James Wanless » education

Getting to the thesis research

James — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 23:47:40 +0000

Here I am, about a third of the way through my thesis year and I’m finally getting to the fun stuff, in that I’m actually doing research interviews as we hit the Christmas season. I’ll admit that, from the end of summer when I was really beginning to finalize my thesis proposal until now, I’ve felt disconnected from most things while doing this. I chose this road, so I’m not complaining, but it was a disconcerting change from year one.

In the Royal Roads University (RRU) MALAT program you bang through six courses in your first year, two of which happen during a six week pressure cooker that includes a two week residency. This is followed by four more courses over roughly another forty weeks, which include a lot of collaborative group work and enough discussion forum posts to choke a horse. While groups will use a variety of tools of mostly their own choosing to get through it, the lifeblood of the coursework are the Moodle discussion forums. Due to the schedule and pacing, you don’t have much time to think in year one and there’s always some assignment or activity coming up, which forces you to stay focused.

Contrast that with a year two thesis route, which is really all about how well you can determine what you need to do and when. While I always felt the thesis route would probably give me a more useful artefact after it was over, and I felt that doing a thesis would help me get better at research (my big goal for doing an MA in the first place), fatigue with what I view as an over-dependence on coursework discussion forums was the tipping point for me – I’m kind of self-directed and very much an autonomous learner. However, back to the disconnect.

Approvals

Getting to the point that I could actually begin research was no small task. In late summer I started revisiting the research proposal I’d done during my coursework last year, to round it into shape as an actual thesis proposal. It was probably a little heavy on lit review, compared with a proposal from a more seasoned researcher, but it was also extremely light on operational details and virtually devoid of anything that made it look like a case study, which is what I’ve chosen to do for my thesis research. This necessitated really getting familiar with case study methodology and a better understanding of qualitative research techniques. I’d say my actual research proposal was a very different document from the one I produced for marks last spring.

By the time I had a proposal that met with approval from the RRU program head it was well into October. That was approval one, but there was still the small issue of Research Ethics Board (REB) approval at both RRU and BCIT, as my research is situated in a department there. While RRU turned my application around in 1-2 weeks, the same cannot be said for BCIT. It’s somewhat immaterial now, but a ball was dropped somewhere along the way, as an expedited approval request took well over a month. In the big scheme of things it’s not the end of the world, but conducting interviews is considerably more involved than running a survey or other quantitative research. I view the process of recruitment as still another approval of sorts, as interview subjects have to want to do it and be genuinely interested in helping you do your research.

Instead of conducting interviews mid-term, what this has all meant is that I’ve had to try and get faculty interested in, and booked to do interviews at one of the worst possible times of the year. With a Christmas break looming, papers to mark, final exams and some serious fiscal and budget issues at BCIT, this piece has been challenging. Most interviews have been rescheduled at least once and I’ve still got one remaining after the Christmas break. More importantly, the idea of having my interviews transcribed before Christmas so I could start doing some data analysis over the break has given way to transcripts in January and data analysis well into February. The saving grace is that I should be able to take some Professional Development time off to do the bulk of my writing.

This period has been the big disconnect of which I spoke earlier. Other than some back-and-forth with my thesis supervisor and the RRU program head, I’ve really been cut loose and on my own. No second residency, no assignments, no timeline for posting to a blog or forum, no group Skype sessions, no writing with others in a synchronous Google Docs session. Just me, my books, my laptop and lots of uncertainty. Lots and lots of uncertainty.

A budding social researcher?

Now that I’m actually conducting interviews, though, I’m finding it very enjoyable. Prior to beginning I was on edge a bit. Will my interviews go well? Will I get the data that gets at my questions? Will my research fall flat on its face? I’m happy to say that I think my fears are dissipating. What I’m discovering is that my enjoyment of conversation is holding me in good stead as an interviewer. I’m sure my technique could use a lot of improvement, but as I’ve listened a couple times to each of my first two pilot interviews, I’ve found that the data is covering my questions and even in just three interviews I’m getting the sense that patterns I hadn’t anticipated will emerge. Each interview I’ve done has built on my previous one and the guide I’m using changes a bit each time. The direction one interview takes actually helps you ask better questions in subsequent interviews.

I’ve always been the kind of guy who wants to know why things happen, how people feel about them, and I feel that the experiences we have can tell us a lot about how to do things better. It’s been a large part of my work to this point as I build and design web sites and applications and I’m beginning to think that moving my career in more social research directions will suit me. Truth is, web usability and user experience research tends to be ethnographic in nature and I could really see qualitative research becoming more and more important to me personally and professionally.

I won’t get to the in-depth analysis until after all seven interviews are complete. In addition to the transcripts that I have by mid-January, there’s a fair bit of BCIT documentation I’ll have to acquire for both background and triangulation purposes. I may even need to look at a little more data collection, but I’m not sure yet.

What I am fairly certain of now, though, which I wasn’t as recently as a month ago, is that I will successfully complete this thing and that I will get what I expected out of the process. I’ll have a piece of research of which I’ll be proud, I’ll be better at analysis, I’ll be better at research and I’ll be a better writer. I’m pretty sure that’s what graduate studies are all about.

Olympic indoctrination a matter of perspective

James — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:04:39 +0000

The dust-up about The Olympic Resistance Network (ORN) providing an Olympics protest workshop for a local of the British Columbia Teacher’s Federation (BCTF) began at the end of last week. I’m not big on political statements being made to children by teachers in classrooms, but I’m not sure that’s necessarily going on here. A look around the various web sites associated with this group certainly shows some political rhetoric, but also a lot of information focused on thinking critically about the effects of the Olympics, historically and in Vancouver 2010 specifically.

The ORN also suggests that they could come in and do workshops for students at the secondary level. I’d be hesitant to go there as I think there are some real risks about rhetorical opinion being presented as fact, and we’ve already had enough broken financial promises about the Olympics from government. I’d want to make sure that what the ORN was offering students directly was prepared with appropriate levels of research, and was presented in accordance with prescribed curriculum and in a way that allowed students to make informed decisions for themselves. What I’m focusing on here is the workshop for teachers.

Since it was reported that this workshop was to take place in Lord Strathcona Elementary on October 28th, the event has been moved to SFU Harbour Centre, due to media coverage and the reaction of Lord Strathcona PAC chair, Angelia Ellis. According to an article by reporter John Colebourn in the October 13 Vancouver Province, all parties are distancing themselves from each other and the event is now being held off school grounds. In my mind, the debate ends there, as teachers can attend anything they like on their own time and they’ve likely heard more political rhetoric at the average BCTF AGM, than they will at this workshop.

A little balance

… on this issue might be a good idea. News1130′s radio spot about it was far more circumspect:

A local with the B.C. Teachers Federation, the Vancouver Elementary School Teachers Association, is encouraging an event later this month called Teaching 2010 Resistance. It’s meant to help teachers raise critical questions about the Olympics by considering issues like homelessness and poverty.

However, Colebourn’s article veered dangerously close to editorial rather than journalism when he used words like “radical” twice, and “zealots” to describe the ORN. Zealots they may be, but wouldn’t a journalist (as opposed to an editorialist) leave labels like those to the reader to apply? Oddly enough, he gives many more column lines to PAC chair Ellis, Solicitor General Kash Heed and even Premier Gordon Campbell to support his bias, than he does to ORN member Marla Renn in providing the other side of the story. If supporting quotes were going to be solicited, then how about finding some from 2010 Olympic Games Watch or the Impact on Communities Coalition (IOCC) for a bit more balance?

The cheerleading that the major media are doing on the Olympics is nothing new, and an article like this might as well have been written by Vanoc, themselves. However, what I don’t understand is the article’s underlying idea that naysayers are necessarily zealots, or that since the Olympics are here in four months, no critical analysis or debate about the social and economic effects of the games should make its way into classrooms. Don’t we want children to grow up questioning the world around them and trying to understand at more than a surface level? Do we want them blindly accepting government promotion as fact, without something a little deeper? The ORN is probably guilty of no worse zealotry than anyone on the government or Vanoc side of the equation.

PAC chair Ellis was mostly concerned about the lack of communication and that the workshop was to happen in the school without official permission, and I can understand that concern. However, what about the traveling photo ops going to elementary schools all over the place in the guise of educational programs, with Olympic mascot costumed actors, ensuring that all school kids will have a glowing mental image of something that’s not so cut and dried? Apparently, according to Ellis government funded propaganda is just fine, but opposing viewpoints have no place in the minds of impressionable children:

With the 2010 Olympics so close, nothing anti-Olympic should be happening at the school …. Critical thinking is one thing, but not if it’s going to be a political platform.

The difference, of course, is that the photo ops are all part of Vanoc’s education programs; no fewer than 27 separate educational promotion opportunities, funded by your tax dollars and mine. There is no shortage of edutainment supplies and lesson plans, with none of it seeming to ask critical questions. I won’t even go into the notion that, while some of the material rightly promotes the healthy living effects of sport, this runs in stark contrast to the BC provincial government’s continual cutting of physical education programs, including mandating 80 hours of exercise as a graduation requirement but not funding it in school.

Where’s the real concern?

While Colebourn’s article also suggests that the local of the BCTF is now distancing themselves from the ORN, the quotes he used simply clarify that media reports that the two groups were associated were inaccurate. In other words there was never something for the BCTF local to be distanced from. The ORN’s Marla Renn also confirms that the two groups have never been associated.

BC Premier Gordon Campbell feels that children shouldn’t be pawns in the debate … that is, unless it’s at the hands of government classroom edutainment:

I don’t think it was right taking all the enthusiasm for the Games away from the children.

Let’s not forget that the enthusiasm Campbell refers to is, in part, whipped up by the government in the first place in using the classroom for their own biased information.

What’s not clear is what actually had everyone up in arms. There’s a lot of stuff on the Teach2010 web site and some of it undoubtedly draws a very long bow, like connecting the racial issues associated with the 1936 Berlin Olympics with what the ORN perceive as present-day aboriginal racial issues. Most of it is suggestive of lessons and materials that teachers can target at secondary children. Of the couple dozens links from the main page, only one is focused on primary school aged children. Maybe, with the negative media coverage, some previously available material was taken down, but if not, then the comments of Solicitor General Heed seem to draw an equally long bow:

You know, encouraging teachers to recruit kids to break the law, to commit acts of vandalism, or to occupy private property, you know even to the extent of sabotaging children’s food, is absolutely and completely unacceptable.

Heed may have seen some material I haven’t, but vandalism and food sabotage doesn’t seem to be part of the Teach2010 agenda. Frankly, even if that kind of material is part of the workshop for teachers, let’s have a little trust in them to not only speak out against it, but to certainly not present it to school kids.

Engage kids on what really matters

As a fan of international athletic competition, I hope to see some great events on TV. As a taxpayer who accepts that the Olympics are coming in four months, I hope they succeed financially so that any debt associated with them does not get passed on to my kids. As a concerned citizen, I have many questions. Particularly when we continually watch the Campbell government do the following in the name of the games:

continue to downplay homelessness and drug problems in downtown Vancouver and other communities while throwing tons of cash at the games;
run a provincial deficit that could hit close to $3 billion and a ‘published’ games deficit of $60 million;
cut grants and programs in light of the provincial deficit;
let Vanoc run out of money while paying up to $30 million in staff bonuses;
leave Vancouver taxpayers at the whim of market forces to deal with athlete’s village cost overruns.

Financial questions alone should be cause for grave concern and the next generation of citizens shouldn’t be sheltered from as many perspectives as possible in considering their government and what something like the Olympics may actually cost us, financially and socially.

When delivery method and subject matter are the same

Grokking the literature review

James — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 06:40:08 +0000

I have to admit that I’m liking the literature review process, the more I understand the right approach. Having said that, I’ve not really done what could be classified as a real literature review yet. I did a very surface one (which could only really be called a minor literature summary) when I did my preliminary thesis proposal a couple months ago to get my topic approved. I am presently starting with that version to flesh out a better one for my official thesis proposal in the last of my cohort classes. When I launch into my full thesis phase in July, I’ll build on the version I’m doing now yet again.

I realize now that I had been thinking wrongly when I approached the literature review as a general reading of related literature, tying it together so as to quote things I thought were relevant, but without what I would really consider any kind of critical analysis. As I’ve been reading journal articles and relevant chapters of a couple research texts, it’s becoming much clearer to me how to read more effectively and how to understand why the process is so important to situating and contextualizing the research I will be performing myself. In fact, I’m now understanding how I’ll be able to finalize my topic and questions ONLY if I do a decent literature review.

Boote and Beile (2005, p.4) state that the literature review should:

set the broad context of the study, clearly demarcate what is and is not within the scope of the investigation, and justify those decisions.

They go on to say that it should also:

report the claims made in the existing literature and examine critically the research methods used to better understand whether the claims are warranted.

Similarly, Knopf (2006, p.127) suggests that, when determining whether a particular approach to some problem has been successful, one can:

focus on the ‘lessons learned’ from a previous effort to deal with a certain problem (and those lessons learned might have been proposed by outside scholars or by practitioners themselves).

Developing a topic and questions

Getting to the point of a really good research topic and questions which truly operationalize it is no small task. In particular, I’ve come to the realization that you won’t land on the final versions until you’ve concluded the literature review for your proposal. It’s also clear that the topic and questions may easily get revised again when further literature review is done for my thesis. This is because, provided you look at the literature critically, you’ll start to really see where the gaps exist and what methods were used to produce the various findings – exactly what you need to determine what you want to look at. If something has been studied to death, you have a lower chance of adding much value to existing knowledge, whereas figuring out that some aspect of a topic has been poorly analyzed may actually give you a better way to approach your research.

In getting to the point of being able to move forward with a researchable topic, Rugg and Petre (2007, p.55), have a good bullet list of the things you should be able to do when you’ve conducted your initial search of the literature. You should be able to answer the following questions:

What is the problem you are tackling?

What is it academically significant?

What are the main things that have been tried before?

Who tried them?

Why didn’t those approaches work?

What are you going to do that’s different?

Where did you get that idea from?

What evidence is there to suggest that this might work better?

If it doesn’t work, will the finding be useful or just make you look like an idiot?

In particular, I like the last question. I’d have to say the biggest risk I’m feeling as I read a ton of articles this week (other than that of not getting my proposal literature review done by Sunday), is that of doing something that hasn’t got the academic merit I’m hoping for.

I’d really rather that the next year of my life isn’t spent on something that makes me look foolish. I can do that easily in many other areas of my life.

References

Boote, D.N., & Beile, P. (2005). Scholars before researchers: On the centrality of the dissertation literature review in research preparation. Educational Researcher, (34)6.
Knopf, J.W. (2006). Doing a literature review. Political Science & Politics, 39(1).
Rugg, G., & Petre, M. (2007). A gentle guide to research methods. Birkshire: McGraw-Hill/Open University Press.

Defining thesis research questions

James — Thu, 21 May 2009 07:43:06 +0000

Getting down to the right research topic and asking the right questions to address it is a pretty challenging process. About the only thing I can say for certain is that I’ll be looking at blogs at BCIT. My preliminary proposal sought to understand the institute’s experience with blogs and wikis for learning and teaching in the more than five years since they were introduced as part of the Technology Enabled Knowledge (TEK) initiative.

We’re in the early stages of the last first-year course of our MA, which deals with developing a detailed research proposal. What I’ve got to do is focus on a detailed enough topic that it will be worthy of a thesis. It has to be something that is a significant problem, the answer to which will add to the body of knowledge on the topic. The literature seems pretty weak on evaluating blogs as teaching tools and I’m pretty sure this is what got the topic in principle approved.

Through a number of discussions and feedback, it’s become clear to me that researching on only blogs, as opposed to blogs and wikis, will allow me a tighter focus. The fact that very little evaluation of these tools specifically at BCIT has been done also makes it a good topic. Beyond that, though, I’m finding that it’s difficult to decide whether I can hypothesize that adoption of blogs has been weak and attempt to answer why, or that the research be totally inductive and descriptive. There are problems with either approach in terms of framing the research and designing the research vehicle, particularly if I go the survey route.

What follows is probably the second iteration of what will undoubtedly still change somewhat. If you have any thoughts about the this I would welcome comments below.

Description
Web 2.0 is a term encompassing Internet technologies that allow users to collaboratively create and share intellectual property online. Weblogs, or blogs, are writing or journalling web sites that have a number of features for interaction, sharing of content and solicitation of comments/feedback.

Beginning in 2003, the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) implemented blogs for learning and teaching through its TEK (Technology Enabled Knowledge, n.d.) initiative, but there was little strategic oversight or evaluation of the effort. The institute has not made many forays into Web 2.0 for learning, but is beginning to do so with its marketing and communications efforts.

The goal of this research project is to better understand the adoption of blogs at BCIT, and to identify key factors, both positive and negative, in their use as instructional tools at the institute.

Working title
Assessing factors affecting the adoption of blogs as instructional tools at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT).

Draft questions

To what extent are blogs currently being used as instructional tools at BCIT?

What key pedagogical and evaluation issues do blogs present for faculty at BCIT?

What technological and support issues do blogs create for staff at BCIT?

How can BCIT use institute-wide experience thus far with blogs to develop institutional strategies for the future?

Again, if you’ve got any thoughts at all on this topic I’d love to read them, particularly if you have experience with designing research on social media in education.

Pondering the thesis

James — Mon, 11 May 2009 06:36:12 +0000

So, now that I know I’m going to do a thesis for the second year of my Masters degree instead of more coursework and a smaller project, I’m facing a plethora of decisions. I’ve got a very basic concept of what I want to research, but over the course of the next twelve weeks I’ll turn a basic idea into a detailed project proposal. As I’m diving into the research issue it’s becoming clear I have a big year ahead of me.

After the first two weeks of our research course, we’re just getting introduced to the mindset of researching. Is that a verb? Well, we did a brief introduction to research last summer, but this course will actually see us produce the detailed research proposal we will use moving forward. For the rest of my cohort, this will be a roadmap for a six credit paper to come later next year, but for me (as I was deluded enough to actually want to do a thesis) this is what I will use to guide me after July, as I am cut loose from my cohort after this. At this stage it’s mostly about the structure of good research and the pitfalls of what to avoid. We’ve discussed what goes into a thesis or dissertation, read a couple theses and done a rudimentary critique comparing them.

Even in just doing that, I was struck by just how much difference there was in the scope, style and quality between the two. I guess what I really thought about was how they both were accepted by different committees in different institutions, and bare little similarity to each other. While their structure and length were roughly the same, everything else was quite different. A thesis is so unique for so many reasons – topic, institute, supervisor, committee, external readers, researcher – that I guess it’s bound to be different from any other. However, I was thinking that the language and approach would need to be the same to meet core competencies at the Masters level, such as:

communication
leadership and teamwork
critical thinking
analysis
knowledge

In fact, one of the two theses I read was situated at BCIT and deals with a related subject to the one I want to do. It’s also the far better one in my opinion and I just finished a 45 minute phone chat with the researcher tonight. While I’m no more secure at this point that I will pull off a work of academic art when I complete it, she had some really solid advice for me about things that I might consider to avoid wasting time. In particular, obtaining demographic data to prove representativeness of my sample will be a particularly important thing to do upfront, in light of issues specific to BCIT.

During the course of our online discussions of what we felt went constituted a good research topic or proposal, I had indicated that in my experience so far I found the following issues to be key:

the research topic is of personal and professional interest
I have experience with the subject of the research topic
the literature on the topic is weak, so the opportunity exists to add some new knowledge in the area
the research is situated at the institute where I work
the supervisor works where I work (not necessary, but should certainly be helpful)

One of the key things that has also emerged in our readings so far, is to ensure the thesis project is scoped properly. It seems far better to do a small project well, as opposed to doing a large project poorly. The two papers I read bore this fact out. While the other one was not a bad paper by any stretch, because the scope was broader, the researcher was trying to cover more ground. As a result, the data analysis seemed weaker and there was more glossing over of seemingly important information. At the end of each paper, it seemed fairly easy to connect the concreteness of the conclusions to the starting point of the project.

I’m hoping I’ll remember some of these good lessons at this very early stage, when I’m knee-deep in this stuff.

Learning to write in a changing, digital world

James — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 06:17:07 +0000

A couple of things I read this past week really struck a chord. It occurs to me that we really don’t seem to be teaching people how to write for the emerging world. Over the past few months I’ve been exposed to academic writing. Detailed formatting, citation syntax and references with hanging indents don’t find their way into everyday writing, and for good reason. However, I really think people are not being taught to write for the contexts, nor the formats, needed in our rapidly evolving digital world.

Based on what I see my high school aged son experiencing, public school is doing precious little to help him like writing. Yes, I said like. It is still my belief that to do something well, you have to like something about it, or want to do it. The approach in school for memorizing and regurgitating (no, I won’t call it behaviourist) stuff up onto a page is uninspiring at best. While he’s using a word processor to produce the assignments, just like when I was in public school, it eventually has to be printed and handed in, only to be marked up with red pen, assigned a somewhat arbitrary grade, and handed back. Do you think the marked version is saved for posterity, to be referenced for a later assignment in the hope that he’ll do better? Hardly. It’s in the trash can or somewhere in a bag or pile, never to be seen again.

Even though a few more bells and whistles are employed as people in my Master’s cohort can access scholarly research (mostly through subscription-based academic databases), papers written for our courses follow a similar path. Hopefully, we’ll all build our academic writing chops as we hand in more papers before we finally do a major project or thesis, but we’re still handing in an artifact, getting a grade of some sort and getting the thing back. I’m not sure a digital version with comment tracking turned on is a whole lot different than my son’s paper-based version, but I digress.

What a breath of fresh air it was to read Writing for Wikipedia. In it, Robert Cummings relates his experiences in teaching his composition class to write for Wikipedia. The mere mention of Wikipedia can send academics into a lather and I’ve even heard locally that it is not to be used for reference. Cummings cites a Nature study of the validity of Wikipedia and says …

For those who are interested in that topic, I would refer you to the Nature study which found that while Wikipedia was less accurate that Encyclopædia Britannica online in its science entries, the aggregate difference in accuracy was not so large as to rule out the use of Wikipedia as a valid source for most readers (and there is no debate that Wikipedia is a vastly more comprehensive source and better able to update itself). No matter how counter-intuitive it might seem that an open source which anyone can edit would provide, on the whole, useful information, it is simply the case.

What I’m really getting at is that Cummings uses Wikipedia as an assignment, but first goes through with his class the idea of writing for discourse in a collaborative environment. He touches on some really key issues when he speaks of gaining an understanding of the concept of audience and receiving often immediate feedback with a critical eye. In my mind, it’s the quality that can come from voices of the crowd. He’s also careful to understand why some students need the one-to-one critique which comes from the teacher before venturing into the online world.

What I really think we ought to be giving very significant weight to, is the value of writing in the digital context. In addition to the comments of the crowd and the value of collaborative writing, what about the format in which many, if not most, people will eventually see the writing? Is there any doubt that digital formats accessed over the web will continue to gain prominence? As the realization of the cost benefits of IP networked distribution over print gains hold, it’s pretty much a given.

As we all know, though, writing for the screen is not like writing for print. Paragraphs should be smaller, bullet pointing should be encouraged and active voice should be everywhere. Scholarly writing will still need to exist, but can it adapt, with standards that can easily allow for the screen? Or are we doomed to abstracts that link to 150 page PDFs? That open technologies can help writers learn about audience and value feedback also seems to be logical in my mind, though I don’t see too many theses-in-progress open for comments. Will that come, and should it?

On a final note, I also encountered a wonderful project brought to my attention by Jim Groom, Fredricksburg Academy Blogs. You can easily read about it via the link, and I’d never do it justice here, but the gist is simple. Provide a local high school with a cheap version of your university’s WordPress MU install, complete with plugins and themes, and let students discover for themselves how to just write. No real purpose, no big book of rules … just writing.

By reading the comments by teachers, you can see that it’s not only teaching them about writing online, but about safety, how much of themselves to expose and how to connect with each other and start conversations. Wonderful stuff, really. Perhaps the most telling comment,

My students love that it is their space. They are writing about anything and everything. I am not stifling what they are writing except within the context of “school appropriate”. Because of that they are not only writing, but we are building community. We are learning about each other…and writing at the same time. I am also finding that the engagement of my weaker students has increased. It is as if their voice is valid now.

Wouldn’t it be nice if this marked the beginning of a real journey?

Reflection and philosophy

James — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 19:55:56 +0000

The course I’ve just started this week in my MA studies is focused primarily on community-building for online learning. We’ve been posting images that suggest facilitation and community and commenting on them. The literature reading thus far has been – and I’m admittedly only about half way through it – about philosophy of education and developing reflective practice. This got me thinking about a journal post.

As always I come at this as an educational lay-person, but one who has been design-focused for well over a decade, led lots of projects and teams, managed web portal communities, and done his fair share of presentations. As I’ve started to think about the connection between the subject matter of the five courses, it occurs to me that a great deal of the core stuff of education and learning is about philosophy. Whether you’re doing analysis, development, design, implementation or evaluation, you’re constantly (or should be) thinking about your learners, their differences, how your approach needs to accommodate them, and specific to distance and technology-mediated learning, whether things like the LMS/PLE will be affected by issues at their end, of which you are entirely unaware.

After all, philosophy is really about the examined life. As we gain life experience, we (hopefully) develop value systems which guide us. Educational philosophy takes this one step further by examining beliefs and values and applying them to educational issues. It’s interesting that we look at these issues now, because they are probably germane to almost any course we’ve done so far. Program planning, for example, covered elements of the ethical and socio-political domains, core aspects of philosophy. Mind you, in a program which is largely applied and practical, it’s probably difficult to insert philosophy and theory (with the obvious exception of our first course on learning theory) into the curriculum, so I applaud its inclusion at this point.

Reflection is really centred on the time you take to examine what you do. This could be as granular or broad as you like, so long as you are developing a way to evaluate and question yourself, with an effort to improve. Connecting philosophy and reflection then, to me, is really just a question of scale. I liken philosophy to one’s broad roadmap for living and reflection to one’s approach for determining whether or not they’re staying true to it. Put another way, philosophy will (or should) have an impact on the external you, while reflection will be more personal.

On a personal note

Connecting these thoughts to what I do is an interesting exercise. As far as my own project management and design practice is concerned, I don’t worry too much about reflection because I’m in analytical mode pretty much 24/7 and probably err on the side of wanting to do too much analysis, even when the project doesn’t always warrant it. I find I can get frustrated when there is no easy way to collect the data I want on users, for example, or when a marketing imperative says I must get something launched even when I know it shouldn’t be. If there’s an error in my reflection it’s that it is probably a little more externally than internally focused and I’ll see if that’s a shift I can make a bit over time.

In terms of professional philosophy, it’s pretty easy to liken the end-user of a web site or application to a learner. Find out who your target is, understand as much as you reasonably can about them and focus your efforts on meeting their needs. Whether your focus is education or communications, you will always have institutional, political, process or business issues to navigate and they will often force you to make compromises in your work. Accept them and do the best that you can because energy is often finite and better spent on things you CAN change.

Instructional design now and in the future: part two

James — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 04:46:18 +0000

This is the second of two parts. Here I talk about factors driving the future of the field. As someone doing this as part of an MA program, what I’m looking for is thoughts on approach from those who may be practicing instructional designers or whose experience is grounded in more than literature review or discussions. Mine are definitely lay opinions in this area, despite my experience in other areas of web development.

Factors driving the evolution of the field

So far, I have identified key issues at play right now in the instructional design field; primarily theoretical and technological. However, these are only springboards for bigger and broader changes to come. What will an instructional designer need as a practitioner and how will that play out for things like F2F or distance learning as technology marches forward? How will learner needs and preferences change as a result? Will open technologies, open access and the evolution of constructivist underpinnings effectively turn instructional design on its head?

What Will Practitioners Need to Do?

While the questions in the introduction to this section might suggest everything will change, this is not so. The skills and attributes an instructional designer brings to the table will have to accommodate external changes out of necessity, “Instructional design is an area in which we should be able to anticipate particularly rapid and significant change (Smith & Ragan, 2005).” However, some things will change and some not so much:

Instructional design issues: “The same instructional design issues are valid for both traditional and eLearning: structure, content, motivation and feedback, interaction and activities (Siragusa, 2000, p.4; as cited by Herridge Group, 2004, p.15).”
ISD process: there is no reason to think the principles of ADDIE or standard ISD will not still apply, with some aspect(s) of Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation always present.
Standards and skills: competencies, standards and skills will continue to change. Emerging international standards for program evaluation and online learning (IPSTIPI, 2006) will become increasingly important. Practitioners will need to develop analytical, project management, technology-oriented media and evaluation / research competencies for business and industry settings (Larson & Lockee, 2007, pp.3, 11-12).

While ID practitioners will have to maintain the skills in sequencing, pacing, content selection and the like, and will still have to choose and use contextually appropriate ID models, business and industry settings may demand more rigour and higher standards in their qualifications, while learners will demand better experiences and expect to use the technology of their choice.

External Factors

While learners, learning theory and technology will largely drive the process of instructional design, trends in society will also play an important role in the kinds of training and instruction required, and delivery method. The explosive growth of purely distance-based graduate-level programs aimed at employed mid-career adults, indicates the need for flexible education. As learning objects and media become increasingly sophisticated, and things like smart objects and expert systems continue to gain prominence in business training, classroom and F2F settings, technology literacy will likely become increasingly important for instructional designers.

Learners and Technology

It is well beyond the scope of this paper to do a detailed analysis of learners and their needs. They will differ significantly based on learning context, demographics, socio-economic and cultural factors. Plus, little detailed knowledge about individual learner needs actually exists. However, based upon the continuing evolution and application of a predominantly constructivist approach to instructional design, learners:

will continue to be more central to the instruction and will require more active, authentic, collaborative learning imbued with multiple perspectives (Karagiorgi & Symeou, 2005);
will need learning experiences more adapted to their individual learning styles, despite the fact that we still require far more systematic knowledge of how different kinds of learners use various media (Miller, 2007), and;
in work-sponsored training, support and professional development – may require more performance technology solutions such as job aids, counselling and on-the-job training (Smith & Ragan, 2005).

While learners ultimately come in all sorts of flavours, those which fit into the broad category of millennials (14-27) make up a large chunk of today’s aggregate learner persona. According to a recent study (Accenture, 2008) of more than 400 U.S. students and employees from this demographic, they show “an increasing demand for high-tech devices to connect with colleagues, peers, friends and family, rather than face-to-face contact,” and that, “they expect to use their own technology and mobile devices for work, increasingly choosing their place of employment based on how accommodating companies are to their personal technology preferences.”

When coupling millennial preferences for high-tech (as opposed to F2F) social interaction, and the desire to use their own technology in the way they best see fit, there is no reason to assume this only holds true for employment. Instructional delivery in all contexts will likely have to progressively and continually accommodate this trend.

Learning and Educational Technology

I have just demonstrated how end-user technology preferences will likely cause significant issues for the planning and delivery of learning, regardless of context. Before discussing the rapidly changing landscape with regard to building and delivering learning online, I feel it is important to highlight broader changes in technology, particularly wireless. As handheld devices and mobile computing continue to gain prominence for learners it is important to have at least a cursory knowledge of the landscape, as it provides important context for how our instruction is being accessed and some of the possibilities for delivering that instruction.

Gartner (2009) has identified eight mobile technologies that will evolve significantly through 2010, impacting short-term mobile strategies and policies. As these take hold, they will undoubtedly affect longer-term technology trends as well, and they are effectively not new issues, regardless. Key trends include improved mobile interfaces, Bluetooth improvements, location awareness, wireless broadband, 802.11n adoption and the mobile web. What is important to note is that these are not new and show that wireless access and mobile computing will continue to improve and become increasingly important to learners, thus making it something instructional designers cannot ignore.

What about delivery frameworks? A Learning Management System (LMS) is a special type of Content Management System (CMS), optimized to deliver instruction online. Examples include Moodle, Desire2Learn and Blackboard. A CMS application is most often a web-based Graphical User Interface (GUI) for managing the content of a web site, as it has become increasingly important to provide access over the Internet. A CMS for updating a web site allows distributed authoring of content by Subject Matter Experts (SME), while centralizing publishing control and design standards through a web management department. LMS software takes the same approach to managing a web-based learning environment, but the end-user features are more tailored to content sequencing, asynchronous/synchronous communication tools, assignment submission and other social learning activities, as opposed to more passive information distribution. Making sense of, and choosing, a particular CMS or LMS is a very contextually specific and technical endeavour, typically well beyond the scope of an individual instructional designer. As I will demonstrate next, though, understanding how these systems work and the features and limitations of the environment for which one is designing, will likely become increasingly important.

The move to open is here to stay. A discussion of LMS software is beyond the scope of this paper and not terribly germane to the specifics of instructional design. However, understanding terms like open source, open standards and open access is very important to the instructional design process. In particular, there has been a very clear development on the web in general, which is now having a significant impact on teaching and learning. Web 2.0 generally describes the move to information democratization, user generated content, socialization, sharing and community-built applications, and is a social change enabled by technology, as opposed being technology-driven. Web 2.0 has also drastically influenced general expectations with regard to functionality and experience and, interestingly, resembles constructivism in many important ways.

Web 2.0 was eloquently described by Stephen Downes (2005) as:

a vision of the Web in which information is broken up into “microcontent” units that can be distributed over dozens of domains. The Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just looking to the same old sources for information. Now we’re looking to a new set of tools to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and useful ways.” In a nutshell, what was happening was that the Web was shifting from being a medium, in which information was transmitted and consumed, into being a platform, in which content was created, shared, remixed, repurposed, and passed along. And what people were doing with the Web was not merely reading books, listening to the radio or watching TV, but having a conversation, with a vocabulary consisting not just of words but of images, video, multimedia and whatever they could get their hands on. And this became, and looked like, and behaved like, a network.

This notion has significant implications for learning. Open content access, sharing and distribution, coupled with the changing face of Millennials and their technology preferences, suggests that while technology is being used to share and communicate like never before, the experience will be very individualistic, tailored to personal preferences and expectations.

Smith & Ragan (2005) recognize some of this when they state, “the single quality that more than any other, seems to set the web apart is the more or less instant and free distribution of interactive multimedia materials.“ Further, that “information infrastructures are becoming able to serve learning in both individual and collaborative modes, making informal, self-directed learning increasingly fused with intentional or formal learning and instruction” (p.364).

Instructional designers will have to understand that learners will be accessing an ever-wider world of information via technology and at times that suits them. They will share, discuss and re-mix content to suit their preferences and they will expect it to be factored into their overall learning experience and objectives.

Beyond Constructivism

What will the continuing evolution of constructivism mean for instructional designers? For example, as I have already indicated the features of many LMS software packages are evolving to accommodate constructivist underpinnings, and learners are becoming much more particular about education suiting their preferences. As LMS applications become more open platforms for accessing content and materials from a number of external sources, and allow learners to have a more active role in creating, structuring and pacing their own learning, how will learning theory change to further affect the instructional design field?

Not everyone feels that constructivism has been that revolutionary. Wilson (2005), for example, calls it “old wine in new bottles.” Further, his four pillars of practice focus more on aspects of instruction than specific theories and include the individual, the outside connection, the value context and the aesthetic. It is difficult to jibe his approach within the broader context of constructivism, but I think it important to make note of the value he places on aesthetic design, something I have long thought was lacking in off-the-shelf user interfaces. Parrish (2005) pushes the aesthetic envelope even further when he suggests that active learning strategies and aesthetic experience share the rhythm of imbalance and balance regained (p.23). Parrish and Wilson both share the notion that the experience of learning is key, and I tend to think that it is an important concept for ID practitioners to be mindful of.

As a developmental approach connectivism is, at once, interesting and extremely hard to quantify. If it is already difficult to design authentic, situated, individual and measurable learning experiences, just try doing so while recognizing chaos, network, complexity and self-organization (Seimens, 2004):

Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual. 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. Connectivism is driven by the understanding that decisions are based on rapidly altering foundations. New information is continually being acquired. The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information is vital. The ability to recognize when new information alters the landscape based on decisions made yesterday is also critical.

I have included the different concepts above not to confuse, but to illuminate how instructional designers will have to think to accommodate the ever-changing landscape of learning theory.

Instructional Design Models and Their Application

With dozens of models available, both rigid and flexible in nature, each designed to address specific learning contexts, model selection will continue to be very personal for ID practitioners. New models, though, will emerge to accommodate shifts in learners, learning theory and technology. Smith & Regan (2005) state, “In the future, we can expect the models that we employ to guide instructional design to become increasingly powerful, sophisticated and efficient.” They indicate key issues in ID model development will include; front-end analysis shaped by anthropological methods, design and delivery shaped by psychology and cognitive science, implementation shaped by market research, evaluation shaped by anthropology and sociology and training programs shaped by real-world jobs (p.365). They also state that models will become more alterable, iterative, layered and graduated, to reflect the need for ‘the quick and dirty’ and the notion of rapid prototyping.

Evaluation

This issue is probably one of the most difficult to anticipate in the coming years. I do not really have a great many insights into evaluation, only that I note it does not fit well with the increasing dominance of social constructivist leanings. Behaviourist methodologies are somewhat easier to evaluate, as measurement often becomes about observing changes in learner behaviour and testing for rote recall. Constructivism and Pavlov’s Dog would seem to have little in common. It is entirely possible that, as learners become more involved in determining their own learning path and experience, instructional designers will have to find ways for them to help determine how they are evaluated.

Conclusions

Instructional designers are faced with a number of significant issues with the changes that are presently taking place. The theoretical nature of knowledge continues to undergo revisions to accommodate how learning is perceived to occur. As technology has moved into a new realm of social capability, with ubiquity of access at speeds that were only a dream a few years ago, almost everything is now a click away, with many social interactions among Millennials just as likely to happen via a laptop or hand-held, as in-person.

The preferences this social technology landscape has created for learners mean instructional design must not only include the traditional activities related to instructional model selection and use, and the steps associated with standard ISD processes, but instructional designers will need to factor in myriad other elements to their design process.

ID practitioners in the coming years will need to consider learners, technology, content and experiences outside their designed environment. The continuing evolution of constructivist theories means learner outcomes will become more individual. While learning environments will still run on specific software platforms, learners will create their own experiences through the open model pervading the web. Everything from planning learner outcomes to determining evaluation approaches will necessitate more direct involvement of the learner.

References

Accenture, (2008). “New-Generation Workers” Want Technology Their Way. Accenture News Room. Retrieved January 29, 2009 from http://newsroom.accenture.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=4767
Bates, A. W., & Poole, G. (2003). Effective teaching with technology in higher education: Foundations for success. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Downes, S., (2005). E-learning 2.0. Retrieved January, 25, 2009 from http://www.downes.ca/post/31741.
Edmonds , G., Branch, R. & Mukherjee, P. (1994). A conceptual framework for comparing instructional design models. Educational Technology Research and Development, 42 (4), 52-72.
Gartner, (2009). Gartner Reveals Eight Mobile Technologies to Watch in 2009 and 2010. Retrieved January 27, 2009 from http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=867012
Hannum, W. (2005). Instructional systems development: A 30-year perspective. Educational Technology, 45 (4), 5-21.
Herridge Group (2004). The Use of Traditional Instructional Systems Design Models for eLearning. Retrieved December, 2008 from http://www.herridgegroup.com/pdfs/The%20use%20of%20Traditional%20ISD%20for%20elearning.pdf
IBSTIPI, (2000). Competencies for instructional design. Retrieved January 17, 2009 from http://it.coe.uga.edu/itforum/paper89/ITForumpaper89.pdf
Karagiorgi, Y., & Symeou, L., (2005). Translating Constructivism into Instructional Design: Potential and Limitations. Educational Technology & Society, 8(1), 17-27.
Larson, M.B., & Lockee, B.B. (2007). Preparing Instructional Designers for Different Career Environments: A Case Study. Education Tech Research Dev (2009) 57:1–24.
MacKeracher, D. (2004). Making sense of adult learning. Toronto: University of Toronto Press Incorporated.
Molenda, M. (2003). In search of the elusive ADDIE model. Performance Improvement, 42 (5), 34-36.
Miller, J. L. (2007). The New Education Professionals: The Emerging Specialties of Instructional Designer and Learning Manager. International Journal of Public Administration, Vol. 30, No. 5.
Parrish, P. E. (2005). Embracing the aesthetics of instructional design. Educational Technology, 45 (2), 16-25.
Pew Internet Project, (2009). Generations Online in 2009. Pew Internet and American Life Project. Retrieved January 28, 2009 from http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/275/source/rss/report_display.asp.
Reiser, R. (2001). A history of instructional design and technology: Part II: A history of instructional design. Educational Technology Research and Development, 49 (2), 57-67.
Seimens, G., (2004). Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. Elearnspace. Retrieved December, 2008 from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm.
Smith, P. L. & Ragan, T. J. (2005). Chapter 20: Conclusions and future directions. In P. L. Smith & T. J. Ragan (Eds.) Instructional Design, 3rd Edition (pp.355-371). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.
Wikipedia, (2009). Moore’s law. Retrieved January 21st, 2009 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law.
Wilson, B. G. (1997). Chapter 4: Reflections on constructivism and instructional design. In C. R. Dills & A. A. Romiszowski (Eds.). Instructional Development Paradigms (pp.63-80). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications.
Wilson, B. G. (2005). Broadening our foundation for instructional design: Four pillars for practice. Educational Technology, 45 (3), 10-15.

Instructional design now and in the future: part one

James — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 04:37:31 +0000

At the risk of opening myself up to a little mockery, I’m going to post a recent paper I did in two parts. Part one, below, includes an introduction and factors I feel have shaped instructional design to its present state. I will post part two in the next few days. As someone doing this as part of an MA program, what I’m looking for is thoughts on approach from those who may be practicing instructional designers or whose experience is grounded in more than literature review or discussions. Mine are definitely lay opinions in this area, despite my experience in other areas of web development. I’ve included only references for this first part and will do the same when I post the second.

Introduction

Instructional design is changing. Learning theory continually shifts to accommodate our ‘best guesses’ about how learning happens. In parallel to this, technology changes rapidly, in particular web-based applications for social activities and the speed and ubiquity with which we can access them. These aspects all come together to provide a daunting number of issues for instructional design consideration. Juxtapose time-tested key instructional design activities that still need to be present and what does it mean for the future of the profession?

Factors that have shaped the current state of instructional design

In analyzing future directions for the field of Instructional Design (ID), it is important to understand where it came from and its present state. Without a solid grasp of ID history, trying to place context around its future would be very difficult. While the origins of ID go back to World War II (Reiser, 2001, p.58; Herridge Group, 2004, p.6), the precursor of current practice seems to be from post-World War II through to specific training developed in the early 1970’s for the military, by the Center for Educational Technology at Florida State University.

ADDIE – ID Model or Process Acronym?

When you look for the specific origins of an ADDIE model, you will likely come up empty. There appears to be no obvious, authentic source for the term (Molenda, 2003, p.34; Hannum, 2005, p.7) in the literature. In truth, ADDIE is essentially an acronym (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation) for a systematic design and development process, describing the nuts and bolts of Instructional Systems Design (ISD).

One Size Does Not Fit All

One specific ISD methodology could ultimately not accommodate the differences required by different learning contexts, learning styles, delivery mechanisms and learning theories. According to Hannum (2005), a rigid ISD process also did not sit well with those wanting faster ways of developing instruction, particularly in the business world (pp.9-11).
As such, numerous ID models based on a standard ISD structure have emerged in the past few decades (Reiser, 2001) to accommodate not only contextual differences (classroom, systems and product), but also, technological advancements, changes in learning theory and the spread of systematic design processes beyond the military to business and educational sectors.

Instructional designers today need to consider a host of contextual issues in choosing and applying a model for their instructional problem. Knowledge type, expertise required, system structure, learning context and the scope of instruction will all provide further information for model selection (Edmonds, Branch & Mukherjee, 1994). As the field of instructional design has developed over the past thirty to forty years, it has undergone steady and progressive change. Considering the change that is happening now and that which is likely to come in the not-too-distant future, the implications of technology for virtually every orientation and context cannot be underestimated.

Constructivism

Perhaps the idea that ‘one size does indeed not fit all’ might prove to have been the primary impetus for changes in generally accepted learning theory today. Constructivism has been the dominant epistemology for the past decade or so, and is having a significant impact on all aspects of the instructional design process (Karagiorgi & Symeou, 2005). While other learning theories will still be used for instructional design with specific contexts, the pervasiveness of constructivism in the literature – and thus as a theoretical underpinning for instructional design education and professional development – ensures its prominence in program planning and instructional design for some time to come.

What is it, then, that distinguishes constructivism as a learning theory? Constructivism has no single definition, but rather a couple of elements common in much of the literature. It recognizes the importance of consciousness, free will and social influences on learning (Bates & Poole, 2003), and suggests knowledge is constructed by persons and is contextualized, based on real past experiences (MacKeracher, 2004).

If we design instruction with a standard ISD process, doing so within a constructivist framework presents some challenges. In particular, evaluation becomes more difficult, when a standardized way of measuring outcomes against objectives must be tailored to meet the individual’s learning experience. As I look at how instructional designers must grapple with the coming technological advances I will discuss this in more detail.

Technology Today

A few years ago, Bates & Poole (2003) predicted that key developments for teaching with technology would include the development of Learning Management Systems (LMS) to accommodate a broader range of instruction, more broadband Internet access, the rise of mobile computing, real-time communication, web services, portals and advanced user interface developments (pp.253-268). The speed at which these predictions have come true and, in particular, the prominence of social media, was likely beyond what they were thinking at the time.

Moore’s Law essentially says that computing power doubles roughly every two years and that, as that power is produced on increasingly smaller chips, the cost of production decreases at a similar rate (Wikipedia, 2009). This trend is predicted to continue for at least another ten years.

Before even considering where web technology is going in the foreseeable future, the developments in just the past fifteen years have been nothing short of amazing. I recall learning to hand code HTML and build web pages for a fledgling City of Vancouver web site in 1995. At that time, organizational web sites were the exception rather than the norm, content was highly textual, static and tedious to produce, web applications and online software were limited in capabilities, and access speed was still slow, typically over 28kbps or 56kbps modems.

Jump forward to today and you will find a very different landscape. Web sites are sophisticated and often designed with the benefit of cognitive psychology and direct user research, while almost any manner of social interaction or functionality is available from today’s variety of web-based social software. In fact, a whole career field in user experience and interaction design now exists to accommodate the burgeoning complexity of producing ever-more elegant and slick interactive online products. The majority of North Americans will be using high-speed access from home (Pew Internet Project, 2009) with download speeds of between 1.5mbps and 6mbps – an increase of between 50 and 1000 times in roughly 15 years, while high-speed wireless networks are a given on virtually all post-secondary campuses. Mobile devices like the iPhone with full web browsers and countless applications are ensuring that no person – or device – is left behind. When you add to this technology context, something in the neighbourhood of a thousand – and growing – enterprise and open source Content Management System (CMS) and LMS products, the challenge for instructional designers in technology-mediated learning is considerable.

What about today’s learner and their technology? Regardless of the learning and learner context, expectations are high. Access to course materials any time, anywhere is becoming very important, as learners from K-12 forward need to balance school, work and life, often holding down a full-time job while training or upgrading their education. As I shall demonstrate in the remainder of this paper, future developments in learning theory, educational technology and the web, and the effect this will have on learners, their expectations and how we need to approach ID as a result, makes this a very exciting (and somewhat scary) time to be an instructional design practitioner.

References

Bates, A. W., & Poole, G. (2003). Effective teaching with technology in higher education: Foundations for success. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Edmonds , G., Branch, R. & Mukherjee, P. (1994). A conceptual framework for comparing instructional design models. Educational Technology Research and Development, 42 (4), 52-72.
Hannum, W. (2005). Instructional systems development: A 30-year perspective. Educational Technology, 45 (4), 5-21.
Herridge Group (2004). The Use of Traditional Instructional Systems Design Models for eLearning. Retrieved December, 2008 from http://www.herridgegroup.com/pdfs/The%20use%20of%20Traditional%20ISD%20for%20elearning.pdf.
Karagiorgi, Y., & Symeou, L., (2005). Translating Constructivism into Instructional Design: Potential and Limitations. Educational Technology & Society, 8(1), 17-27.
MacKeracher, D. (2004). Making sense of adult learning. Toronto: University of Toronto Press Incorporated.
Molenda, M. (2003). In search of the elusive ADDIE model. Performance Improvement, 42 (5), 34-36.
Pew Internet Project, (2009). Generations Online in 2009. Pew Internet and American Life Project. Retrieved January 28, 2009 from http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/275/source/rss/report_display.asp.
Reiser, R. (2001). A history of instructional design and technology: Part II: A history of instructional design. Educational Technology Research and Development, 49 (2), 57-67.
Wikipedia, (2009). Moore’s law. Retrieved January 21st, 2009 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law.

When delivery method and subject matter are the same

James — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 00:41:32 +0000

The MA I’m pursuing right now is an interesting beast. One thing that has been very engaging about it is that what I’m studying is actually how I’m studying too. That is to say, while the subject matter of many degrees delivered via distance has nothing to do with how they’re delivered, it’s the exact opposite in this case. The MA in Learning and Technology focuses on learning within technology mediated environments and context.

What I find interesting is that, as I get further through courses in subjects like program planning or, in particular, the course I’m doing now in instructional design, I see the principles that I’m reading about and discussing online being put into practice by our instructors. It’s allowing me to see (at least for my own learning style) the effectiveness of different approaches to instruction and what is working for me … or not.

Design is design

Much of the ground I’ve covered so far (save for learning theory and research courses) is really about project management and design theory and frameworks. A lot of the principles we read about in the textbook for this course – and some of the literature we’re reading – could just as easily be applied to web design (and aren’t really about only learning at their core). Many of them are broad design principles I’ve worked with for some time.

Setting goals and objectives, using those for measurement and evaluation, user/learner analysis, formative evaluation (iterative user testing in the web design world), summative evaluation (metrics analysis and user feedback in the web design world), sequencing, pacing, and on and on. The big difference to me comes down to learning objectives, specific activities and evaluation of outcomes – a big difference from aggregate web sites and applications.

I will delve more into these similarities – and where I’m seeing aesthetics and online learning could be better blended – in future journal entries.

The cognitive aspect

I may be overstating the obvious, but the key things I keep returning to with regard to learning are cognitive and social activities within the web environment. Certain elements that are very specific to learning are becoming clearer to me through experience.

My design and project management practice has not been learning-focused, so perhaps my observations will not be news to anyone working in that field. However, the instructional design material I’m absorbing now is coming to life for me as I equate what I read to what I’m doing in the program. In particular I find that the balance of social and autonomous activities goes a long way to determining my satisfaction with the instructional design of a particular course, while the pacing, step size and cognitive load inherent in the instructional design determines how engaged I remain with the material.

The social-autonomous balance

The first two courses in this program were completed in a residency intensive (and were almost entirely social experiences), so my comments are based on the third and fourth courses. To some degree, both follow the same approach. A number of readings are assigned, which we complete individually, supplemented by a number of small team activities and assignments, along with occasional individual papers and assignments. My preference in this area is coloured heavily by the fact that I’m an autonomous learner.

Not only do I like doing the readings at my own pace, but my enjoyment of writing means I really get into drafting and polishing papers on my own. I find a great deal of value in the online discussions in which we take part, as it provides me perspectives that I would not have encountered working in isolation. It aids greatly in the interpretation of readings and analysis of the literature. However, there’s a limit. These two courses have been in stark contrast to one another.

Where Program Planning was very heavy with group discussions and collaborative assignments (to the point where team members were suffering fatigue by the end), Instructional Design has been comprised primarily of reading and an individual paper, with a couple fairly loose discussion forums thus far, which honestly would have benefited from a little more structure. The overlap and sheer volume of group discussions and assignments in the former course heightened the cognitive load so that learners had difficulty focusing – to the point where we felt the quality of the discourse eroded dramatically by the end of the course. The free-flowing discussion forums of the latter, coupled with the way unmoderated chatter has a way of meandering quite far off-course, has meant that the value of the discussions seems to get quite diluted if they’re not closed off soon enough.

Engaging the mind

I draw strong comparisons between designing information architecture and wireframes on a web project, and things like pacing, step size and cognitive load, which we’re focusing on right now in my present course. The concept of cognitive load is really not new to me, though I’ve usually considered it in light of page clutter or how much information is ‘above the fold’ on a particular web page. How much mental work do you make your learner or user do to complete a required task? It’s all about how you structure your information, visual cues, information scent and userflows. Again, I’ll write more on that at a future time.

When I look at this issue with respect to the past two courses, more contrasts emerge. In Program Planning, while I feel that I certainly came away with a strong foundation in the material, I believe the same result could have been obtained without some of the stresses we encountered. Five units all had different lengths, and while there were two individual papers and one group edited project, each unit had a large volume of reading, a lengthy discussion forum and then a summary of that discussion posted to a course wiki. In at least one case the group discussion/wiki and the group-written project could have been blended and lost nothing. I’d guess this one course probably took at least 15 hours a week most of the time.

Based on what I’m reading about pacing and step size, the course probably suffered the most from slow pacing and small step size. Too many exercises in each unit seemed to result in waning interest, declining quality and a heavy cognitive load. Too much material to focus on and slow movement between units for me. My autonomous learner couldn’t move at the pace I would have liked. Even those who prefer the social online activities (whom I spoke to about it) found the volume of group work to be overwhelming. While one of the unit wiki discussion summaries could have been replaced with the group edited paper in that unit, the wiki exercise was probably unnecessary to some degree, at least for all five units.

By the same token, Instructional Design probably needs a bit more structure to its activities – at least so far. I’ll give this course a very large caveat in that it’s happening over the holidays and, to the instructors’ credit, they’ve kept the workload light over the last two weeks of December. However, in general, I’ve found the quality of the online discussion forums a bit weak this time. To avoid engaging in too much meandering chatter, I decided to stop engaging at the point when the discussion was supposed to end. I say ‘supposed’ because many folks continue discussion forums well past the cut-off, when reading for the next section is to commence. To keep all learners engaged in discussion at the right time, I find the group activity structure better in the Program Planning course, while I found the volume of those activities to be excessive.

My conclusions

Admittedly, my analysis is very personal and only based on a few experiences, but I’m seeing a strong pattern in what does and doesn’t work so far in the realm of online learning. It’s also difficult because one size definitely does not fit all in this area. It seems a balance needs to be struck. The small group activities and the individual work needs to be carefully balanced to allow learners to feel like they are still managing aspects of their education. Social learning is definitely a valid concept in my mind, but not to the point where the work is completely produced as a group effort.

My feeling is that the balance needs to lean a little more to the autonomous side of the scale. I find the group activities and discussions are valuable because you gain insight and perspective you can’t on your own. However, those activities need fairly rigid boundaries and, at least for me, don’t provide nearly as much value in and of themselves as what they can contribute to the work I that I still produce on my own.

A vision of students today

James — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 05:24:50 +0000

This isn’t new and doesn’t pretend to answer anything, but it’s got a solid, haunting quality and certainly gives you something to think about. Does information overload scare students today? Are too many things competing for their attention? Will their education deliver what they expect?

I know what I’m doing right now can be ovewhelming at times.

No related posts.

Serious barriers to going open

James — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 22:21:13 +0000

While the title of this post sounds gloomy and might make it appear that I don’t favour opening up the web as much as humanly possible, in truth it’s the exact opposite. However, I like to think I’m also a realist and as I read and think about the move toward more open and accessible content and services on the web, there are significant issues in our way en route to achieving that goal.

It’s not just about cost

If, at its heart, the evolution of the web is dependent on social computing, web platforms, mashable services and bottom-up, user-generated content, then we’ve got a ways to go yet. For example, RRW laments web platform performance, and rightly points out that services without a solid revenue play built in will not succeed:

Our culture of sensation and free makes it much harder for platforms to think deeply and be disciplined. Google felt they had to come out with something to stop Facebook’s momentum. Facebook rushed to create a completely open infrastructure; and it backfired both for users and developers. Having been burnt by Facebook, small and large companies alike will now think twice before investing in a presence on platforms. This is a shame, for we need platforms and we need them to work well.

That’s only part of the story and misses a very Canadian perspective on it. While RRW also links back to a good article on the risks of using free services, we’ve got a little problem with trust called the Patriot Act, which goes way beyond the concerns of a service being free. It’s all about trust – service longevity, data security, ownership and more – I’ve worked extensively in the public sector, and it’s probably their number one issue.

Connecting through open standards

What about connecting people through applications and services, and then in turn, connecting those services to each other? Single sign-on for every web application you use would seem to be a start. OpenID should be a no brainer. Sign up for one account, then any time you want an account on another web application, you should be able to login with something like your OpenID and have access. All your credentials are stored in your OpenID and you simply provide that ID URL on any OpenID-enabled app, confirming your password when you log in. I can probably count on one hand the number of places I can actually use my OpenID. It simply hasn’t caught on yet.

The recently announced Windows implementation of OpenID is much like other web giants, Yahoo! and Google, in that it’s a one-way move aimed at still protecting their walled garden. If you have an ID on one of these sites, then you can use it elsewhere, not the other way around:

Although Open ID is becoming a viable option for independent sites, particularly after this announcement, there’s still a great deal of friction preventing serious uptake. Major Internet hubs that offer Open ID are generally providers only, so a Windows Live user is still going to need a Yahoo account to use any Yahoo service. As long as this is the case, the utility of Open ID will be constrained.

Leading web services are typically providing an open API to allow programmers to extend those services in new ways. It’s another of the key underpinnings of the social web, but means there are as many ways to mash together new applications, as there are applications themselves. Google’s Opensocial promised to change all that by delivering one API for all social applications to use so that they could easily talk to each other. Once you’d built one service on Opensocial, then all other services would work the same way. Much like user IDs, many services see a great deal of value, financial and otherwise, in setting the rules in how you play with them.

Education goes open

Given the purpose of open access, education is probably the most natural fit of all. There are plenty of calls from within the educational sector to open things up for learners and instructors alike. I’m not sure if the move to learner-directed credentials could render traditional credentials worthless, but with the growth of Open and Distance Learning and things like the Open Courseware movement, open and social concepts in learning become more important every day.

For example, MIT is embracing the OCW movement, along with several other institutions worldwide (including Canada’s own Capilano U and Athabasca U), while UCLA is bringing their videos to the web.

There has been a significant push in recent years to look at new licensing models to make textbooks more affordable. This is particularly an issue when a couple chapters change marginally and then university courses prescribe the updated releases each time they come out, complete with a new $100+ pricetag. News that Google has settled with book publishers over their online book indexing should be a model for all publishing, and not just older or out-of-print books. It wouldn’t be hard to embrace the realities of online distribution and develop reflective licensing approaches, but is not likely to happen when it threatens the bread-and-butter of the scam that is the textbook industry:

The agreement doesn’t cover books that are currently in print and therefore making money for publishers. Those books can still be marketed through the book search via Google’s Partners program. Books that have had their copyrights expire are likewise unaffected. What it does cover is what Google’s Chief Legal Counsel, David Drummond, calls “the vast majority of books in existence”: those that are in copyright, but out-of-print.

It’s not just textbooks, but broad access to all content and the flexibility of applications. Boy is Blackboard
going about it all wrong. They know systems like Moodle are giving them a run for their money in the LMS space, so they let their users connect to external and open source tools from one interface. Huh?

Blackboard is still controlling the environment and implementing the features they want. It’s the LMS that needs to be open and flexible in the first place. By providing a secure, flexible tool with easy API extensibility, I’d imagine a better route to choose would be to build upon Moodle to act as the connection framework, allowing users to integrate their tools and academic databases of choice from within the framework. This kind of thing reeks of desperation ploy by Blackboard.

Now, imagine building that LMS on top of solid, ubiquitous authentication and API standards. You want Skype or YouTube or WikiSpaces with that? Just enter your account and your LMS does the rest. Or, how about building a script within Moodle along the lines of Fantastico and implement an instance of your favourite OS tool right with Moodle, with adoption of your CSS styling intact. We’re talking about a lot of coding here, but it’s not hard to imagine a platform that really rocks and serves learners and instructors well.

A better way to go open

Right now, OpenID is all over the place with proprietary services allowing your username to be an OpenID. That’s a start, but think about issues like domain registration, Web Standards or look at more granular technical protocols like HTTP and FTP.

Opensocial is a great concept and Google isn’t going anywhere in the near future, but I’m not sure we want a completely commercial (and obscenely dominant) entity holding the keys and protocol for how a large part of the web might work together.

Eventually ideas catch on, they become ingrained, with broad-based collective management and protection. Standards are the rules by which all developers and providers must play to ensure a better experience for everyone. While we need to stop the walled garden approach to hoarding content and extorting huge license fees for it, what we do need is centrally managed approaches to application integration and user authentication. Things are moving in the right direction, but sort of kicking and screaming. If Microsoft and Blackboard won’t do it the right way, they should just get out of the way.

Writing collaboratively with Skype chat and Google Docs

James — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 20:41:15 +0000

I’d imagine most people find the benefit of Skype to be that of free long distance calls. As long as the person you’re calling is also on Skype you can save airtime or long distance charges. That’s great, but given I do very little long distance calling and use my cell mostly for family chatter, Skype has not typically been my tool of choice to replace the telephone. I’d played with Google Docs a bit for fun, but with no real goals in mind. I’ve always got my MacBook Pro with me so I don’t often need multi-computer access to the same files. Enter the coursework for my MA. We are doing our work in small groups of four or five and, all groups are comprised of geographically dispersed folks.

Skype

While finding times for everyone to meet online is a challenge, I find using Skype chat to reach decisions to be wonderful. It gives you the ability to do public group chats on-the-fly or to set up a more secure public chat by allowing read/write permission by invite only. Promoting the room is done via link which connects them to the chat room instantly. Transcripts are always available as HTML documents written to your hard drive and are cumulative from the time you started the chat – ideal when you need a record going back a couple weeks over multiple sessions. You can send files peer-to-peer and add contacts to the chat at any time, while calling an individual for a quick conversation to clarify something is only a click away.

Google Docs

We can easily carry these discussions over to Google Docs, in deciding who needs to do what by when. I’ve set up one file for us to collaboratively write to and shared it with everyone in the group as collaborators. Formatting is easy and different collaborators can simply colour-code their highlighted changes for one editor to compile, with as many rounds of edits as necessary. Or you could just let everyone write whatever they want if you’re brave – personally, I like safer ground rules.

If anyone overwrites groupwork by accident, the versioning ensures you can revert to the last good one easily. As an extra precaution I’ve suggested everyone back up what they do as an export. Once this is ready for final submission I can easily share it via a Skype chat or simply have everyone review it online quickly. If I could change a couple things (and maybe I’m just missing a feature or two) it would be that of a live change tracker in the interface and that the formatting would be better preserved if you export to Word.

Other options less enjoyed

There are many online collaboration tools, but they tend to have problems inherent. And, truthfully, unless you need to share a desktop presentation or whiteboard something, many of the tools won’t actually be of much use.

Elluminate is a cool e-learning and business collaborative suite, but unless you’re up to paying substantial licensing fees, the free version allows only three participants in a limited-feature collaborative environment. The modules look cool, but the only way you’ll see them is a sales demo.

Yugma is another tool which, while providing a full trial for 15 days after which you’ve got a pretty bare-bones environment, I’ve found to be buggy. The feature set looks good but, in trying to use it earlier in the summer for my coursework and just recently for a contractor to demo some wireframes, it has simply hung when I’ve tried it.

Zoho tools bills itself as a suite to compete with Google Docs and more. A brief overview of their services from their landing reveals a very complete suite and what I’ve read would point to Zoho as a solid choice. However, we needed something without user limits or poor feature sets. You still need to pay to get the full meal deal and, in this case, that wasn’t going to work. I’d be interested in looking at it further though, because if all the tools are truly integrated, there would be a very compelling case to use Zoho.

Twiddla was another option that, had I been looking more at collaborative whiteboarding and drawing, I would be interested in investigating further. It didn’t meet my needs for this instance, but I found the user experience good. Simple, online and easy to use. I’m always big on something that doesn’t require the download of a desktop app, as the experience between users on different OS’s will often reflect which one the developers started with.

Final thoughts

I wish Google Talk was more like Skype. It wouldn’t even have to offer IP telephony. If you use Gmail, then you can search Google Talk web chat transcripts in your inbox. That’s not the same as a self-contained chat tool that gives you a full feature set including full transcripts. Then again, the best tools are ones that do one thing really well. Talking and chatting are great with Skype and collaborative writing and publishing to a number of formats are great with Google Docs. You can make them work together pretty painlessly and that’s probably the best way to go.

I’m a citation weakling

James — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 01:00:51 +0000

I’m getting my head around writing for graduate studies, but I don’t think I’m using citations the way I probably should be to really provide effective support for arguments I’m making.

Maybe it’s my process. I just completed a paper that, while it didn’t have to be academic writing in the truest sense, still did require a minimum number of citations and all references to be formatted as per APA standards. I don’t mind any of that and, since I like what I read to generally be based on fact and forceful arguments (as opposed to, let’s say, claiming you get foreign policy because you can see Russia from your house) I certainly want my own writing to be logical and supported.

However, I find that my process for literature review and citation is weak. With this particular paper it didn’t help that I changed my mind significantly on the premise and rewrote most of it late in the game. However, that simply highlights the need to solidify my premise early on and then thoroughly read a wide variety of literature with enough time to craft it into my writing as fluidly as possible.

What I find I’m doing generally, though, is not reading the literature thoroughly enough. I write something, scan journal articles when I need support and pull appropriate pieces out. However, I’m just not sure how to do more reading in the available time. I’ve got solid tools to help and I probably have to incorporate their use more religiously.

So … what do you do to, not only, keep your references organized, but to get through an appropriate volume of literature to get the right references in the first place, and pursuasively weave the citations into your writing?

Will post-sec embrace the open social?

James — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 05:02:34 +0000

The answer to this question seems to be largely dependent on what you read, and it probably also depends on what you want to use open, social software for. Based on some of the mailing lists and discussion forums I read, and post-sec sites I visit, social media concepts (whether built on open source or not) are far from well-articulated in most cases.

Content strategy and content management systems

Feeds are becoming more common, but are not necessarily being implemented in a way that allows site visitors to have real choice as to what updates they can receive. The public web site is the prime marketing channel of any institution, and on any given post-secondary web site you are liable to see the gamut. Poorly designed and architected, hand-coded static pages, to full-blown database-driven, XML-gasmic experiences, with a feed associated with everything, regardless of whether the content is appropriate to supply a feed for, or not.

With regard to marketing content, determining what to feature, how to elicit subscriptions, where you might want user-generated content like comments, how you engage prospective students in a public dialogue and whether you’re prepared to open up things like course ratings to public discourse are all questions institutions are grappling with in presenting a more user-friendly, socially-constructed face to the world.

As the marketing side of post-secondary is where I spend the bulk of my working time at the moment, it is not only the issue of what to publish, how it is structured and how those decisions are made that can be challenging. The CMS conundrum is perhaps moreso, always a topic of some discussion on university web development lists. Everyone wants to know what each other uses, but often the one asking the questions cannot get his/her powers that be to make the leap and use open source. Enterprise support and architecture are understandably big concerns, but with the proper mindset about how they work and bringing support in-house, the question might move from if the move should be made to what flavour it should be made to. The idea of building functionality to suit as it is needed, as opposed to waiting for a vendor to decide to implement something, would seem to be a no-brainer.

What about curriculum and textbooks?

The main discussion I am starting to see is more around opening up learning to broad audiences. Learning commons or open learning models are not new, but have hardly become common by any stretch.

I know some people probably feel “the tide is turning, there is no way to stop a moving freight train and it is only a matter of time” (How is that for mixed metaphors?), but there seems to be a lot of push and pull with the issue of open sourcing texts, let alone constructing course curriculum collaboratively. At the one end you may have younger or more digitally savvy faculty members balking at the high price of textbooks and wanting to remove the cost barrier in providing access to them for free online. However, the other end has big publishing interests who want no part of it. Yearly revisions for the cost of a new book seems to be their lifeblood.

Seems to me that opening up the whole process of accessing reading materials and collaborating on course elements brings the notion of constructivism to life:

Christopher Rice, a lecturer in political science at the University of Kentucky, is one such trendsetter. In 2006, Rice experimented with a wiki for his Introduction to Political Science class. In addition to online articles, the wiki links to books at Project Gutenberg for older texts. This kept the students’ reading list to below $40, an important consideration when tuition seems to go up every year. Students could also collaborate, posting class notes and helping to develop the course.

With regard to publishing royalties, is there a middle ground that is not getting explored much (or maybe it is and I am just woefully unaware)? Often people have a hard time reading solely online and need a hard copy. What about multi-level and multi-user licensing? A free non-printable, digital license akin to Google Books format, a slightly more expensive PDF version that you can print yourself, or an on-demand full cost printed and bound version from the publisher. If a publisher wanted to ensure they were not giving away the farm through free digital-only licenses, they could implement a very reasonable online-only class-wide license. Not quite free, but not what we have now, and that is a step in the right direction.

The Ars Technica article above also touches on tenure and the disincentive of royalty-free publishing. I do not profess to understand that enough to offer an opinion or solution, but it seems to me that if an academic world-view began to emerge that valued open access to post-secondary education, publishing models would develop that would adequately deal with the tenure and royalty issues.

Some argue that open curriculum won’t work, that is until you read through the blog post and comments, including the author’s own. The author wrote with a blanket statement, something which needed to be qualified …. badly. The basic concept of open access to, and collaborative development of, curriculum can work just fine, but not if there is no oversight, guidance or editorial hand moving it forward. All one need do is look at the concept of comments on news stories to see that, while it may indicate popularity or interest, unguided opinion on a factual piece of copy seems to have poor results (maybe it is just me). Similarly, building curriculum iteratively without experience guiding it would likely not make it worth learning.

What about learning platforms?

I would give my own present experience with learning platforms a mixed review. While a tool like Moodle puts a powerful LMS (or PLE depending on your definition) at your finger tips without exorbitant licensing costs, making the system really sing requires some work. The implementations I have seen have not really explored the user experience side enough to ensure task flow, navigation, contextual content, design contrast or user features are really structured to make the system as user-friendly as it should be, let alone appropriate use of rich media (as opposed to overwhelming use of Flash, ensuring poor accessibility among other things).

Distance learning is pretty well established. With the emergence of the web, in the past 15 years, online platforms like WebCT, Blackboard and, more recently, Desire2Learn and Moodle have replaced older distance methodologies like correspondence. I do not want to comment on the value of distance learning because so much of the success potential is derived from the user experience design effort, type of curriculum, credential and personal learning style. It is a bit of a generalization to say whether it works or not.

Attrition rates of distance-only learning are pretty well documented, but would likely be improved by adjusting the delivery method. As opposed to passive replication of lecture materials, a well designed online learning environment can go a long way to improving distance outcomes. Royal Roads, for example, blends short residencies with distance-based cohorts and has graduation rates well in the 90′s.

In conclusion

Regardless of whether an institute embraces or eschews open source software, developing strategies and plans for open access and collaborative methodologies would seem to be crucial. Students are demanding convenience and, often, self-directed education where appropriate. Developing an open, social strategy requires careful deliberation of, not only, what an institute wants to do, but the appropriate tools and approaches that will get them there. User experience design and considerations with regard to development of learning and marketing platforms is probably key in this regard. As well, pushing for more progressive text licensing models and experimenting with more student-faculty discourse on collaborative curriculum development will strengthen the student connection with the institution and develop a stronger sense of ownership of their education.

Residency wrap

James — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:07:31 +0000

I really could not think of much but getting a good night’s sleep for a couple days after my Royal Roads residency ended last Friday. Now that I have had time to get through the rest of one of my two textbooks and finished the first of my two post-residency assignments, I can look back over the past few weeks and see where I am, where I have come from and where (I think) I am going ….

People and castles

Notwithstanding the little barrack dorm in which I spent 12 days, the campus experience was great. Our group seemed to gel very well and I sense the two weeks was the beginning of some pretty good friendships. The intensity allowed us to focus on group project work and start this degree on a reasonably even playing field, while helping us better understand places in which we can all improve to make the distance group work more successful over the next couple years. A good indicator of the overall intensity was the level to which people cut loose after our banquet. A release was clearly needed.

We were told that the reason the RRU programs are so much more successful than traditional distance programs (95% success versus 50%) is that they throw short, intense residencies into the mix. I believe it. Distance education can be isolating and will often not work for learning styles which depend on relationships and interaction with other people. I believe that having faces, names and personal relationships will help people to feel more inclined to put in extra effort at times when motivation may be ebbing. I also think the beautiful grounds, peacocks, Hatley Castle and general ambiance might have a little to do with it, too.

Learned concepts and new explorations

While I had a grounding in qualitative and quantitative research and the basic difference between them, I have had a pretty skeletal understanding of what they really are and how to look hard at data. I would say that is still pretty true, but I have a far better idea of the things I need to explore to begin to get a better grasp on quantitative data analysis and the ways in which we can frame qualitative research questions to avoid bias. This is an area into which I will be delving more deeply.

Even the small amount of reading I have done to this point on learning theory really has me pumped to learn a lot more. In particular, the way learning is so deeply connected to philosophy and psychology is very intriguing. I have always found sociology very interesting and, in particular, how technology is affecting human behaviour. With a communications background and, now, an excuse (by way of getting a grad degree) to look deeply into the intersection of social science and technology, it is pretty safe to say my spare time is largely spoken for.

Recognizing personal behavioural weaknesses

Perhaps the biggest change I have started to see is in self-examination. I still know my strengths (though they are clearly not as strong as I thought they were), but I am really looking at my weaknesses as bigger monsters to be tamed. As you read the following, do not get the impression that my confidence is suddenly shattered. Rather, I simply find that many of my tacit assumptions about myself are not proving to be true. I find myself somewhere between initial disruption and making meaning of my own new discoveries in this area.

I far too easily revert to type when group projects become challenging and tend to start ‘shoring’ things up and regimenting process to move them along. MacKeracher (2004) says that, among other traits I seem to possess, emotional intelligence includes recognizing emotions in others and handling relationships by managing moods and emotions in others. It is safe to say that this area could use a bit of work on my part.

It is not that I fail to recognize the emotions of others, and I can even be pretty empathetic at times, but I believe I do not give them enough validity if things get tough. If someone else works or learns in a far different way from me, my approach is likely to have poor results. I need to learn to more quickly recognize those who are right-brain dominant, or perhaps whose style is not as autonomous as mine.

I am no longer convinced of my analytical and critical thinking skills. I know it is still my orientation and love evidence to back up an assertion, but based on the things I was writing in my first pass at an academic paper, I clearly still make a lot of statements based on bias and opinion when I am unaware of doing so.

The payoff in change

If there is a silver lining to be found in all this, it is likely that I am recognizing things that can be changed with a little work. Not only will better accepting different approaches and improving my emotional intelligence simply make me a better person, it will certainly pay dividends in how I do my job, as well as the group work I will be involved in during this Masters degree.

Aside from allowing me to obtain my degree, going deep into this general subject matter is really where I see a lot of the personal growth and gratification coming from. I guess it is a pretty big help that I have long found the stuff very interesting.

Removing bias in my thinking will help me ask the right questions at the right time as I read and will ensure my writing reaches a new level. While this is important in academic reading and writing, I am certain it will even pay greater dividends in my daily activities, improving everything from work presentations and research right down to the writing on this blog.

Finally, getting more rigorous and capable in research will perhaps allow me to move in new professional directions over time. Doing it well will help my current job, but will most certainly prepare me for new challenges, too.

Reference

MacKeracher, D. (2004). Making Sense of Adult Learning. Toronto, Ont. University of Toronto Press.

One gigantic learning cycle experiment

James — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 20:23:38 +0000

In my mind, there are two distinct ways of looking at what this group of great people has been through in the past two weeks. There’s the side that forces you to look at yourself, examine your own beliefs and theories and (hopefully) begin realizing some new possibilities. Then there’s the piece that RRU looks at or gets out of it.

I think the RRU piece is a very large constructivist learning experience that has one large macro learning cycle to it. We’ll all have plenty of tiny learning cycles along the lines of Kolb’s theory, but this MA will be more akin to Taylor’s broader model when you think of the RRU perspective. Do you think RRU designs this that way, or am I out to lunch and simply sleep deprived?

Our residency ‘boot camp’ (and make no mistake, this has been a bootcamp) is the disruption phase. We’ve received our share of downloads via a behaviourist learning model. Several lectures on learning theory and research methodology. However, I start thinking about how much the group exercises forced us into upheaval and working in ways that were uncomfortable at times. To me, that’s the disruption and now we go back to real life and try to integrate that and accept it to form a new reality.

For myself, I think of how I could change or avoid the missteps in future group projects, particularly when we’re working at a distance. It seems that boundaries could be better created and enforced by the group simply discussing at the outset a way of working that fit for everyone – and then agreeing that everyone will stick to the framework. This doesn’t mean it has to fit anyone’s personality type or learning style better, but it will help ensure that people can strike a balance and work from a common set of principles.

If anyone comments on this, let me know what you think you’d do differently to better frame a group project?

Risks associated with online publishing

James — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:17:05 +0000

Apologies for simply quoting various places in one article, but I thought
this overview from the Citizen Media Law Project was worth repeating through paraphrasing. The following are pretty obvious, but easy to forget if you start blogging regularly.

While I know I should be using APA, I’ll also apologize for that and plead the hunger-panged, time-strapped, conversational blogger as an excuse.

In the well-worth-a-read article, Gilmor makes very good points (with a lot of information I haven’t included below) about what to keep in mind. It speaks very much to accuracy, truth and things like slander – all things we should be very aware of in the realm of academic integrity and rigour in doing our own work. It’s so easy to bang off a blog post, that sometimes these things don’t remain top of mind.

A few direct quotes in bullet format to whet your apetites ….

If you publish information that harms the reputation of another person, group, or organization, you may be liable for “defamation” or “false light.”

If you publish private or personal information about someone without their permission, you potentially expose yourself to legal liability even if your portrayal is factually accurate.

If you use someone else’s name, likeness, or other personal attributes without their permission for an exploitative purpose you could also face liability for what is called misappropriation or right of publicity.

If you have web forums, allow reader comments, host guest bloggers on your site, or if you repost information that you receive from RSS feeds, section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (“CDA 230”) will likely shield you from liability for problematic statements made by your users, guests and other third-parties.

if you publish or use the creative work of others, their trademarks, or certain confidential business information without the permission of the owner, you may be exposing yourself to legal liability for violations of intellectual property law.

As you publish your work online you may want to correct things you have previously published.

Online constructivism

James — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 08:45:48 +0000

As we all really begin looking at learning in the context of the web, it’s interesting to take a look at some of the research around the effectiveness of the medium. How some of this information affects you probably depends on how you feel about the web to begin with, how you’ve used it and how successful you’ve felt it’s been for you.

In my working experience, I’ve managed web sites and online communities, but never used them for learning, as facilitator or learner. Personally, I find this incredibly interesting stuff and really look forward to the journey. I think RRU is probably onto something, with a combination of blended intensives and distance courses, because an online-only experience will likely be a weak one for me.

Do you think the web holds the key to a new, promising frontier? Or, perhaps it’s a new way of delivering something that’s always been there.

The Personal Learning Environment (PLE)

I stumbled across an interesting piece out of Germany. I’m not sure I agree with some of it, because in the end a lot of the analysis really identifies issues broadly applicable to emerging social media and doesn’t say much about specific application to learning. Things like protection of data ownership, or that social media is a shift to user-generated content are hardly new notions. Perhaps in the realm of learning, inclusion of user-generated content is new, but not when you simply look at blogs, wikis, media sharing and many other tools on their own. Isn’t constructivist learning about creating your own knowledge by blending new information and past experience?

As opposed to any one point or issue in their article, what Schaffert and Hilzensauer (2008) have really stumbled on is the overarching notion that collaborative tools in an online environment makes it constructivist. They compare a PLE with a Learning Management System (LMS) in much the same way new online social media (web 2.0) in general is compared with the passive information gathering of what is often referred to web 1.0, where there is no way for the user to contribute or create anything new.

Is it easy to see how contributory tools and communities of learners (particularly in cohorts) turns the journey from passive to active, prescribed to constructive?

Reference

Schaffert S, & Hilzensauer W, 2008, eLearning Papers, No.9, http://www.elearningpapers.eu/index.php?page=doc&doc_id=11938&doclng=6&vol=9

Team dynamics

James — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:10:50 +0000

Now that our first assignment is all done, but the short presentation later today, I wanted to reflect on team dynamics. It’s fair to say that there was a challenge or two in this first project. I don’t consider that bad, as this week has been primarily about learning about one’s self.

Part of this is the unfamiliarity the members have with each other. Most people here have known each other for four days and we’ve been working quite intimately. The benefit time gives you is that you learn where to go and to not go with certain people. Unpredictable environments can negatively impact collaborative productivity (Dunin-Keplicz, B. & Verbrugge, R., 2004).

How am I reacting to working with different personality types? Which types are more or less complimentary to mine? What about the intrinsic things we have that goes beyond type and allows us to be chameleons and cope well outside our comfort zone? Some do this well, some not so much.

We ended up, more or less, each doing a piece of the first assignment, with a lot of back and forth and feedback loops. I don’t want to judge the benefits of this in this one specific instance, because someone will always likely be the point person to edit and submit a group project, or to pull all the collaboration together into one final draft.

A touchier question for me is one we probably all grapple with. Is it better to do a part of the project which we know we’re not suited for because we want to expand our skillset, or should we go to the place that’s familiar for us since it’s easier for us to be sure of the end result? This certainly requires some soul-searching. If we’re way outside our comfort zone, will we know when we need to back off, or ask for help or not?

Reference

Dunin-Keplicz, B. & Verbrugge, R., 2004, Engineering Societies in the Agents World, pp107-122, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg

Taming an MBTI beast

James — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 08:31:48 +0000

I found what we covered today to be a pretty important thing and it’s left me struggling a bit to frame it in light of learning and working in a team environment. In our morning session with Hillary, the MBTI inventory was both reassuring and disturbing.

At a surface level it wasn’t really surprising. I know I’m analytical, organized and prefer working through something by breaking it into manageable pieces. Due in large part to being a project manager, I can fairly easily take on the role of trying to get things to a logical conclusion. This is fine if you are a client and project lead and you’re paid for getting something done. Maybe not so much where the boundaries and roles are less clear and far more fluid.

I approach anything in much the same way, including ‘banging’ through a first draft of an assignment. I often write in a stream of consciousness and stop to review after producing way too much material. However, when I consider those traits in light of the projects we’re now working on, how do I apply my tendencies in a way that will most positively work with a group dynamic – one that will often include people who are less verbal or express themselves in a quieter or more reserved manner?

In producing good team projects, I’m really grappling with how to use my traits to their fullest potential while ensuring they don’t engender in teammates a feeling that my tendency to organize and focus is coming through as taking control or dominating in any way.

I’m trying to make sure I’m always bouncing things back to people, asking their feedback and ensuring I’ve acurately captured what they’ve said. Is that enough? Any thoughts from those who plot anywhere close to an ESTJ?

First impressions of Royal Roads University

James — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 07:28:21 +0000

More aptly, this post might be called, “What I crammed into my first day and a half.” Seriously, though, it’s been a bit busy and this post will not do it justice. This is not to suggest that I’ll be posting recaps of everything I do because there is more MA focused blogging to come. I’m not sure if that will be at a WordPress hosted blog or this one.

Note: I’ve included a few pics I took today and many more will likely come next weekend. You can view larger sizes as part of the Flickr set by clicking on any picture below.

The surroundings

It’s quite a beautiful campus and location, on a hill sloping down to the water in Colwood, a suburb of Victoria. Situated amongst old growth forest on former First Nations land, the campus is pretty breathtaking. Hatley Castle, and Nelson and Grant buildings, in particular, really show off the military college history of the place.

Plus, there’s a big focus on sustainability and recycling and that’s a pretty big plus for me.

Unfortunately, since I broke the 18-55 lens on my Nikon D40 a couple weeks ago, I’ll be using my lower resolution Fuji S602Z for the next two weeks. Oh well, they look fine for smaller, online pics. On that note, I’m looking for a good deal on one of the Nikon compatible super zooms. I’m thinking one of the 18-200′s, but I digress.

The accommodations

This is not a negative, per se, but they are spartan. Had I decided to apply earlier and booked an ensuite room, I’d have my own washroom, but that’s another story. The upside is that it will be easy to focus on the work at hand, with nary a sofa or TV in my room to distract me. There is plenty of opportunity outside to clear one’s head every so often, there are great hiking trails and I’ve already given the gym a spin tonight, prior to doing the reading from today. It’s all good.

The food

While I’ve only had a veggie burger with salad, I must say that the Habitat Cafe food is actually a pleasant surprise, particularly when one compares it to what’s available at BCIT. The food here is reasonably priced, healthy and appealing and there seems to be a reasonable selection. As a meat-free guy, I’ll always want more good veggie options, but they are apparently open to requests and this won’t be the only place I’ll eat, so I think things are in pretty good shape.

Day one

Truth be told, the first day was a fairly relaxing intro to what’s coming. We had a good orientation this morning, giving us an overview of the amount of work ahead and then took care of student cards and a short campus tour. I’d already had a look around, both this morning and a few weeks ago.

Good lectures on research methodology and article critique rounded out the afternoon, with a little more detail emerging surrounding the coming days’ activities. One of the things that will work very well for me is the focus on analytical thinking and critical analysis. I may actually go two weeks without being told I’m being too analytical …

In closing

There’s plenty more to come – in the next two weeks and two years. I’m hoping to get a few more peacock shots (which should not be a problem) and go a little further afoot to see some of the trails and natural surroundings.

No related posts.

Masters blogging

James — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:27:52 +0000

A lot of my writing on this site will now chronicle the trials and tribulations of obtaining a graduate degree while working full-time, trying to maintain a marriage and family, and hopefully still getting a little exercise along the way.

Something I’ve been pulling together for some time and which is finally happening, is the MA I’m pursuing. The focus is learning and technology and I’m doing it through Royal Roads University in lovely Victoria BC.

In truth, the only time I actually know I’ll be at RRU is during the two weeks beginning July 28th. Most of it is a distance and online cohort and whether I do another residency next year will be determined by whether my MA ends up being thesis or course based.

We’re just rounding the end of a two week pre-residency session, dissecting a few chapters of texts on adult learning and research and a few sundry pieces about issues like cohort based learning and the application of new learning to professional pursuits. We’ve also been getting our feet wet in the Moodle instance set up for this cohort.

Out of the past week’s readings and online forum posts has come a first assignment asking me to examine my assumptions about learning within a constructivist learning framework. If I understood the epistemological questions, the assignment was really about asking myself if I thought people learned largely through direct, observational methods, or more by inferring and reasoning. I’m not sure at all that I hit any sort of nail on the head with what I wrote.

Luckily, this first paper is as much about practicing academic style and showing a baseline for further development than it is for anything else. It will be used primarily as a feedback mechanism and will be updated at the end of my two week residency, which begins next Monday.

Online learning lacks personal touch

James — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 23:56:29 +0000

Came across the following via Stephen Downes, where he refers to to a response from Clive Shepherd. Neilsen first suggests:

I continue to believe in the linear, author-driven narrative for educational purposes. I just don’t believe the Web is optimal for delivering this experience. Instead, let’s praise old narrative forms like books and sitting around a flickering campfire â€” or its modern day counterpart, the PowerPoint projector â€” which have been around for 500 and 32,000 years, respectively.

I continue to write books, and I continue to develop training seminars, because I believe these media are best for deep learning of new concepts.

To which Stephen remarks:

I think learning happens through numerous media, including web posts (which is why Nielsen writes his online column in the first place). And I think that people continue to write books and develop training seminars because that’s where the money is, not because that’s what produces the best learning.

And finally, Shepherd’s (partial) comments:

Interesting. Of course we don’t know exactly what Jakob has in mind when he talks about e-learning – traditional, self-paced instruction? live online learning using web conferencing software? collaborative distance learning? informal learning using web 2.0 technologies? If we assume he means the former – what we used to call CBT – then that gives a starting point for a critique of his assertion. Jakob’s key idea here is that ‘deep learning’ is a lean-back experience, best accomplished away from a computer, whereas most web activity is a lean-forward experience, which is designed to meet the individual’s immediate goals in the way that they see fit.

I come at this issue as someone who has developed a few very rudimentary e-learning courses in the corporate world, who now works as a web user experience lead at a post-secondary institution, and who is likely to be doing a Master’s degree soon, with a significant component delivered via distance and online.

I think what Neilsen is trying to say is that the web is not the ideal environment for the level of immersion necessary for significant learning and that his ‘just in time’ metaphor is apt. I don’t think, though, that it’s necessarily about having an author-driven narrative. Regardless of any social media capabilities you can enable to make online learning better, you will never get the engagement of sitting in a room with peers and a capable instructor.

I also think that the medium may not be capable of delivering a full degree without some face time, but is great for snippets and individual courses of certain kinds. For one thing the feedback mechanisms for students, while improving all the time, are no match for the back and forth engagement of students and instructor. Forums, comments, message boards, email, IM, chats …. they’ll all good but lack immediacy in most cases, and body language subtleties in all cases.

Truth be told I’m not sure I ever want the medium to improve to the point where it’s as good as face-to-face.