CogDogBlog – a must read daily in my ‘gator – turned up with this post:
How many of these are members of AECT?
For the last couple of days I’ve been listening to The Stephen talk about how to be a good learner and about E-Learning 2.0. A lot of what he has to say rings so true. I’ve listened to three in a row and some ideas keep echoing.
He maintains – and for what it’s worth, I agree – that the Web has changed the world from a consumer culture to a producer culture. One case he makes is that we have the capacity to be producers of politics. Not having voting and discussions online. That’s still consuming. He talks about putting the national budget in a wiki. Everybody can take a stab at what they think it should be. Reconciling those differences in public instead of in committee makes for a producer, not a consumer, culture. Not everybody would have the patience, interest, or wherewithal to deal with budget — so they’d deal with trade, or education, or defense, or whatever. The point he makes is that we no longer need to centralize in order to get economies of scale in production. We have the ability for anybody to produce almost anything from almost anywhere.
He also makes the case that learners are no longer consumers of education. They produce it. We take a piece from here and we take a piece from there and we add a piece and we pass it along. It’s what teachers have done all along. In the past only teachers had the opportunity to reach an audience. Only teachers had the authority to speak. All that’s gone. The Institution of Education is a lot like business.
It’s like a dinosaur — a huge sprawling bundle of momentum and inertial efforts being directed by several walnut sized nerve ganglia. It’s working on becoming extinct — very slowly. The problem is that the teachers don’t know it.
I’m coming to think this is the root problem with professional organizations in general and the AECT in particular. We are no longer consumers of professional organizations, each of us is a producer. MyOrganization on steroids. And if everybody can produce their own associations — using blogs, aggregators, tags, and all the other acoutrements of social software — then the existing organizations become irrelevant.
So the question to the floor is, “How do we change to stop being irrelevant? What can we do in the post-Cluetrain world to nurse this dying behemoth back to life?”
It’s Wednesday and I want to post but I’m not sure where to go. Any one of them would probably make a full post, but I’m short on time and I’m afraid if I don’t at least give them short shrift, they’ll fall off the radar.
On the Management Division Elections
Over the last couple of days Don Little, Karen Kaminksi, and I have been trying to get a handle on what should happen now that the Board has ruled that one cannot hold a major divisional office and a board seat at the same time. Karen (current board liaison from Management until 2006) and I (nominated for Board member-at-large for the 2006 election) both agreed to run for president of Management before the ruling. The ruling puts a monkey wrench in that election.
Karen sought clarification of the rule from Phil and Sharon who told her that there isn’t any problem with her running for Management president. The rule change last week was only about holding the job, not about running. But if I withdraw and no new volunteers step forward to take a stab at divisional leadership, then she’ll win the unopposed election. In October, the Management Division will have the task of replacing Karen in the post that she is unable to fill because the rule change prohibits her from taking both the president-elect post in Management and Board Liaison.
And if they can do that in October, why aren’t we resolving this now so that it doesn’t become an emergency appointment to fill an unexpired term?
Day Three of Phaedrus Academy
My online course just started the third day. I’m requiring students to sign up for the Moodle, to get a blog a edublogs.org, and to set up an aggregator. Only one student has asked “Why do we need to look in three places?” I’m taking that as a good sign, but I may be deluding myself into thinking the students care.
Some time ago, Don Little pointed me to this post over on Creating Passionate Users. In a nutshell it says
If you think, you cannot be afraid. If you’re afraid, you cannot think. The mind shuts down. It’s built that way. Fear is a reflex that shuts down rational thought to allow you to move out of the way of danger.
The latest report from the AECT Board has underscored some serious problems and one has to do with me directly.
The Board has adopted a ruling that no member can simultaneously serve on the Board and as an Officer of a Division. While I don’t have a problem with that ruling — although I’m sorta kicking myself for asking the question to begin with — it puts me in deep gou shi.
Read the rest of this entry »
Over the last few weeks, my stats have dropped off — a lot. I attribute this to my preoccupation with writing in other places. I think I’ve started 8 blogs in the last couple of weeks. All of them are suffering from the same malaise. I write a few posts and move on, sometimes remembering to go back and look again … more times not. As a result of all this writing in the wrong places, I haven’t seemed to have a lot to say here.
I have to stop that. I’m not done with this blog yet — and it needs some feeding.
One of the reasons that this has become important to me is that I’m about to start teaching a course and I’m debating on where to write for my students. I’m pondering the realities of writing to my students as well as the real likelihood that I’d like to write about the process of teaching the course — and for the record, this will be the first course I’ve taught that has blogging built into the design. It oughta be a great learning experience for me.
The course starts Monday, so I better decide quickly.
What topic shall we discuss in September?
Resolved that Education and Learning are only co-incidentally related and any attempt at attributing causal relationships between the two constructs violates statistical norms.
That seems a bit heavy. Perhaps we should go with
They tell us that
We lost our tails
Evolving up
From little snails
I say it
The debate over ownership of scholarly works has taken the next inevitable step:
Inside Higher Ed :: University as Author?
the court treated faculty work as
