Etale – Life in the Digital World

interdisciplinary musings on life and education in the digital world

Archive for category editorials

2008 Digital Future Report

Jan 23

Posted by etale in blog, editorials, reviews | Comments off

As of this month you can view a summary of the findings from the 2008 Digital Future Report. Check out information on the Center for the Digital Future web site for details on how to obtain a full copy of the report.

I want to highlight one aspect of the findings. According to the report there is a large increase in online communities. But these are not simply friends networking in MySpace and face book. The report notes a growing number of people involved in online communities with a social purpose or cause. People are connecting virtually in order to support, be informed, inform, and unite around social causes. And directly from the summary, “…a large and growing percentage of members — now 55 percent — say they feel as strongly about their online communities as they do about their real-world communities.”

This information blends nicely with my post from yesterday. With the most recent Frontline episode on Kids Growing Up Online, we also see a social networking established around the site. Perhaps this is a temporary network, but you can certainly find vibrant networks of parents and concerned citizens drawn together by this same cause.
While I am probably preaching to the choir, this is one more proof that it is time for us to move beyond thinking about the Internet as technology and start recognizing that it is a place with rich diverse cultures. It is as real as New York City, but far more diverse. The Internet is full of actual people who find deep meaning in their relationships with others in this place.

Information Overload – Choose What is Better

Dec 27

Posted by etale in blog, editorials, ethics, journaling | Comments off

A recent post to Slashdot pointed out a new article at Wired entitled, Researcher, Info Overload Costs Economy. This article described the predicted problem of the year for 2008, information overload. The article highlighted the overload of emails and the adverse impact upon business productivity. Jesdanun writes, “He estimates that such disruptions cost the U.S. economy $650 billion in 2006.”

Is the economy the only thing at risk? If you are able, think back to the days when you did not have the Internet at your beck and call. How was life different for you? In what ways has this immediate access to information improved your life? In what ways has it detracted from your quality of life or perhaps drawn you away from that which was more important? Have you ever experienced anxiety about your inability to keep up with the latest news and trends? Was this anxiety greater or less in the days prior to widespread access to the Internet?

I have probably already referenced this before, but it is worth repeating. In Technopoly, Neil Postman reminds us that what may be most important today is not necessarily learning how to use every technology, but rather to better understand how technology uses us. Unless we seek to hand over our lives, beliefs, time, energy, character, and legacy to the latest trends and technologies, we are wise to heed Postman’s words. Perhaps this is a timely article, as 2007 comes to an end and we begin to consider goals and priorities for the New Year. What will determine how each of us spends our time and energy in 2008?

I am reminded of an account in the Christian Scriptures where Jesus comes to the house of his friends in Bethany. There are two sisters, Mary and Martha. Martha, we are told, was very busy, occupied with all of the preparations that one might expect for such an honored guest and friend. Mary, on the other hand, sat with others at the feet of Jesus while he was teaching or perhaps sharing about his recent journey. Martha was not happy about this.

From Luke 10:

“But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”
“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

As we consider the myriad of urgent tasks and pressing information of 2008, may we each choose what is better.

E-Learning Courses are Easier to Scrutinize

Dec 23

Posted by etale in blog, editorials, education, educational technology | Comments off

Secretary Spellings Encourages Greater Transparency and Accountability in Higher Education at the National Accreditation Meeting

This isn’t new, but it is important.  We’ve heard news about this movement for the past several years.  Spellings was talking about transparency in order “to provide families with valuable information about institutions so parents and
students can make informed education decisions.”  I remember Darcy Hardy mentioning something similar at the 2006 Distance Learning and Teaching Conference- that there is a growing demand for evidence that a higher education institution is actually resulting in student learning.  We want to know that a diploma means something and that students with that diploma actually have the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to be successful beyond college.  This growing trend to be more transparent about student learning outcomes as well as student performance after graduation is something that accrediting agencies will look for more and more in the upcoming years. 

I know that Spellings was talking about transparency on a University level, but this also leads me to think about transparency in a different way, on the course level, and simply transparency of the details of a given course for use by the instructor.  Consider a typical collaborative e-learning course.  Discussions, correspondence, instructional materials, and learning activities are captured, easily available for scrutiny during the course and after it is complete.  As an instructor/facilitator, I find this a priceless opportunity for careful review and discovery of what did and did not work.  If several students struggled with a particular unit or assessment, I can track activity levels of students, how frequently they logged in, and how much time was spent on a given activity.  This doesn’t work perfectly.  For example, if a student visits a page and simply prints it out rather than reading it online, then it may look as if the student only spent thirty seconds on the page, when they may have spent an hour.  Instructors can use all of this captured data for course improvement, research (granted all of the appropriate IRB measures), as well as interventions with individuals students who are struggling. 

The amount of data available for review is sometimes overwhelming.  Print off a single-spaced script of threaded discussions from a sixteen week graduate course with fifteen students and you are likely to have 300-500 pages.  And the fact that all of this data is in digital form allows you to engage in all sorts of discourse and content analyses. 

I realize that this is not really what Spellings was talking about.  But the ability to carefully review and scrutinize e-learning course quality is amazing.  When I have presented overviews of e-learning to groups who are skeptical that one can receive a good education online, I often encourage criticism and skepticism, but only if it is across the board, applied to all learning environments.  I explain that, “E-learning courses receive the scrutiny that all courses deserve.” 

While it is easier to review the details of an e-learning course, what Spellings is talking about is outcomes.  From the perspective of accrediting agencies and prospective families, they want to know if students are actually learning anything.  That can be demonstrated by end results, often without showing how they got there.  But I am too much of a process person to accept a set of numbers as an adequate measure.  I also want qualitative data.

Blogged with Flock

I was Wrong

Dec 22

Posted by etale in blog, editorials, education, news | Comments off

Lecture HallLast week, soon after I had posted about Open Yale Courses, conversation about it started on the DEOS listserv. While I’ve been an avid lurker for years, I had never contributed. So, I chose Open Yale as my first opportunity. Some critiqued the initiative and similar ones as promoting poor e-learning courses. My response was that these are not really e-learning courses, that they serve a different purpose. I was surprised to find that some saw fit to judge them as full e-learning courses, criticizing Yale for producing courses that lack the characteristics of an effective online course. Who would mistake these for actual online courses, I thought? Well, perhaps I was mistaken. Since that post I have found more than a few people referring to these projects as free online courses.

Today on Lifehacker there was a link to the Education Portal, a page entitled: Universities with the Best Free Online Courses. I guess people are calling them courses.

What is interesting is that a few people fear these open course initiatives are a threat to online learning. After all, these are free, right? I don’t think they are much of a threat to face-to-face or e-learning courses, but that they are wonderful resources in the spirit of the open source movement. At the same time, if anyone should be threatened by these efforts, it is the professor who insists that one-way lectures to a hall of 200+ students is good education. How is that better than these freely available lectures from top schools in the country? At least you can pause and replay the free online versions- not a small feature when considering teaching and learning effectiveness.

Neo-Luddite Educators…Malpractice?

Dec 21

Posted by etale in blog, editorials, reviews, sites and sources | Comments off

There was a day when I was a conference junky. I took copious notes and sought every opportunity to touch base with speakers who captured my imagination. Being a teacher, I also got easily frustrated with colleagues. Our school would pay for us to attend the conference and then some would skip out to go golfing with a group of friends. While I never fell into the golfing group, my interest did begin to dwindle over time, to the point where I would sneak out half or two thirds of the way through a given conference day.

But my favorite conference, the Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning hosted in Madison, Wisconsin is always different. While I have stumbled across a few less than interesting talks, the quality and practicality of speakers is consistently high. So, it was odd for me to skip out of the final presentation at the conference this year. Chris Dede, Professor of Education at Harvard, was giving a talk on Evolving Emerging Models of Learning and Teaching via “Cyberinfrastucture.” Instead of listening to the talk, I had a great lunch with a former colleague who now works in Madison.

But I didn’t miss the presentation. I postponed it a few weeks until the video was put online. Then, over lunch, I opened up the presentation on one monitor and my digital notepad on the other. I expected a great talk, but I didn’t expect to find a quote in the first two minutes that was so engaging, so provocative, that I could even hear a room full of forward-thinking distance learning leaders mumble or possibly engage in a little nervous laughter.

On Chris’s first slide he explained that we are moving from a position where people ask “Can distance education be comparable in quality with face-to-face instruction?” to a time where we instead ask, “Is pure face-to-face instruction professional malpractice? “ He briefly explained his point, but not much, so while I eventually listened to the rest of the talk, I had to pause it and spend some time on that last part. Professional malpractice? I wasn’t even sure what he meant, but I intuitively knew that he had spoken something very important. So, I typed the quote and printed it out as a poster that still sticks to the bookshelf in front of my desk, occasionally evoking a confused, surprised, or inquisitive response from visitors.

I look at the quote several times a week. The more I think about it, the more I agree with it. Some may disagree with it on different levels. Some might argue that technology is simply a tool. But is it an optional tool? What if you hired a handyman by the hour who insisted upon not using power tools to get the job done? Or how about a doctor who preferred to bypass modern medical tools for those used a century ago? According to Dede, this is what people will think of educators today who are resistant to the use of current and emerging educational technologies.

While I agree with the spirit of Dede’s comment, I’m not sure if the research supports him quite yet. There are still plenty of highly effective educators who use little to no current technology. But the truth behind his statement begins to appear as we think about preparing people for 21st century living. What if I am preparing someone for a vocation that requires strong Internet research skills, digital communication expertise, the ability to effectively collaborate at a distance, and an understanding of the ethical issues in the digital world? If I refuse to model and explore these elements with my students on some neo-luddite ground, then perhaps I am venturing into a type of malpractice. As explained by people at The Partnership for 21st Century Skills, we are obligated to prepare students for life in the world of the present and the future, not the world of the 19th and 20th cenutury.

Amazon’s Kindle and the Future of Books

Dec 18

Posted by etale in books, editorials, news, reviews | Comments off

I was delighted to learn about the announcement of Amazon’s Kindle in the past month or so. This wireless reading device uses electronic paper supposedly as easy on the eye as traditional paper. But with it comes the ability to connect to Amazon wirelessly to purchase your next book. You also get the ability to earmark pages, search for keywords, and most of what you would expect from digital text. I first got the news from Slashdot and clicked my way over to Amazon to learn more about it. If it were not for the $400.00 price tag, I would have ordered one that day. Why not sell it to me for $50, knowing that you have a captive audience who will be buying books for years to come? Either Amazon expected many people like me or there are plenty who think that $400.00 is reasonable, because the product is currently out of stock, selling out within six hours of the release.

Whatever the case, it is an impressive development, not simply because of the technology (there are similar products on the market) but because of the connectivity and access to 90,000 books that come with it. The idea isn’t new either. I remember earlier versions of digital book readers back in 1999- almost ten years ago people were already prophesying the demise of the book. Earlier readers were equally expensive, harder on the eyes, and much more bulky than the Kindle. And even with those versions there were schools considering purchasing sets for students, pondering implications for the future of education.
I fully expect that electronic paper will transform the way that we deal with the written word, but I figured that I would use the development of the Kindle to muse about reading in general. Neil Postman’s Technopoly had a section that recounted The Egyptian myth, The Judgment of Thamus. In it, the God Theuth presented a present to the wise King Thamus, the gift of writing. Rather than accepting the gift openly he expressed several reservations:

““Theuth, my paragon of inventors, the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it. So it is in this; you, who are the father of writing, have out of fondness for your off-spring attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function. Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality: they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society.”

I add that quote to my blog as I think about the thousands of books on my shelves, in boxes in my garage and basement, and the dozens that I check out from the library monthly. I consider the truth of Thamus’s predictions in my own development and I think about how often I am compelled to finish a book, even more than to understand it, learn from it, grow in knowledge or wisdom from it. I love books. I love the smell and feel of old books. I love the sensation of turning the pages, the joy of highlighting them and the satisfaction of quiet debates that I have with the authors in the margins, sometimes with the thought of a great grandchild coming across it and learning a bit about his deceased relative. In fact, I love books so much that, when I was reading a book about hobbies, I found myself drawn to a web site called http://www.bookcrossing.com/ ,where people leave books at places around the world and post a note on the site for others to find them. I quickly subscribed and, while I’ve yet to pick up or drop off a book, it is on my “to do” list.

Despite my love of the traditional book, the majority of my reading today is done online: emails, blogs, online journals, wikis, research reports and web sites. And I fully embrace the world of digital text, seeing many benefits to it, especially when reading for information, networking, collaborating and in an educational setting. The ability to search, cut, paste, reorganize, share, hyperlink, and mashup affords opportunities impossible with a traditional book. Despite all of those features, there is a flatness to digital text. The 1000 year old book looks just like the 10 day old book in the digital world. Besides that, there is no smell to digital books and spilt coffee risks doing more than leaving a stain or being a nostalgic footprint of your conquest.

I could go on about the differences between digital and paper books, but what I am ultimately describing is a cultural phenomenon. I have the perspective that I describe because of how I grew up, in a world of paper books (although I really didn’t start reading them until college). Books and their creators inspired me to love learning more than any class or school. But the world changed; with many people reading fewer and fewer paper sources, and more digital sources. There are plenty who are inclined to print out articles before reading them, but many more who have adapted to reading on the screen, despite what the research does or doesn’t tell us about the average attention span for reading on a screen. So, if I am right, Amazon is on to something. Despite the warnings of wise King Thamus, writing is here to stay, but the book may be less than a century away from the museums.

Since it is slightly on topic, I’ll finish this post with one of my favorite Youtube videos.

Shoveling Snow and Online Christmas Gifts

Dec 15

Posted by etale in blog, editorials, journaling | Comments off

I live in Wisconsin and I don’t own a snow blower. In fact, with near record snow in the past two weeks I have spent ample time shoveling, chipping, and scraping at my driveway and sidewalks. Apart from the fact that I enjoy the exercise, I also consider the shovel to be a last stand against the infiltration of technology in my life. Take into account the fact that I’m an instructional technologist, I spend most of my time working on e-learning initiatives, and when I go on a night run, I take with me a GPS watch, heart rate monitor, MP3 player, and a battery-powered safety light flashing on my waist. I am certainly no Luddite. And yet I love reading about the historical Luddites and I see immense value in neo-luddite literature. These authors have important words of caution for our age, and their writings are excellent prompts for dialogue about what Postman calls the “Faustian bargain” of technology in society. So, I continue to shovel snow the old fashioned way, not quite ready to go high tech on the driveway- taking a little pride in this silent and symbolic stand against Postman’s technopoly, as if Postman would have had any problem choosing a snow blower over a shovel. Please don’t think my sacrifice too great…I have a one lane driveway.

For me it is the shovel, but during this season of Christmas shopping, I hear a few people say that their hold out is shopping. As easy as it would be to order gifts online through Amazon, Target, Walmart, or your virtual retail of choice, something doesn’t feel quite right about that. It seems a little too easy. For these people, click and buy takes away from the romance of the gifting experience.

Well, according to the December 13 News Release at comscore.com, if money is any indicator, this is a diminishing sentiment. In fact, comscore reports 20 billion dollars in online sales since November 1; 19% up from last year.

Long line shopping is certainly not where I choose to take my stand. I’d much rather browse the online world for just the right gift, click and buy; and I encourage it for all who buy for me. I’ve even gone so far as to include direct hyperlinks to the products on my wish list. And after I’ve put together my interactive Christmas list and ensured that all the gifts will be here on time, I can spend all morning fighting the machine by shoveling snow the old fashioned way.

Snow