This was created from the transcripts released at whitehouse.gov on June 4, 2009. I removed the title and all references to “(Applause)” as I just wanted it to represent the words spoken by President Obama. Do you have any interesting reflections or observations? Here is one. If you look at the word cloud and the full transcript, you will not find the words “terrorism” or “terrorist.” Instead, President Obama opted for the word “extremist” and he used it 18 times.
Open Source Textbook Initiatives - Historically, textbooks have been the single largest line item on many school budgets when it comes to curriculum. We now see initiatives like Curriki and the California Open Source Textbook Initiative that might challenge this. Imagine a day when that line item is cut or reallocated toward people (curriculum specialists, instructional designers, etc.) and support technologies. With Open Source Textbook Initiatives as well as WikiTexts, we get a text that is continually being updated (not having to pay for a new version / edition every few years?); that can be easily customized to meet the needs of a given course, school, district; that can be used as a whole or in part; and that can be easily distributed in a variety of formats. Oh, and it many cases this option might be free or, if one needs a paper version, the cost of printing.
Electronic Reading Devices – The Kindle, Sony Reader, iPhone, Netbooks, and a variety of emerging devices make it possible to deliver content, even entire textbooks and course readers electronically. These technologies are bridging the paper and electronic world of text and other media. While the book is an amazing technology, it has limitations that can be overcome by these new devices. With an iPhone or similar reader, I can be on a hike in the local forest and have immediate access to all of my texts; not to mention the ability to make use of the GPS capabilities, communication tools, and the ability to record or discuss my experiences (record notes, take and share pictures, watch video tutorials on how to identify poison ivy, email someone, talk to someone live or asynchronously, mark my current location on a map). Rather than walking through the woods with a backpack full of books (not that anyone would do this), I have my textbooks in my pocket (backpack optional, bug spray required…at least here in Wisconsin).
Online Social Networks and Mashup Technologies - I already mentioned wikis, but this deserves a separate category. In the first item, I was thinking more in terms of systematic organized projects. However, online communities and social networks make is easier for educators and course designers to learn about a variety of individual sources, organize them into themes/topics/units/chapters, link to them or embed them in a central course resource location, and bypass the use of a textbook altogether. If I am teaching Geography, I can use Google Earth and Google Maps, embed links to relevant sources right into my course blog/wiki/iGoogle page, create or borrow YouTube videos for mini-lectures, have students contribute their own resources… You get the idea. Before long, I have a customized, powerful, content-rich, multimedia textbook for my class. It really isn’t even a textbook is it? It is a multimediabook. Why would I even consider using a traditional textbook if I have the time and resources to do something like this? Maybe I just answered my own question. How many educators are willing to set aside the time and resources to do this? This does require creativity, the ability to analyze and synthesize information, and good instructional design sense. Take a look at the National Educational Technology Standards for Students and Teachers. These are the very skills that we are expecting of the current and upcoming generations of students, teachers, and administrators in the k-12 world. And they certainly seem to be abilities that we should expect from University professors who carry titles before and after their names that are supposedly connected to mastery or expertise in one or more disciplines.
Custom Texts / Readers - These have been around for years, especially in higher education. A professor creates a collection of articles, book chapters, and essays; and it is sold as an inexpensive text at the University or nearby bookstore. Now let’s add the digital element. Imagine a bookstore that will take a box of articles, books, essays, disks, files on flash drives, images, audio files, and video clips. They will take care of getting all of the necessary copyright permissions, then, based upon the instructions of the teacher or design team, they build an indexed electronic text that could be purchased online and made immediately available to students. If something changes mid-year, even mid-semester, the text can be updated with the new resources with minimal effort or cost. If a student has a learning disability, the content can be easily converted to a form that works best for that student. The instructor could even gain permission from students and include examples of exceptional student work in the next version of the reader. I may be stretching the boundaries of reality a bit, but imagine this. Imagine that people put their readers on the web for others to purchase…a ready-made option for the lazy (or busy) instructor. And those student examples that were included? What if the students received a small source of revenue out of the deal? Now that would be a brand new motivation for students to perform well on an assignment.
Hybrid Organic Textbooks (HOT) - We already have a decade of textbook companies building electronic versions of their books, rich with web-based resources, multimedia resources, pools of quiz questions, even full learning activities. In fact, some of these web-enhanced textbooks have become so full-featured that the textbook and web-based resources become the entire course (something that I lament…the last thing that we need is to further confuse the words “textbook” and “curriculum”. I’ll save that for another post). However, there is potential here. Imagine if textbook companies embraced the best of grass roots social media while also providing a core paper / electronic hybrid resource. This might include a paper-based text that could also be used on a mobile reader or device. At the same time, the publisher would have a web presence, adding new and quality resources to the text. Add to that a dynamic community and repository of client-produced lessons, resources, images, videos, discussions, keypal programs, scheduled guest presentations, and collaborative activities. Now we get true convergence of paper-based textbooks, web-based supplements, open source texts and wikis, electronic readers, and grassroots social networking. If publishers or a small group of motivated educators can catch this full vision, then everyone will get a chance to experience a powerful and positive disruption in k-12 education. Do I have any venture capitalists readings this post?
At best, e-learning is an educational conspiracy, challenging the superiority of traditional face-to-face graduate study. E-learning often gets the scrutiny that is deserved of all learning. Is a one hour lecture to a group of 30+ students truly the most effective way to help students master the stated course objectives? Is it superior to or more effective than other methods? Or, is it simply an unquestioned higher education tradition? E-learning, in some cases serves as a challenge to such traditions. For that reason, it may well be a mechanism to not only increase accessibility to higher education, but to challenge, improve, and transform what takes place in traditional face-to-face graduate programs.
While certainly not an exhaustive list, here are five other ways that e-learning graduate programs challenge the superiority of traditional face-to-face graduate study:
1. They challenge the notion that one must move or travel large distances in order to obtain a high quality graduate education.
2. They challenge the notion that one must submit to often inflexible schedules of courses and offerings in order to obtain a quality graduate education.
3. In some cases, they challenge the notion of a one-size fits all graduate education (although many of the best face-to-face programs join in this challenge).
4. In other cases, they challenge the notion that graduate courses are best designed and taught by a single person. Instead, in the best cases, e-learning promotes a team-based approach to course design that may include a combination of subject-matter experts, instructional designers, graphic designers, computer programmers, and a variety of other specialists. In fact, the role of instructor is just one of many factors in some good e-learning course designs. What makes the role of instructor so sacred? The only essential role in effective learning is the role of learner.
5. They challenge the idea of the closed-door no questions asked approach to courses. In place of that, many online courses and programs receive ongoing careful scrutiny. Furthermore, all course activities are perfectly recorded and available for post-course review and evaluation. Imagine if every classroom interaction, every instructor comment, every student comment, and every student artifact of learning in a traditional face-to-face course were available for careful review as part of a course improvement process. That is already the case with many e-learning courses. This is not to suggest that all e-learning programs use this data, but the data is available, there is an option to use it.
In honor of the ten year birthday of blogs, here are the top five best online resources about the culture of blogging. If you take the time to read and digest each of these you will have a good introductory understanding of blogging in digital culture. Don’t expect simple articles in this list. While these are not all academic sources, they are all deep and rich explorations and musings on the blogosphere.
‘Web Log’ Celebrates 10th Anniversary - A wonderful and informative NPR series on “the evolution of the blogosphere.”
A Portrait of the Internet’s New Storytellers (PEW Internet and American Life Project) from July 19, 2006 – This is a year and a half old, but provides some rich data about blogging culture.
Carlson Analytics – Blog Statistics and demographics – If you want a solid understanding of blogging in the digital world, take the time to work through this information. This is a thorough and up-to-date introduction to blogs. Don’t stop at the first page. This takes you page by page through different topics about blogging (statistics, blogging types, tools and primers, community, journalism and politics, issues, law, dollars, enterprise blogging, genres, lingo, and more).
What’s the Ballyhoo about Blogs- From the abstract:
“Ten librarians offer spontaneous, even off-the-cuff, opinions about the pros and cons of blogs and blogging. Are blogs a substitute for print communication or older electronic resources such as static Web pages and electronic discussion lists? What will the future hold for blogs and their content? The librarians reflect on these questions and describe their own use of blogs.”
While often speculative, this is a useful and thought-provoking piece.
Blogpulse - Now that you have read about blogs, you can use BlogPulse to begin your own research on worldwide blogs. You can use tools on this site to identify and chart trends among bloggers around the world. Is President Bush being blogged about more or less over the last two months? Which is being blogged about more; Shiites, Sunnis, or Kurds? Or here is my favorite feature. You can use the BlogPulse Conversation Tracker to watch stories travel through the blogosphere. This lets you track the origin of a story as well as learn about low bloggers blog about other blog entries 
.
Blogged with Flock
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
Despite the growing influence of web 2.0 technologies in e-learning there is still a persistent challenge for the educator who is charged with designing e-learning. The challenge is to avoid simply replicating what one does in the face-to-face classroom. When one runs into trouble making the transfer, it is sadly too common for the e-learning course to lose out, easily turning into reading texts and writing papers with few other elements. From an instructional design perspective, I see another challenge in both face-to-face and e-learning courses. This challenge is what I call the “role rut.” The roles of student and teacher becomes so embedded in our thinking that we often fail to consider a wide variety of potentially powerful and engaging designs.
With these two challenges in mind, I now turn to the nature of digital culture. In the digital world, roles and identities are constantly shifting as we move from site to personal blog to news blog to video sharing site to search engines. In a single day in the digital world, I may be a student, teacher, researcher, blogger, consumer, mentor, lurker, video producer, team member, and friend. Of course, this same thing is true in the face-to-face world, but these roles are even more fluid online. One can quickly try on a myriad of roles. With this dynamic in mind, I am currently working on a couple of presentations and articles related to what I am calling the alternate roles approach to designing learning experiences. It is not new or profound, but it does offer a strategy for escaping the ordinary, a way of getting out of those role ruts that are commonplace in online and face-to-face education. The alternate roles approach is a simple thought experiment or challenge: try to design a course, unit or learning activity without using or thinking about the traditional roles: teacher, instructor, learner, student, facilitator, or participant. Instead, design the learning environment with two or more alternate roles. Consider the following possibilities: Mentor, Master, Boss, Coach, Guide, Expert, Consultant, Travel Guide, Assistant, Supporter, Advocate, Leader, Mayor, Employer, Director, Manager, Owner, Administrator, Advisor, Editor, Assessor, Professional, Team member, Player, Novice, Explorer, Tourist, Supporter, Advocate, Member, Citizen, Investigator, Research Assistant, Researcher, Employee, Actor, Director, Manager, Steward, Owner, Designer, Creator, Administrator, Offender / Defender, Author, Apprentice.
This is more than role-playing. Role-playing tends to be a single activity in an otherwise traditional teacher/student environment. Instead, this is an exercise in simulation learning, still starting with learning objectives (What do I want them to learn?) but then quickly bracketing the teacher/student roles in lieu of alternate roles. Experimenting with this exercise has been a delightful experience, affording me a fresh and exciting way to think about instructional design in the digital world.
This is 6 month old news, but I just got around to viewing it. Here is a trailer for the full 30 minute video by Cisco.
The full 30-minute video is worth your time.
Transforming Education for the 21st Century is an excellent introduction to how digital culture is influencing visions of education. The argument is that the current educational system exists to prepare people for a 19th and 20th century, and that we must recreate education in order to prepare students for life in the 21st century. This goes beyond reading, writing, math, and science. It explores the role of digital literacy; critical thinking and problem solving; and new approaches to collaboration, communication and creation.
Ken Kay, President of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills lays out a vision for education that respects the importance of teaching content and memorization, but it also includes: “life and career skills; learning and innovation skills; as well as information, media, and technology skills.”
By the way, you can find another great video on the subject at the Partnership for 21st Century Skills web site or by clicking here.
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