brownelearning

The TEDxNYED videos are now online, and I’ve decided to rewatch the presentations I found interesting and write up my reactions. I’ve already said (as have others) that I was disappointed in the overall experience, but that was not the fault of speakers. So, here’s a good one: Mike Wesch’s Cautionary Tale

Why did I enjoy Mike’s speech? Mainly because he brought in external material of which most of the attendees had been ignorant, and then used that new information to shed light on our field. (This is how the TED format could work for thematic conferences.) Specifically, Mike showed how “new media” can have harmful side effects. The point needs to be considered carefully by the edtech community.

I do not think the rest of this speech was as strong and, worse, demonstrated some glaring inconsistencies in Mike’s thinking – thinking that has so great potential.

For example, in one case “new media” were bad when they altered the established native culture, but then, in another case, “new media” were good because they could alter an established culture. Without explicitly establishing the criteria by which we can judge the merits of the culture (is it worth saving or does it deserve to be destroyed), the arguments canceled out.

Further, Mike failed to recognize any value (or even the existence) of the cultures “new media” create. “[New media] will be what we make of it,” he said. Well, I say new media are without our interference and we do not have a responsibility to “make” something of them.

Finally, Mike barely implied that there were limits to using new media in class. He stated that his students could change their “research schedule” (not a “syllabus”) when and how they saw fit, but they could not change the class goal. Oh, but who decided on that goal? The students? or the teacher? He did’t say. Also, if you noted the byline on the documentary his class produced, it only listed the professor’s name. I’m not saying these limits on student-centeredness are unreasonable, only that we should talk as much about them as we do the hype they counteract.

Again, this was one of my favorite speeches at TEDxNYED. I hope it starts some good conversations.

I have been satisfied with the level of acceptance open source products have earned during the last decade. But I fear that its progress may be impeded by the continued confusion between “free” and “open.” This is not a new argument, but the premises have shifted slightly. Basically, open source advocates must constantly remind the public that the YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are NOT open source.

I sat in a meeting last week listening to faculty and staff debate the future of our campus’ learning management system. Our provider has been purchased by Blackboard, which gives us four years to either migrate to the Beast, or find another way. If you know me, you know what my opinion is.

I’ve been pushing Jon Mott’s model: Let’s focus on the core functionality of what the institution must do, while supporting faculty and students’ use of non-campus (“cloud”) tools. This maintains the security over student data and restricted material without sacrificing the advantage of the emerging technologies. As we were discussing how the college IT staff could support such a model, one person spoke up:

Several faculty have started using open source sites, and they’re starting to realize that when the system goes away, they’ll lose their work.

Anyone in open source, or even with a cursory knowledge of its pros and cons would have done a double take. I think my brow furrowed into the ceiling panels. They continued.

When sites like YouTube make changes, or just close-up shop, a lot of the work you’ve put into building your content is just gone.

I usually hold my tongue in meetings, especially when deans or higher-ups are in attendance, but this was one misconception I dearly wanted to nip in the bud. Before the moderator had a chance to call on anyone, I corrected:

Just a correction, if I may? YouTube is NOT open source. It’s free to use, but the very nature of open source would actually mitigate the risks you bring up.

I spoke with the person after the meeting to give them a quick rundown on what open source is, is not, its advantages and disadvantages, and why it was so important they I correct them during the meeting.

Today I received my subcommittee’s report on the issues we’ve researched. My view is well represented in the report, but our subcommittee chair made a similar mistake. She equated cloud computing with the use of open source tools. I sent a polite correction, which was applied to the report.

Most of my involvement in open source has assumed that when the products were good enough, they would break into the mainstream. I felt that the movement had succeeded when campus IT guys installed Firefox on the lab computers. But it appears I missed the next glass ceiling: Overcoming mid-level decision-makers’ misconceptions.

David offers a parody of the future of education. Now, the hard part about responding to a parody is that you never know which components are meant to be serious. From what I know of David, I think I can figure it out, but I offer the caveat that I may be wrong.

He offers two good reasons for which the future of education will look a lot like its past:

1. Employers will continue to want a third-party validation of their potential employees’ qualifications (degrees from accredited institutions). [I think he believes this one.]

2. The societal-shifting advances of the past (academies, books, printing, etc.) failed to disrupt the traditional lecture format of education. [I think this one is facetious.]

I want to explore the second point a little deeper, even it wasn’t meant to be examined..

If lectures were as soul-destroying as many educational reformists would have us believe, then no one would use them. (Even TED would change its format.) But lectures give something that other formats of instruction do not: efficiency.

It’s akin to why so many tests – even those created by good teachers – continue to employ multiple-choice items.

But surely we can find instructional media that are more efficient than lectures. A text posted online, for example, has the potential to serve orders of magnitude more learners than the thrice-weekly professorial song-and-dance in the lecture hall. And its distribution cost would be infinitesimal relative to the cost of a live lecture. If efficiency is accomplishment over cost, then online texts are much more efficient than live lectures.

That’s where David’s first point comes into play. Live lectures preserve the gate-keeping status of the institution. The lecture hall has walls that limit participation; they only include those meeting the requirements of the institution. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

If you look at the truly innovative institutions (e.g. WGU), they have shifted the gate-keeping mechanism from credit-for-participation-in-information-distribution (the role of lecture and the lecture-hall walls) to credit-for-evidence-of-proficiency (assessments). This model affords greater efficiency in instruction without sacrificing the gate-keeping (read: profit-generating) responsibilities of the institution.

Contrary to David satirical vision, I believe that education will look different in the future. And institutions who shift from information-distribution to candidate-evaluation will own the future of education.

I’ve always held to Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s view that Web 2.0 is actually “what the Web was supposed to be all along.” In fact, it’s what the web had been for geeks since the mid-90’s. The difference is that now non-geeks have the tools (and the desire) to participate as well.

But there is another difference – one I gleaned from a Slashdot post that I can’t find – one that’s been stewing in my mind for a few weeks, and finally congealed with this review of You Are Not A Gadget, by Jaron Lanier.

If there is anything different between the web is now and how it was pre-2.0, it’s that companies have now successfully monetized the users. Remember, your Facebook page is not Facebook’s product – you are their product. They don’t sell you anything, but they sell your information to their advertisers.

Something reminded me that some people still want to use an overly-inclusive definition of technology. So, I dug this out of an unpublished version of my dissertation prospectus:

Although some prefer an inclusive definition of technology in education (Seels & Richey, 1994; Driscol, 2001; Gibbons, 2003), the popular view of the term, which is shared by opponents of technology integration (Cordes & Miller, 2000), refers specifically to microcomputers and their peripherals. The broader definition is not as useful because it includes such disparate “technologies” as colored chalk (Wilkins, Peck, & Jordan, 1991) and analog clocks (Anderson, 1997). Therefore, this research will use the narrower point of view.

This started out as a response to another blog post, but it got too long, so I spun it off here.

I’ve often wondered about how well qualitative methods are generally applied in instructional design research. My specific training is in quantitative methods, so I’m not qualified to make that judgment, but I have observed a certain incongruence between the amount of rigor required by my colleagues in other fields, and the little effort many instructional design researchers exert.

For example, I came across the term autoethnographic in a study by Kupczynski et al (2008). The authors only cite one reference supporting the method, and it’s a textbook. I asked an anthropology friend of mine (a professor at American University) who specialized in qualitative methods about it and she about fell over. Her exact words were, “Good night, what is research coming too?!” She has warned me previously against data that is “too clean,” and shown how to include rigorous checks for trustworthiness (which I would call validity).

Compare this to a good friend of mine (and a great researcher) who passed his dissertation defense with a few revisions. One of those revisions caught my attention. To paraphrase his committee chair:

“In your methods section you described a negative case analysis [which is a method used to verify trustworthiness], but you didn’t actually do one. So, before we approve your dissertation, you’ll need to strike that section from your methods.”

I think it may be that instruction designers are practitioners first, and researchers second. During an open discussion at PIDT two years ago, a professor claimed that one of the things holding up instructional design as a field was the reluctance of journals to accept qualitative methods. He specifically mentioned that ETR&D had rejected several good submissions from him and his students. Cliff Mims from the University of Memphis spoke up because he is (was?) the editor over qualitative studies for that journal. He countered that he read a lot of submissions, but could usually tell within the first two pages that the “qualitative study” wasn’t rigorous enough to be published.

During the next break, I approached Cliff and asked him what his qualifications were to judge the quality of qualitative research. He responded with a litany of certificates he held and workshops he had attended on real qualitative methods. His comments jibed completely with what I’ve experienced working with sociologists and other qualitative experts at the Social Science Research Council and the National Academies.

It was there that I envisioned a project that has languished in its nascent stages for two.. almost three years: I want to construct a rubric based on qualitative practices from anthropology and sociology, and then score 200 randomly selected qualitative theses and dissertations in instruction design. Even if the great majority of them are aligned with the guidelines for rigor, this study would identify areas of relative weakness with the field.

Cliff loved the idea at PIDT, but I just haven’t had the time to follow through with it. So, if any graduates student reading this are looking for a good thesis or dissertation project, feel free to take this one. Just cite me.

Last week my students learned what little the class schedule affords about classical test theory and reliability. Basically, they only know that e = x – t, that reliability is the opposite of e, and how to interpret a few reliability coefficients. (Keep in mind these are practicing teachers, not psychmetricians.) During the lesson they played with a spreadsheet that calculated KR-20 coefficients.

One of them asked me where I found the “program” (he meant spreadsheet). When I told him I wrote it he asked, “Do you ever get bored?”

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My presentation with Charles Graham (during a session sponsored by the TACTL special interest group) went well. The best part was presenting in the same session as Tanya Tripp, who I’ve always felt is a very conscientious researcher, and a team from Arizona State West, who I cited in both my measurement project and dissertation.

My slides are now available on the TICS webpage.

I’ve built a few databases in my time, but I would not consider myself a guru, though I have been called, “a database prophet” at a national conference. I simply have intermediate database skills that I bring into areas that usually lack them (eg. area studies and foreign language training).

The biggest and most important database I’ve ever worked in was the one that tracks the U.S. Department of Education’s Title VI activity. I say I work “in” it because I did not create or maintain the system, but I mine data out of it for several research groups.

“Mining” data is a great metaphor because, just as a mountain wasn’t built to give up its coal, most databases were built to store active information, and the old data is just residual. Coming through this residual data is difficult because, for example, the database may have changed since it was inputted, but the old data was not updated.

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FYI. http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/

There are a few people out there scratching their heads over this one. My only hope is that they don’t change the name because nothing curtails the growth of an open source project quite like brand confusion. (See Red Hat vs. Fedora vs. CentOS for an example.)