EDGEX 2012: About Disruptive Education

This sentence from Stephen Downes post A World to Change best exemplifies one of the key drivers behind a conference like EDGEX2012: We need to move beyond the idea that an education is something that is provided for us, and toward the idea that an education is something that we create for ourselves.

With EDGEX2012 coming up just round the corner, I must say that I am super excited. It’s getting a bit difficult to focus on my daily work, the BAU stuff and not wander off in my head to the conference. Thanks to Viplav Baxi, we finally have speakers and thought leaders like Stephen Downes, Jay Cross, Clark Quinn, Dave Cormier, et al. coming together in a conference in India.

But I am jumping ahead as usual. I wanted this to be a blog post on what the conference is and why I think all educators—teachers, CLOs, L&D consultants, policy makers and policy breakers, and anyone who has anything to do with enabling others to build capability—should attend. If you believe that the current education system is failing us, is no longer sustainable, is neither fair nor equitable, then this is the conference for you. If you have ever been inspired by the writings of Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Pedagogy of Hope), then this conference is for you. It is about disruptive education. About freeing education from the shackles of a building (call it school, college, what you will) and democratizing it. It’s about handing power back to the learners and creating the environment for learning to happen. And it will. We have experiments like the Hole in the Wall by Sugata Mitra to prove us right. 

The Connectivism and Connective Knowledge MOOC (massive open online course) that Downes, Siemens and Cormier started in 2008 exemplifies networked learning, and the transformative impact of technology on learning. Most importantly, it does not have a “fixed body of knowledge” that learners need to go through. “Rather, the learning in the course results from the activities you undertake, and will be different for each person.” And this is the fundamental, quintessential personalized learning taking place on a massive scale year after year. I had joined the MOOC in 2010 for the first time. Since then, I have been a sporadic visitor to the MOOC and have always found nuggets of learning that suited my need at the moment. It empowers you—the learner—to architect your own learning. 

Closely aligned to this, we have Jay Cross—the proponent of Informal Learning. At a time when organizations were investing in formal, top down training programs, a vestige of the Industrial Era and Taylorist ideas of productivity improvement, Cross, Marcia Conner and a few others were busy advocating informal learning, workscaping, the power of social tools and the importance of building one’s personal learning network. I find this coming together of the different strands that constitute how we learn and perceive and make sense of the world today in a single conference quite remarkable. 

The conference also has speakers like Grainne Conole, Martin Weller, Les Foltos, Douglas Lynch and others. And the overarching themes are:

1. Informal Learning, Communities of Practice, Connectivism
2. Personal Learning Environments, Open Distributed
3. Learning, Net Pedagogy, Learning “Design” in a 2.0 world
4. Learning Analytics, Ubiquitous learning
5. MOOCs, OER University, Stanford AI
6. Role of teachers and coaching in an open distributed learning environment
7. New forms of assessments

There are resources here for those keen to know more about connectivism, learnscapes, communities of practices, open design, social network analysis and more.

#CCK11: Connectivism-MindMap

Putting together the points from the different sources on Connectivism in the form of a mindmap:

#CCK11: Week 1 Highlights - Connectivisim Defined

Given below are the highlights from the readings for the first week of the CCK11 course. 
Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age

1. Know-how and know-what is being supplemented with know-where (the understanding of where to find knowledge needed)
2. In today’s environment, action is often needed without personal learning – that is, we need to act by drawing information outside of our primary knowledge.
3. What adjustments need to be made with learning theories when technology performs many of the cognitive operations previously performed by learners (information storage and retrieval)?
4. …chaos states that meaning exists – the learner's challenge is to recognize the patterns which appear to be hidden.
5. The capacity to form connections between sources of information, and thereby create useful information patterns, is required to learn in our knowledge economy.
6. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.
7. Connectivism also addresses the challenges that many corporations face in knowledge management activities. Knowledge that resides in a database needs to be connected with the right people in the right context in order to be classified as learning.
8. Connectivism presents a model of learning that acknowledges the tectonic shifts in society where learning is no longer an internal, individualistic activity.

What Connectivism Is

1. Connections form naturally, through a process of association, and are not 'constructed' through some sort of intentional action.
2. Hence, in Connectivism, there is no real concept of transferring knowledge, making knowledge, or building knowledge.
3. What you are talking about as 'an understanding' is (at a best approximation) distributed across a network of connections.
4. “To teach is to model and demonstrate, to learn is to practice and reflect.”

Connectivism and its Critics: What Connectivism Is Not

According to Connectivism:

- learning occurs as a distributed process in a network, based on recognizing and interpreting patterns

- the learning process is influenced by the diversity of the network, strength of the ties

- memory consists of adaptive patterns of connectivity representative of current state

- transfer occurs through a process of connecting

- best for complex learning, learning in rapidly changing domains

The learning process is influenced by the four elements of the semantic condition:

• Diversity
• Autonomy
• Openness
• Connectedness

Learning is not a process of ‘transfer' at all, much less a transfer than can be caused or created by a single identifiable donor.

 

What is the unique idea in Connectivism?

1. Tools augment our ability to interact with each other and to act. Tools are extensions of humanity, increasing our ability to externalize our thinking into forms that we can share with others.
2. Connectivism is the application of network principles to define both knowledge and the process of learning.
3. Connectivism focuses on the inclusion of technology as part of our distribution of cognition and knowledge. Our knowledge resides in the connections we form – whether to other people or to information sources such as databases.
4. Connectivism recognizes the fluid nature of knowledge and connections based on context. As such, it becomes increasingly vital that we focus not on pre-made or pre-defined knowledge, but on our interactions with each other, and the context in which those interactions arise.
5. Making of coherence in a subject matter one is new to is about dialoguing with other learners. Make conversations a priority and let learners interact with the content, with each other, with the technology they will use for sense-making.

What is Connectivism?

1.       Connectivism focuses on:

• Our need to externalize to make sense
• Our need for frameworks/structures for sense-making
• Our need to socialize and negotiate around knowledge
• Our mind is a patterning mind: we are attuned to note, recognize and draw patterns from complex systems
• Our desire to extend our humanity through technology

2.       The experience of learning is one of forming new neural connections and conceptual frameworks.

3.       Learning occurs in continually fluctuating space.

4.       Connectivism is focused on the primacy of connections and networks.

5.       Types of networked learning:

• Neural-biological: neuroscience and AI states that learning is the formation of new neural connections.
• External-Social
• Conceptual

 6.    Connections create meaning: how we put together ideas is our conception of a particular field or state of knowing in that field.

 7.   Learning in a network sense is a function of:

• Depth and diversity of connections
• Frequency of exposure
• Integration with existing ideas and concepts
• Strong and weak ties (weak ties bridge separate worlds)
• Different types of networks with different types of attributes will serve different types of learning needs

Technology increases our ability to dialogue with others which results in a complexification of opinion.

#CCK11: Introductory Post--Reasons for joining

I joined the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (CCK11) MOOC a tad late. It is a 12 week course that started on January 17 and will continue till April 11. I am really excited to see what it holds. This is my introductory post. I am a bit worried that I am lagging behind in my reading but not too worried since many of the articles and posts that are linked are stuff I have already read. I am eager to go through this journey as a part of a group of people who are passionate and keen about the same things that I am.

The course syllabus was especially intriguing, and my special interest is the Adaptive Systems which is coming up in Week 7.

Week 1: Connectivism
Week 2: Patterns
Week 3: Knowledge
Week 4: Unique?
Week 5: Groups, Networks
Week 6: PLENK
Week 7: Adaptive Systems
Week 8: Power & Authority
Week 9: Openness
Week 10: Net Pedagogy
Week 11: Research & Analytics
Week 12: Changing views

Key reasons:

1. I have been reading and am highly influenced by the writings of George Siemens and Stephen Downes.
2. The theory of Connectivism fascinates me, and I see its absolute relevance in this age of networked learning.
3. I am also intrigued by complexity and chaos theory and do quite a bit of reading around these topics, which gets random at times. I tend to stray on the web. This course provides focus and a “guided” yet flexible path that will help me to do concentrated reading.
4. I wanted to experience the feel of a MOOC. I think MOOCs will increasingly become a way of sharing and learning together.
5. Dave Cromier’s video on What is a MOOC? pushed me to join. It rocks! It made me want to be a part of this learning experience.
6. The fact that I don’t need to read everything but the more I do cover, the more I can participate. This is a great motivator for me to cover as much as possible because I hate to feel left out.

10 things that Dave Cromier says about a MOOC that inspired me to join CCK11

1. The key characteristic of a MOOC as a participatory, open and distributed course
2. It’s an event around which people who care about a topic get together (although learning is not an "event")
3. All the course work gets done in areas accessible to everyone—absolute transparency of the learning process
4. Everyone gets to learn from everyone’s work
5. A MOOC promotes network creation and facilitates engagement with other participants (a key learning skill of the 21^st C where knowledge resides in friends and “knowing where is more important than knowing how or when”)
6. There’s no single path through the course—I can choose my learning path and different ideas can coexist and new ideas emerge
7. A MOOC is a lot like being on the web but it is paced, which also gives me a good reason to keep focused
8. The need to “declare” myself and create artifacts that will help me to make my learning process transparent (this post for example is a start)
9. It is a perfect blend of curated content and emergent knowledge, ideas and viewpoints
10. The 5 steps to be successful in a MOOC—Orient, Declare, Network, Cluster and Focus—are also the key learning skills required in the networked age. This, I thought, would be a great place to hone these skills. 

The points are synthesized from the following 2 videos:

• What is a MOOC?
• Success in a MOOC

So, I signed up.

What did I do next?

1. I joined the Google group here.
2. I went through the webinar recordings.
3. Saved the Twitter search for #CCK11
4. Scanned through the paper.li creations for CCK11
5. Subscribed to the CCK11 Daily

This has been my Saturday morning so far. I am now settling down with another cup of coffee to watch the 2 webinars:

• The Course Introduction and Overview
• Educational Data Mining: A Methodological Review

I will try to follow these up with some more readings from the daily. Will be back soon with my next post. 

Love-Hate Theory, Learner Motivation, Connectivism and Other Such Thoughts...

Preamble

I missed IDCI session yesterday but am thankful for the tweets from @gargamit100 and @sreyadutta. These followed by Sreya’s post gave me some idea of the discussion. You can read the post here: Business-driven Learning and LH Theory (Love-Hate Theory).

The post set me thinking about when do we use “Love vs. Hate” to design a training program. This triggered thoughts related to learner motivation and how even a “business driven” or “business centric” program benefit from motivated learners.

This further led me to mull over some of the fundamental theories all of us IDs start out our ID career armed with. In the initial years of being an ID (when we are still at the novice level as per Dreyfus Model…for discussion on this, please check here: http://learningsolutions.ning.com/forum/topics/in-a-learning-organization-how), these learning theories become our guiding light. Subsequently, we internalize them and they inform our design decisions and instructional strategies almost at a subconscious level.

The Love-Hate discussion made me cull them out from the depths of my subconscious and pin them down for my own scrutiny and examine their application in what we do.

Below is the result of my self-reflection and soliloquy that I spent the better part of my Sunday morning engaged in.

Recently, while surfing the web, I came across the National Survey of Student Engagement Report (NSSE) for 2007.

The report begins with the following quotation:

More than anything else, being an educated person means being able to see connections that allow one to make sense of the world and act within it in creative ways. Every one of the qualities I have described here—listening, reading, talking, writing, puzzle solving, and truth seeking, seeing through other people’s eyes, leading, working in a community — is finally about connecting (Cronon, 1998).

Point 1

Learners learn best when they are able to align the new knowledge with knowledge from the past. Motivation is intrinsically connected to this ability to make the connection; as soon as this connection happens, we feel that we are progressing, that the new knowledge/skill is not beyond our ability to master, and we feel confident. This confidence sustains motivation and engagement. Thus, while the learner has some initial motivation that prods him/her to take up the challenge of learning a new skill, chances are that de-motivation will set in unless s/he is able to “construct” associations between the existing knowledge and the new knowledge.

Conclusion #1: When designing with “love” and to have motivated learners, help learners to connect new knowledge to their pre-existing ones.

Supporting Theory: An understanding of the Constructivist Theory helps to conduct Learner Analysis keeping in mind the importance of capturing the existing knowledge level.

Point 2

Once this connection has been established, the learner will very likely exert himself/herself to acquire the new skill. All learners (I am not talking of compulsory schooling) come to any course with a “What’s In It For Me” approach. Constructivism plays a large role coupled with Cognitivsim in catering to this aspect. As soon as a learner is able to make the association, s/he is able to add to the existing schema for that area of knowledge. Thus, that specific schema expands, increases, instilling confidence and increasing engagement.

Once the learner is motivated to learn and attains the new skills/knowledge/understanding of a process, this brings about a change in his/her behavior. This is a definite requirement in most business driven training where the learners have to perform certain actions to meet the business objectives.

Conclusion #2: Motivated learners will make that extra effort to acquire and internalize the new skills required to meet the business objective.

Supporting Theory: An understanding of Constructivism and Behaviorism helps in designing training solutions using instructional strategies that leverage the existing knowledge, provide feedback at critical points to reinforce the correct “learning” and act as deterrent for the incorrect behavior.

Point 3

In today’s Digital Era, Connectivism adds another crucial dimension to the traditional learning theories. With the shelf life of knowledge rapidly decreasing and new “knowledge” increasing exponentially, the importance of the ability to synthesize and make connections has increased manifold.

Ongoing change is going to make current knowledge obsolescent. Thus, even the most current information is not going to be current by the time it goes through the design-development phase and reach the learner’s plate as a packaged training program. This is where, to quote Tony Karrer, we need a shift from the design of pure courseware solutions to reference hybrid solutions designed to be just-in-time supports.

These can be in the form of just-in-time aids, access to experts via social networking tools, podcasts, screencasts, and anything besides that address the need of the moment. Such aids are ephemeral in nature and thus suit today’s rapidly shifting “knowledgescape”. From a business perspective, they are cheaper and faster to create and deliver.

We moved from an oral tradition that was discourse based to the written medium with the invention of the printing press. The latter innovation began the process of codification or “capturing” of knowledge from individual sources in the form of text. With the advent of technology and the rise of web 2.0, we are going back to the discursive model of knowledge acquisition where how we make connections and network is more critical. Knowledge and understanding is being constantly reshaped and built through interactions across different platforms.

Conclusion #3: Today’s learners will benefit from being guided to make connections, be given access to information just in time and in just the right amount, and be exposed to technology that will help them in creating their own learning environments.

Supporting Theory: An understanding of Connectivism is important in such cases where the “knowledge is needed, but not known, and the ability to plug into sources to meet the requirements becomes a vital skill. As knowledge continues to grow and evolve, access to what is needed is more important than what the learner currently possesses.”

This is my understanding and I am still grappling with the dilemma of applying these when creating programs under time constraint.