My own internet of things
Internet Time Blog: Another way of looking at instructional design
Jay Cross’s article (via Stephen Downes, OLDaily) resonates with my desire to distinguish “training” from “education”. He takes some major events of the past century and suggests how they have shaped our view of learning.
Downes ~ Principles for Evaluating Websites
Another Stephen Downes’ article – this might be a useful resource for students (and staff) in assessing website content.
(Critical) history of ICT in education – and where we are heading? – FLOSSE Posse
“Why is the impact of technology on the way we learn so marginal, even though millions of dollars and euros has been spent on to develop educational computer technology? Could it be that there has been some principle conceptual bias and all the minor changes made in to it do not help much, as the principle is wrong?
With an analogy: if you are sailing somewhere in equator and take a course by mistake to south, even that you should go north, it does not help much if you every year fix your course 5 degrees. You will still end-up to Antarctica.”
I particularly like the Analogy 🙂
Stephen’s Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ How To Be Heard
Much of what I read online comes via Stephen Downes’ OLDaily. His guide, entitled “How To Be Heard” is not about how to market your blog, but is more about how to write your blog (and really is about how to write regularly irrespective of the medium.)
This is a very good resource. (It also recommends a sans serif font – hmmmm maybe I need to review my choice … ???)
I am very proud of the fact that on June 19, 2005, approximately 3 years after beginning my journey in taekwon-do, I was awarded my 1st Dan Black Belt by Sabum Spiro Cariotis. I have trained at least 3 times a week for all but the first month or so of my training, and I trained almost daily in the 6 months leading up to my grading so it was a big commitment in terms of time and energy. The blackbelt was certainly a motivating goal to keep training, but it has not been the endpoint in itself – I have continued to train 3 times a week since my grading and am still as passionate and as enthusiastic about taekwon-do as when I started. I suspect that I haven’t updated my blog until now because I needed the evidence (for myself and maybe for others) that it would indeed be the case that I would keep training with a passion. My blackbelt as an achievement in isolation is actually meaningless since in physical terms I am only just beginning to feel comfortable with moving and thinking as a “martial artist”. I am fully aware that to think in terms of expertise takes at least 10 years, so I am still in the early years of that journey. What I am convinced of is that it is possible to learn new physical pursuits at any age in life so long as you are prepared to put in the work and I still have a lot of work to do !!
I really enjoyed the grading itself – I was surprised at how smoothly the day went for me. My patterns were quite passable and although I was initially intimidated by the idea of grading alongside two girls who perform patterns with exquisite grace and skill, on the day I felt reasonably comfortable and confident and on reviewing the video afterwards, I was pleasantly surprised with the outcome. I also surprised myself with how comfortable I felt with fundamental movements, step sparring and self defence under the pressure of grading. Sparring was physically taxing but I was pretty confident of my fitness level and my ability to survive if not to star. The most challenging part of the grading for me was always going to be the board-breaks – I have trained for them since whitebelt level, but I am small and technique and timing are not my strong points so I have always been concerned about what might happen on the day itself. You can’t fake board breaks. As it turned out, I was very focussed and completed all the breaks asked of me. I was pretty stoked by the fact that I did a flying sidekick over 4 people (it was originally going to be over 2 people given my size and age :-)) – unfortunately my designated cameraman was so enthralled in watching us that he forgot to turn on the camera to preserve my effort for prosterity … so there is no photographic evidence of my feat !!
So I am now a black belt in taekwon-do and I’m proud of it, but it is only the first step in a longer journey to be comfortable calling myself a martial artist.
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I’m playing around with the combination of WordPress, Feed2JS and Blackboard in order to use the corporate LMS, but get around some of the annoyances of Blackboard and some of the difficulties of collaborative content being locked inside a password-controlled environment.
The Announcement Tool in Blackboard is pretty annoying in that you have to go into the Control Panel in order to use it, and you have to have staff level access, and there are some non-intuitive things about the permanent vs non-permanent listing. There is also no capacity to have the Announcements pushed to students rather than making them pull them from Blackboard.
So long as Announcements are not considered “secret” (should not be seen by anybody not enrolled in the subject), they can be posted on a blog and “fed” into a permanent Announcement.
Now all you have to do is update the blog site, and the permanent announcement will update itself.
It would also be possible to use WordPress for collaborative work with student groups, who could then publish their work via Blackboard. I’m still trying to work out if this is as much trouble as setting up groupwork within Blackboard itself.
Having waxed lyrical about the possibilities afforded by fanfic for encouraging creative writing in school kids, my next foray into harnessing the power of popular culture is to suggest replacing the Problem-Based Learning curriculum in Medicine with a requirement to critique a few episodes of House.
Not only would you get the evidence-based, hypothesis-testing scientific approach to practising medicine, but you would also get to analyse motivations from doctor, nurse, administrator, patient and patient-social-circle context.
And you might even get a good laugh as well …
I have recently been reading many things on blogs, blogging and blogs in education. What has come out most strongly to me is that:
a) blogging *software* provides an easy way to make a website;
b) blogging *as a writing genre* requires that you have something to say;
c) mandated blogging is unlikely, of itself, to inspire people to write if they don’t have any intrinsic desire to express themselves in words, and is unlikely to promote a sense of community because the motivation for participation derives from a requirement to be involved rather than a personal choice.
Yesterday I discovered a writing community / writing genre that had previously entirely escaped my attention but was fascinating to me as a parent and an educator. I realise that not everything that’s new to me is necessarily new to other people (I am not immersed in gaming or popular culture …) but I have not seen “Fanfic” before, and maybe there are other edu-bloggers who haven’t either.
There are fanfic sites for all sorts of things such as Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek etc – in fact one of my colleagues assures me that “where there are geeks, there is fanfic”. I was directed to a Harry Potter fanfic site to read a story written by a teenager well-known to me. This teenager has consistently failed to submit any written assignments at school in 2 years. Here I found at least 3 chapters of a story amounting to over 3,000 well-crafted words … with reviewers comments to which the author had responded. So not only was this teenager reading extensively and immersing himself in the ideas from the story, but he was (and is) writing creatively himself and opening his work to interactive peer review. He is doing it because he wants to, not for any other purpose, and the main reason he showed his work to his parent(s) was in order to support his claim for a later bedtime because he was “working” rather than gaming.
The potential of these sort of sites to encourage literacy in teenagers is fairly obvious, as is the sense of community and the peer interaction (peer in the sense of shared interests / values rather than the age-group sense) that can happen purely online. I guess I see it as a bit like blogging, except that it is set in a creative framework rather than an “opinion piece”, “serious commentary”, personal monologue framework.
Then again, maybe I’m just impressed at what a teenager can do when they want to and when they do it for themselves rather than when they are told to “be creative” or to do things as “work”.
From Ken Smith: The habits of judgment and authority via Stephen Downes,
“In the context of a discussion of the reliability of Wikipedia, Will Richardson paraphrases a librarian who has struggled to know how to evaluate the content of a web site. She said something like this:
I’ve been a librarian for ten years and I have to tell you, I feel like a fraud. I don’t really know where to start when it comes to figuring out whether a site is believeable or not.
Whether she intended it or not, whether she even knows it or not, she has, I think, put her finger on one of the central failures of our education system. Adults, professionals, people who have completed their formal education and taken on their career roles, should be responsible — it is useful to pull that word apart — should be able to respond to the complexity they face as professionals, as citizens …”
Although I don’t disagree at all with the central tenet re the failure of our education system, I’m not sure it is the librarian education that has failed. Librarians did not make judgements about the disicpline-based content of traditional media – but they made judgements about the source of the content … reputable media outlets would have their own way of ensuring that content is “believable” and librarians would make meta-judgements based on the source and “known reviewers”. When there are no established “gatekeepers” of authorative knowledge, each individual has to make their own judgement from first principles – which highlights the simultaneous strength and weakness of an unlimited information source such as the internet.
I went to a lunchtime seminar by John Barrie on Turnitin, the plagiarism detection software from iParadigms. I can see the practical merits of Turnitin and I can see that it is scalable into the near future, but I wonder if we have actually identified the correct problem to solve, and whether the Turnitin approach is scalable or even sensible into the future? The idea of the entire internet being fingerprinted is reminiscent of the scenario of enough monkeys and keyboards to produce Mozart … at what level is anything truly original?
The title of the presentation was “Vetting academic work for originality: Saving the world from unoriginality” – very catchy for sure, but perhaps not particularly interesting or realistic. At an undergraduate level, the content of most submitted work is not primarily focused on originality, but on accuracy. When writing a first year psych lab report on “The Stroop Effect”, perhaps there is a real limit to the number of ways of expressing the content before the information actually becomes incorrect in pursuit of originality. Maybe instead of detecting plagiarism, we should be trying to generate assessment tasks which are not affected by plagiarism – rather than have one academic grade one thousand papers, perhaps we would do better to have one academic produce ten papers of different quality on the one topic and have 1000 students grade those 10 papers.
Alternatively, if university staff / student ratios were appropriate so that proper assessment of individual undergraduate students could take place (eg presenting a paper to a tutorial group and then submitting a written version for marking, and having shared marking across tutorials), there would be a disincentive to cheat. The thing that would alert teaching staff to plagiarism would be a mismatch between the ability to present the content orally and in written form. If end-of-semester assessment was by essay style (hand-marked) exams requiring generative capabilities, there would be more opportunity to match student voice with their written output.
At the undergraduate level, there is a serious question to be asked about whether it is more important to be able to generate an original piece of work than to recognise which piece of work most accurately reflects “the right answer” (assuming there is such a thing)? If we can string together appropriate pieces of information wherever they come from to produce a coherent article (be it a “term paper”, an essay, a lab report, a computer program), we at least are showing that we understand the content area appropriately. I believe this is a necessary but not sufficient precursor to being able to produce something original. I actually have grave doubts as to whether true originality at the undergraduate level would be recognised by the average tutor, let alone encouraged or rewarded. It requires substantial academic expertise to evaluate the quality of original work in a discipline area.
It seems that plagiarism is considered a serious issue because we like to claim that a prime objective in teriary teaching is to instill in our students the concept of academic integrity and of scholarship. However, to my mind, academic integrity (coupled with academic freedom) is associated with a whole moral philosophy regarding knowledge, sharing of knowledge and how academic work contributes to the greater good of human endeavour. Academic values and moral philosophy are taught by example (intellectual and behavioural modelling) rather than by policing. If plagiarism is rampant in the younger generation, we should be looking to the values implicit in our education system rather than to policing strategies to effect cultural change.
If you look at the highly structured curriculum favoured by our secondary education sector and the templated way much of the “knowledge” is presented, it is not surprising that plagiarism is rampant – what is the difference between plagiarising and rote-learning? What is the difference between a “fact” and an “idea” and do facts as well as ideas have citable sources?
In terms of values and behavioural modelling, if you also look at business ethics (or attitudes to speed cameras) in the past 15 years, the emergent theme is that anything that is not expressly forbidden is implicitly allowed. No matter what the written rules say, if it isn’t policed, you’re allowed to do it. And if you’ve got away with doing it for a while, it violates your rights to suddenly start policing it. Steve Vizard and Rene Rivken come to mind on the business front … what did they do that was wrong???
Intellectual property and copyright law seems not to be about integrity and moral philosophy at all, but are much more about how to protect the ability of an individual or institution to make money from creative endeavours rather than to share that creative output with the rest of the community (which in the past funded academic institutions to pursue the creation of new knowledge for the greater good of humanity).
Two other factors which have affected academic integrity in a subtle but seriously insidious way are mentioned in passing below. Both of them affect the behaviour of academics which is then modelled by those who are learning from them creating a different academic culture and set of standards.
1) Measuring research output by number of publications rather than quality of publications (counting is easier than assessing quality) so that there is a strong career incentive to make as much publication mileage as possible out of each random academic idea no matter whether it leads to institutionally-endorsed rampant self-plagiarism, a proliferation of poor-quality journals, and/or a sense of dissatisfaction with the entire peer-review and publishing system.
2) A strong push to “reusable content”, without ever clarifying the difference between acceptable / appropriate reuse and plagiarism – acknowledgement of the source is an obvious difference to a trained academic, but the fine line between paraphrasing and substituting synonyms is a tougher call to make for a layperson. Maybe, in the end, the only difference is the wider vocabulary available to most academics – an academic’s lexicon already contains the synonyms that a layperson searches for in a thesaurus, but the paraphrasing process is still the same – when does restating an idea “in your own words” become stating something original? And do I have to cite that Tom asked this question of me in the corridor tonight or can you believe that I thought of it first? And if I did, have I now “beaten Tom to press” so that he will have to cite me in the future?
Back to reuse of content, consider particularly the concept of reuse and acknowledgement of source in the teaching context (which is often the only context in which students see academics at their work). Clearly the ideas being presented in the classroom are not original because we are teaching people about the current state of agreed-upon knowledege in a field.
Lectures and visual aids associated with lectures provide a context for assigned reading and other research activities. Often, lectures provide a specific context or elaboration on material sourced from “the textbook”. If you now consider how the process of generating lecture resources for a “traditional lecture” has changed during my 20 years as an academic
– (circa 1985) I gathered together a set of slides or overheads illustrating key points, and wrote key points on the blackboard
– (circa 1990) I prepared overhead transparencies with illustrations and key points
– (circa 1995) I prepared Powerpoint presentations which were distributed via an intranet
– (circa 2000) I prepared Powerpoint presentations which were placed on the web
By the early 2000s, in common parlance, the Powerpoint presentation became “The Lecture”, and because it resided in a public place free of the context in which it was presented and the words which were uttered explaining the origin and content of each idea and image, issues of copyright and intellectual property started to arise. The overheads of annotating each idea and image became a disincentive to preparing interesting additional resources for teaching, and the idea that providing enrichment to one group of students but not to all students (where different staff taught different streams) undermined the sense of academic responsibility for teaching material as well as undermining the atmosphere of collegiality.
It seems to me that institutions have only recently become deeply interested in the issue of plagiarism detection in the context of selling curriculum, selling degrees, selling research output and gaining competitive advantage from the intellectual property of their workforce of academics. The sense of academic integrity and moral philosophy associated with being part of an international community of scholars whose combined knowledge belongs to humanity has been seriously eroded by treating academic output as a saleable commodity and applying “business models” to academia using totally inadequate analogies.
I guess one aspect of writing in a blog that is simultaneously a real strength and a serious weakness is about to be demonstrated – I want to post this now because I know I won’t come back to it properly in the next few weeks to fill out the gaping holes in the line of argument. I think I know how to fill them, but I don’t have the time right now. Is it better to put the half baked idea “out there” (even if I’m the only person who goes back to read it) or is it best to let it drown in a sea of other half baked ideas? And furthermore, is this enough to ensure that I at least mark a line in the sand to say “I thought like this on this day, even if I don’t get to rethink it and publish it properly until a lot later on …”