For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been playing over in Ning with the Classroom 2.0 and School 2.0 people. The usual suspects are there and some of the puzzlements I’m dealing with is “what the heck is this space?” and “why do we need a centralized location?”

David Warlick wrote this reflective bit about the space today:

2 Cents Worth » Starting to Get It?
I’m coming to suspect, however, that there are many kinds of networks, and that they are, in a sense, part of one network, tied together (attracted to each other) through the conductivity of conversations and the gravitational pull of logic.

He goes on to talk about attention and how when we started blogging, there was a lot of attention available but that as more and more voices flooded into the space, the natural limits set by hours in the day begain to overwhelm attention. I think a lot of people (at least those who’ve been doing this for more than a few months) have had the experience of trimming back their feed lists because it’s just too much. So the idea of attention has merit, but this other notion of a variety of interconnected networks precipitated another discussion.

In an ancillary conversation I was having with Mrs B on the subject of professional organizations, we began to analyze what it is a professional organzation offers to its members in a networked world. Why would anybody pay dues to be a member of a club? What could a club offer that would make it worthwhile?

She pointed out that humans are tribal animals, so we want to belong to something — that old Maslow affiliation drive. Which made me go back and think about the idea of “professional organzation” as a way of permitting its members to address the top half of Maslow’s hierarchy. I don’t know quite how this all works yet, but I wanted to get it down while I could remember it.

One of the things the “tribe” needs is identity and that comes from a shared vision, shared values, and shared goals — a sense of “us.” The tribe also needs a center. The center becomes the instantiation of identity through that shared vision, value, and goal. Someplace where, if you go there and meet another member of the tribe, you know you have something in common — just by virtue of their being there — even if you’ve never met them before.

The next question, logicially, is the nature of this ‘community center’ and I thought it could be decentralized. A technorati feed with the tribe’s name as tag could provide the center, but that would require a level of skill, and expertise that I don’t think a lot of people have yet. It’s going to be hard to identify with a feed and most people don’t see the river of content flowing from a feed as a center.

And that brings us back to Ning and other centralized spaces like TappedIn or MySpace or The ORG. They provide a place to go to find the tribe. To see what the members are doing. They provide a baseline that’s easier to deal with than the dispersed and distributed model. The problem with the ones I know about are that there’s no good way to merge distributed and centralized content together.

Eventually, I began to think that the community center needs to be centralized as a symbolic commitment to the tribe. We can each have our own spaces but the tribe needs a kind of metaphorical long house. It’s an answer to Stephen Downes’ perennial question of “why does there need to be another place?”

I’m working in analogy here. In metaphor. Bear with me if it breaks down.

If I go to the market and meet somebody, we share some things in common, and for a short period we even share a common goal – getting whatever we came to the market for. But the meeting is co-incidental. It’s not being driven by any kind of common vision or shared outlook except in the most superficial way. We’re not tribe.

So if I tag a post as “online community” and it merges with something that somebody else posts, it’s co-incidental. We might have opposite views and opinions, and while that has some value, it’s not the view of the tribe. While it’s true that the person is part of my network, that person is not one of “us” and is not part of my affiliation set.

And that brings me back to David’s notion of the gravitational attraction of ideas and linked and related but not congruous networks. People are finding Classroom 2.0. People are joining, reading, writing, participating. There is a rudimentary sense of identify forming — an idea of tribe. We’re still in the storming-norming stages but it’s already beginning to shape up. The conversations that happen in there tend to stay in there. They don’t appear to be pinging out (altho it’s entirely possible that I’m missing it). A few people are cross posting content from outside in and from inside out, but the link out of the community seems to consist primarily of links to the individual members’ blogs and web sites. So this sorta looks like David’s idea of connected networks holds up with one network inside the Ning garden and links in and out.

All of this leads me to the conclusion that the value of places like Ning is in forming centers around which networks and affiliations can form. Not as a replacement for the distributed world of feeds and aggregators, but as kinds of hubs. Cross pollination centers. Tribes.

April 8th, 2007
Posted in Observations, Online Community
1 Comment »

At the turn of the last century, the most economical way to travel from New York to Los Angeles was by rail. Not many people did it because it took a long time and was relatively expensive. There were good reasons to make the trip, but not everybody was able to capitalize on those reasons. By the middle of the century, passenger rail was already slated for “has been” status in the US with the growth of the airline industry resulting from innovations in long distance air travel during World War II. Transcontinental air travel killed passenger rail — and ushered in a new era in business opportunity — by removing several days from the round trip. By 1975 almost three-quarters of passenger travel in the US was by air and less than 10% was by rail. Today it’s possible — altho uncomfortable — to fly from New York to LA for a business meeting and return the same day. It’s a long day, but it’s possible. More to the point, new business opportunities arose because air travel became more available and ubiquitous. Disney is a prime example. Without air travel, DisneyLand would never have been able to “go national” and attract visitors from around the country — and eventually the world. In a certain sense, the world’s business required the development of air travel once the technology became available. The pace of the world required it. At the turn of the last century, taking a week to get from New York to LA was acceptable because there was no other choice. Today, very few people can afford the luxury of taking that much time. And we’ve learned that the airplane can take us places where rail lines cannot be laid.

The parallel between the Academy and passenger rail is inescapable. The question of “Where are we going?” is less clear. When you need to get to LA, you know where you’re bound for. But what’s the destination for education? Is there one? From an economic perspective, we need credentials to apply for a job. The reality is that you don’t really need skill in the job to get it, just good credentials. Lacking credentials, you don’t even get the opportunity to fail. So, in a certain sense, the role of education is certification.

That’s a problem.

The line worker who loses his/her job at the factory can’t afford to spend four years getting a degree. Even two years of trade school is problematic. Unemployment compensation lasts a matter of weeks, not months, and financial obligations snowball quickly. A professional caught in a mid-career job shift has similar, albeit less immediate, problems. Having one degree makes it easier (altho not necessarily less expensive) to acquire another. Again, making the change from retail management to, say, computer programming can take years to achieve transition. In the meantime, those people have some serious problems. Forget going into math or science related fields unless you start young — say, 14 — and work forward. It’s as unlikely as becoming a gymnast at thirty.

But Education isn’t really about just getting credentials, is it? I mean the credential gives us the opportunity to apply for a job, but the skills to actually DO the job are also needed and we need a better way to get those skills than the current model of Education.

Just as the airlines superceded the railroads as passenger carriers, we need to find/develop the replacement for the current models of education. We’re still going the same places. We still need to learn. We need skills and knowledge. We need paths to credential so that we can actually use our skills and knowledge by passing the gatekeepers. We still need to get to the same places — credential, skill, knowledge, self-fulfillment. What we need is some kind of jet plane to replace our Educational Iron Horse and, when we find it, perhaps it will take us places we didn’t think were possible.

December 24th, 2006
Posted in Education, Observations
No Comments »

Will Richardson had some interesting words about “Tough Choices or Tough Times” — the report from The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce.

“Community and Collaboration on a Scale Never Seen Before”
[I]f 2007 is going to be the watershed year that it seems to be shaping up to be, we need to do more work in traditional spaces and spend less time blogging back and forth to each other. While this is a powerfully engaging and nurturing environment, if we are going to make our voices and ideas truly heard, we need to start building a grassroots movement “out there,” one that highlights the realities of the world and successes in the classroom through channels that those decision makers (read parents, board members, etc.) are still wedded to.

Here’s the problem, Will.

The report is calling for a new system, not a patch to the old. In the same way the airlines have replaced passenger rail, this new system of education will replace what we know as school. What will it look like? How will it be implemented? I agree that “blogging among ourselves” amounts to “preaching to the choir” but how would engaging the railroads in developing the airlines have helped? If we take this commission’s report seriously and start thinking about what a new — replacement — system would look like, why would those with vested interest in maintaining the status quo be willing to engage?

The Cluetrain holds — pardon the expression — a clue as does Kat Herding and Doc’s Latest writings. If business in the Industrial Age has been about economies of scale and de-personalization, then the new economy might buyers and sellers talking to each other to create products and services specific to the need. In many ways, we’re talking about artists and artisans being the workers in this new economy. Whether your art is accounting or marketing or distribution, when we start talking about creativity and imagination, we end up with art. Think: The Secret of My Success.

Which brings us to the model for this new economy. Is it something akin to a global “open mic night” where people form ad hoc collectives to create a specific work? A kind of jazz combo? Can we build cars that way? Or airliners? Will we need to, or will we let other parts of the world deal with the cheap-labor/mass-produced commodity goods?

I don’t know. ‘M just askin’

December 18th, 2006
Posted in Education, Observations
No Comments »

For the last 17 weeks I’ve been teaching in Kentucky. The commute was pretty easy … just down stairs. And the course was one of those terrifyingly exciting experiences that comes along every so often when you teach. The reason I’ve not written much here is that I wrote so much over on the Phaedrus blog! For the first 12 weeks, I wrote something every day (on average) seven days a week.

We started with my traditional greeting message Good Morning, Mr. Phelps. Over the course of the first week’s effort, the students were asked to subscribe to a listserver, start a blog, get an office in TappedIn, set up an aggregator, and establish an Instant Messenger link. Once established we started using the tools to talk about issues like Education and Distance and Learning. All things considered it was a great ride and I hope that the students really did find it to be as stimulating as they said they did.

Some of the posts that started the biggest discussions:

• On the Classroom where I discussed the purpose of the classroom and why “as good as the classroom” isn’t really good enough. Given that my students were mostly classroom teachers, this went better than I thought it might.
• Learner Centered was a response to the question, “Why are we doing all this stuff outside of Blackboard?”
• On Distance Education was the wrap up post on the week devoted to looking at definitions and parameters of distance ed.
• A recurring theme in this course was Thinking Like a Learner. One of the goals was to get the students to understand that being a student and being a learner are two separate things. I’m perhaps being arbitrary in designating students as those individuals who care about grades and learners as those who care about knowledge. As a distinction, the class rapidly got on board with it.
• It didn’t take long for us to get into trying to deal with Reconciling Teaching and Learning. We were quite careful to examine Teaching (as separate from Education) and Learning. If we, as teachers, recognize that the students’ goal is not our goal, then we can begin to deal with creating educational experiences that provide for common ground.
• It took us three weeks of foundational work before we actually got into learning about My Basic Toolbox. We worked together to deal with some of the issues of tools.
• Why Powerpoint is Evil was one of the more intriguing posts of the semester because it elicited an invitation to do a guest spot at a middle school in Texas. The students had been given a copy of my post and had some questions. It was a wonderful experience for me and I understand from the teacher-in-the-room that the students got a lot out of it, too.
• Fostering Engagement came as part of the design and development portion of the course wherein I explained how I was demonstrating engagement in the course and practicing what I preached.
• Another post that elicited outside interest was ZPD where I laid out Vygotsky’s idea of Zone of Proximal Development. While my grad students found this a fascinating idea, the 8th graders in Texas asked me to come back to talk to them about that idea as well. What a blast! Using the idea of ZPD as an example of the principle in that they didn’t know it existed before they read my post, and after learning a bit about it, they were fascinated to learn about the principle, Vygotsky, cognitive apprenticeship, and that learning is something that learners do that’s really quite independent of what teachers do.
• That topic lead naturally into the role of The Teacher where I described a model of teacher as being neither “sage” nor “guide” but rather “bridge.”
• Ironically, one of the ideas that kept cropping up was Learning, Technology, and Age. I got rather tired of hearing about how this class of mostly thirty-somethings were “too old” to assimilate the lessons of technology easily. As a card carrying member of AARP, I had some words for them.
• There were a lot more posts, but I think these are pretty much the ones that I’m happiest with.

So, that’s where I’ve been for the last four months. I’m back now,

December 16th, 2006
Posted in Distance Education, Education, Online Community
1 Comment »

One of the catch phrases of distance ed is “anywhere, any time.”

The internet changes that. I’m starting a stint as adjunct faculty at Morehead State teaching a graduate course on the principles of distance ed and one of the issues I’m wrestling with is how to deal with the reality of time. The first challenge is to get hardcore classroom people to understand that, in a distance education course, the course meets now — at any particular now the student may percieve — and that has profound effects on the relationship between teacher and student. While synchronous communications modes require the participants to share a “now” regardless of time zone, but the majority of communications are asynchronous which creates some tension between teacher-time and student-time.

I think the answer has to do with a modification of the power-structure in a course, but it’s clear that online education is not “anywhere, any time” so much as “everywhere, all the time.”

August 20th, 2006
Posted in Distance Education
3 Comments »

With so much buzz on this out there, I’m not sure what else can be said.

Everybody seems to be acting like this is an informational issue. If we could just make the legislators understand the issue rationally, then they’d back down.

The problem is, it’s a political problem. The people who drafted this steaming pile knew exactly what they were doing because they’ve made it politically impossible for it to be defeated. “Senator X voted AGAINST keeping your children safe!!” is an ad that nobody wants to run against.

Facts — like this bill makes nobody safer, hampers access to virtually all school based access to important resources including many legitimate newspaper sites, and serves only as a political chip in the larger game of pandering to the public — will have no place in the cruel calculus intended to plot the path to re-election.

The only thing we can do is ride it out, vote ‘em out, and hope that the pendulum will eventually swing back to something approaching rationality while we still have free public education in the US.

July 29th, 2006
Posted in DOPA, Education
2 Comments »

John Taylor Gatto has some rather different ideas on the state of schooling. Google him up if you’re not familiar with his contrarian views on forced public education. His basic premise — and it appears pretty compelling — is that schools exist to make kids into the compliant cogs required of industry. Here’s what he had to say to Vermont homeschoolers about what it would take to correct some of the problems.

Shocking Origins of Public Education – Gatto
To get better schools that actually served us instead of suffocating us, we would need to successfully challenge certain scholastic and corporate assumptions. We would need to abandon, entirely, the idea that any such reality as mass-man actually exists. We would have to believe what fingerprints and intuition tell us — that no two people are alike, that nobody can be accurately described by numbers, that trying to do this sets up a future chain of griefs. We would have to accept that there is no such thing as a science of pedagogy, nor is one possible — that each individual has a private destiny. We would need to transfer faith to such principles and behave as if it were true. We would have to come to our senses and admit that knowledge is not a substitute for wisdom. We would have to believe each American has the right to live as he or she deems wise providing only they do no harm to others.

Personal experience is often denigrated as “anecdotal evidence” but it is nonetheless compelling for being immediate and directly perceived. Unfortunately personal experience leaves little opportunity to separate superstition from reality except thru replication. My personal experience with school, work, and education makes me think that the current disconnects between public expectations for Education and actual outcomes of Education may be related to Gatto’s contentions. As a people, we seen to recognize that our kids are not coming out of school prepared to take on the world on equal terms. Our response is NCLB, which feels a little like adding ballast to the Titanic’s holds.

Specifically, I believe most Americans — probably most people in the world — buy into the notion that the purpose of Education is to mold youth into productive citizens. When the US had a strong manufacturing base, that meant creating a few people who could manage — the officer corps in our Industrial Army — and a mass of people who could actually work on the production lines day after day, doing the needful without asking questions. The problem now, of course, is that our manufacturing base has departed. It will not be back. Now the skills we need to become productive citizens include the very skills antithetical to being successful cogs in the machine.

If Gatto is correct, the question becomes, “How do we reverse a century of momentum?” We have three generations steeped in the notion that forced public schooling, standardized testing, and mass education is a just and reasonable approach. Moreover, practically every person in the nation today is a product of the system. If Gatto is correct, then we’ve all been indoctrinated. Those in positions of authority owe their authority to that system. Dismantling the system means giving up the authority.

In the 1700s, America was populated by independent, rebellious, and obstreperous people. Over the course of the 1900s, that essential American character appears to have been systematically trained out of the American psyche. The 60′s notwithstanding, the individual capacity to reason and the integrity to stand by the results of that independent reason seem to have been leeched away. Have we devolved to the point where, if Gatto is correct, we no longer have the capacity to correct the problem? Have we made ourselves so stupid that we lack the tools to educate ourselves to adapt to the demands being placed on us by the new economy?

July 11th, 2006
Posted in Education
1 Comment »

This is one of those subjects that seems to be bubbling up lately. Clarence wrote the problem statement recently:

Remote Access: Reviewing the Long Tail
I’ve been spending some time thinking about the long tail and how it applies to education and to knowledge management, direction, and creation. What does this have to do with classrooms and schools?

I’m trying to visualize what the Long Tail might mean in the context of Education. Read the rest of this entry »

July 7th, 2006
Posted in Education
1 Comment »

Donal and I have been thinking about the purpose of Education. That’s the Big-E version. One of the difficulties is coming up with a kind of Unified Field Theory that melds the whole thing together. We appear to use the term to mean different things.

• It’s what we subject our young to from age 4 or 5 to age 16 or so
• It’s a process of acquiring skills, attitudes, and knowledge
• It’s an idealized state of directed learning

For the sake of the argument, let’s specify that the purpose of Education is providing the means for individuals to become – and remain – productive citizens. Read the rest of this entry »

July 3rd, 2006
Posted in Education
No Comments »

Lately I’ve been thinking about how the economy has changed and what my kids might do for work when they get out into the job market in about 10 years. I was feeling pretty low about that until I remembered Wilbur.

Wilbur was a funny guy. He lived down the road from us when I was growing up and taught vocational arts at the VTI in Portland. He had a ready smile, and a kind of a goofy sense of humor. He always had a sparkle in his eye like he knew the punchline to a joke that you hadn’t heard yet but he was sure you’d like. Read the rest of this entry »

June 18th, 2006
Posted in Down East Diary, Education, Kids
No Comments »