Old Cognitive Dissonance

If you do not currently have an aggregator, stop reading this NOW. You do not have time to read this.

Go get an aggregator and set it up. Point it at D’Arcy Norman, Will Richardson, Stephen Downes, and Don Little.

Add http://www.aect-members.org/dld
Add http://www.aect-members.org/wordpress

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, email me.

Do it NOW. Every day you delay you’re falling behind by a month.

Are you still here??!

I’m not kidding! Go get your aggregator running.
(http://www.bloglines.com isn’t a bad place to start).

Ok. If you’re still with me, then you should have your aggregator running.

Congratulations. Welcome to the New World Order.

Now, on to the Wandering …

One of the corollary thought streams I’ve been pursuing lately is this notion of “persistence” in educational experience. It’s related to “integration” — as in linking various course contents together in a way to foster learning. I started thinking about this a couple weeks ago when I ran across some of Dr. Helen Barrett’s writings on eportfolios.

I realize that it probably violates several university policies to actually implement tools that enable students in a “Foundations” class to relate content and learning to a statistics, or even research methods class. Hey, I’m an iconoclast … it’s my job.

Helen and others have suggested that one of the values of the eportfolio is that it counters the very real problem of what happens when the course is over and the Learner Management System locks the students out again. In traditional classes, students have notes and artifacts, books and readings that can be retained and referenced years after the course is over. In the BlackCTClass world, this is often not the case as course message boards, communications, and group work is often lost into the bitbucket.

Overlooking, for the moment, that 90% of my own — classroom based — stuffage has been tossed, I think this is still a terribly valid point. If I had started a better portfolio system 10 years ago when I started grad school, I can’t help but believe that a lot of my older work would still be around. Lately I started rebuilding my original portfolio (and looking at how much I’ve changed) and that reflection has really started to color a lot of what I think.

The first radical notion is that we should REQUIRE students to get their own server space. We do them an injustice by providing server space on the university systems because we then take it away after they graduate. This is NOT a huge investment. For about the cost of two Venti Mocachino’s a month, anybody can buy a domain name and server space with a pretty advanced platform under it. Several hosting companies offer apache/PHP/mysql platforms with over a gigabite of space for less than $10/month. That’s a pretty decent platform and while it wouldn’t support zope or plone, it allows for the implementation of a decent content management system (like typo3 or even textpattern). The CMS is important because it allows for non-programmers to use these platforms without having to get bogged down in the minutiae of programming in them.

With this platform under them, students have control of their learning in ways that neither classroom based education nor templated online learners have. In the first place, it’s theirs and they can do with it as they please. It is not subject to university policy, rules, or expiration. In the second place, it provides for a platform for self-directed learning. In our field, the ability to deal with these platforms, to come to grips with the potentials and pitfalls, is going to be crucial moving into the first half of the century. Any faculty member who cannot cope with templated server spaces is going to be woefully behind the curve. This is a skill that is as important as being able to type or use the telephone.

And that’s the second radical notion. Faculty who do not currently have such an environment are behind the curve.

I realize that this goes beyond mere blogging, altho blogging is a good first step. It goes beyond porfolios and vitas, altho they are excellent applications to work on and to think about while considering the server tools you need. I also realize that a lot of you have just heard me say the moral equivalent of “you need to spend the next several weeks engaged in the detailed study of quantum physics” and you’re have a bit of math anxiety.

Relax.

You’re so far behind now, that taking several months to get up to speed isn’t going to make that much difference. By this time next year the world will have changed again. Twice. So taking your time to make up the lost ground isn’t going to matter too much, so long as you stay on top of where the field is as you go and not just where it is now.

There are some simple things you can do to get started and which will lay the groundwork for later efforts. Chief among those things — get your aggregator going. Every day you delay puts you a month behind. And you can never catch up. By not having an aggregator and following a few people, you’re on the wrong side of the digital divide. Come over to the dark side!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 22nd, 2004 at 8:37 am and is filed under Wanderings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.