The impact of working to your heart's content #learningDesign #MobiMOOC #inclusivity

Last week was inspiring thanks to the company I was in and the ideas that were exchanged Thank you John Traxler for organizing this wonderful workshop! My presentation was part of a multiplier event for the European MOONLITE project, looking MOOC design for refugees and migrants. A couple of days ago I realized what an impact this event had and how it affected my well-being. So why did it feel meaningful? It was the mixture of being on the road, meeting up with like-minded peers (the importance of exploring the concept of inclusivity), and suddenly realizing I was in a workshop where all presenters were female… something one rarely finds oneself in outside of the gender-circuit or designated ‘all female sessions’.
All of these factors finally got me to break out of my social media silence and see how I want to move forward.

Realizing the impact of projects that evolve out of ‘just some idea’
MobiMOOC was the eight MOOC out there and focused on mobile learning, which was also a new topic for MOOCs in April 2011. The idea of organizing MobiMOOC just came out of a wild idea, having worked on mobile learning for Sub-Saharan countries, and because I loved the experience of CCK08 the first MOOC ever.
While I was rearranging my slides for this presentation, I realized that organizing MobiMOOC resulted in quite a lot of meaningful actions and connections. To give you some idea of what was said during the talk, I am adding my slide deck here.

MobiMOOC design of a community MOOC from Inge de Waard

Being on the road
I like being on the road (though - when happens too frequently - it takes a toll on family life, creating some imbalance at home). But being on the road somehow gives me ideas, and it puts me in a mindset that feels exhilarating. Although not as exciting as Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, I do feel it has something. To me, being on the road provides ideas, and it gives a feeling of being alive. I guess my ancestors have been populated with a lot of nomads, for instance, my great grandfather who sailed the seven seas as a cook on international boats since the age of 14, and there must have been more ancestors doing the same thing. Wanderers.

Being inspired by like-minded peers
It felt so good to be in the company of inspiring peers, and to feel my heart and soul being content.
It was wonderful to meet-up with Nell Bridges (great mind, wonderful home), to finally meet up with Gabi Witthaus (I still laugh out loud with the divorce anecdote you told me), meeting Marwa Belghazi, to share ideas with Agnes Kukulska-Hulme on what I would love to be paid for (simply sharing ideas, thinking, writing them down), to meet with the always warm-hearted Daniyar Sapargaliyev who is now living in the UK with his family, trying to provide ideal surroundings for his two young sons, and of course to listen and question John Traxler who always has a different and in-depth view on academia, on life, on creating a meaningful life.

Each day I was learning and I learned from all of them, as each person I met was truly inspiring. They walk the talk of inspiring people and they work to somehow make the world a better place. How wonderful is that!

It is fascinating how you can feel what makes you tick by being surrounded by people you connect with. But most of all, each person there told me about the importance of doing something you really like. Of putting yourself out there, in whatever capacity you can (all efforts are worthwhile), and of simply being yourself.

Limitless learning plenary #OEB16 on owning learning

A great set of speakers, all talking on the subject of owning learning (some limitless)

Alec Couros

Promise of open and connected learning is the subject. Promise of personalised learning is one of the elements that have changed in the last few years. The ownership.

Help with bowdril youtube is example of the strength of weak ties. Everyone has access to networks today. The longtail of learning helps to connect with people for niche learning.

Post napster idea of MIT giving 2002 all their materials away via the internet. Youtube is the ultimate MOOC as so many people have learned their own passion.

Audrey Clemens is another kid that he learned and shared through the web.

#learningproject (part for students): how can we learn from the web, and document the learning through web options. (eg Bob Ross tutorials to learn painting).

So if we can google it, why teach it. This is a bit of techno utopianism that we need to be critical off. Tech utopia , Langdon Winner on mythinformation. (from searching for the limits book).

Neil Postman on 5 things we need to know about technological change. It is not an attitude, but a ecological…

Emerging challenges for open learning:

information literacies; filter bubbles and fake news (Eli Pariser, youtube beware of filter bubbles).

Blue feed,, Red feed: looking at the tail of two different tail news. Very good article.

Most students don’t know when news is fake (wallstreet journal).

Trevelyan (1942) what is worth reading and easy prey to sensations.

Attention literacy: Mcluhan, heavy media multitaskers impacting learning and attention.

Problems of identity: resume is replaced by online portfolio (eg). One option is universities providing you with your own domain name for you to fill with relevant information.

We live in a world where one single tweet can change our lives for bad or for good.

Cybercrime: romance scams: fake network accounts (catfishing) to get money.

Greater societal problems: when we ask students to come to the web, this is not a perfect world and it is getting more hostile. Geography of hate website.

We need to really think about what we teach students on getting online tools.

Diana Laurillard

Who owns the responsibility of for learning. (using the conversational framework, see picture)

The outline of her argument is: what it means by learning, and what it takes to teach in the digital world, who owns the responsibility fr learning, how to plan the shift to effective blended learning, the education context for teachers and leaders. So her point is more formal, where alex couros’s focus was more on the informal, passionate learning.

What does it take us to learn formally? The point of the conversational framework was to distill the learning and put it into a fairly simple framework.

(see picture), and the idea should be to widen the learning conversations to embed all of these types of learning and interactions.

Question: teaching presence ? when a teacher is taken out of the framework. This is where education comes in, as it can cater specific learning that would take you much more time to get there. So the teacher provides something that you cannot reach quickly yourself.

The teaching workload is increased in terms of … (see picture).

Using learning technologies is our best bet to be able to do this. So, to Diana these are exciting times to be in education.

Challenges: MOOCs are free education for highly educated professionals most of the time. So we need to use the technology to scaffold/cascade those who do need education and cut off.

One option is to use MOOCs for teachers, as they are following MOOCs anyway, but aiming the course at training teachers for their profession.

Who owns the responsibility of learning? The new digital demands we make on teacher time will effect the time and tasks they need to do.

Learners were collaborating, working online in both class and at home, online.

Balance of responsibility looking at teacher and learners? With technology we can enhance the advocacy of both. Teachers should be able to think through how they can support learners with tech for independent learning.

Shift planning towards blended learning.  Modelling learning benefits versus teaching costs: see

http://web.lkldev.ioe.ac.uk/cram/index.html

The drivers are strong but not aligned with digital. And we invest in the enablers, which are weak if you do not have the drivers for innovation. Unlock the power of the teachers to support more blended learning, more personalised learning. Teaching is a design science, lets trust the teachers to do this.

Martin Eyjolfsson

He wondered about why Icelandians seem to be more creative? Because Icelandians are happy… but why?

Only a few of us young people know what they want to do later on in life… this calls for creative solutions to bring passion to their life. A massive participation from an early age into society. So becoming a jack of many trades from an early age onward to feel society, to keep an open mind and be a free spirit. Bjork has a project biophilia (http://biophiliaeducational.org/ ), which learns kids about creativity.   

Mark Surman from Mozilla

Web literacy empowers people and keeps the internet healthy. The stakes are getting higher on what internet means for education and for humanity.

What does it mean to have a healthy internet? Mozilla has a motto: guard the open nature of the internet. And this was said when it was launched in 2003 but it still rings true.

The internet is made by multiple people and in a way by us all. The internet is an ecosystem built by us, but we need to keep it healthy. But many things have happened.

The internet of things is increasingly becoming  reality. Every aspect of us will become connected. This also means it becomes an increased risk, as AI is embedded in these systems and filtering bubbles as well. Some of the risks of this ecosystem is IoT botnets are growing and they are up for hire. Where devices are much less secured. We have an increasing cybersecurity risk that risks of taking whole companies down. The stakes are very high.

What is the social structure as we live in an increasingly connected society? There is a digital divide (eg demographic digital divide is real and pervasive). The digital power and opportunities influence divides. Those divides are global.

Structures of economy are part of the healthy internet, eg major app producers are in the North, where growing smartphone use in South, so new/old colonial.

(look up latest worldbank report as it was actually critical and of interest).

Imperial ambitions from US and China corporations using the internet. Mozilla makes products with values and ethics embedded in them, but increasingly Mozilla found that the need to be part of a larger trend to keep internet health. We as Mozilla are choosing to become more political.

Teaching this to help people realize what the digital world is, is one of the best activist actions to take and be part of. This is an important activist role.

Are we teaching the right things? Web literacy is an important citizen skill, yet we do not take it seriously enough in schools. This is reading and writing and participating in the digital world. Critical reading skills as well as participation skills, and creativity is critical as a skill. We need to be successful to be a productive force.

www.theglassroomnyc.org as a way to interactively make people more web literate.

Why Europe’s new copyright proposals are bad news for the internet (see fortune article), the outcome of this debate will have a massive effect on citizenship in Europe. It might be giving an free road to censor personal internet content on a massive scale. It will have an effect on free digital speech.

Look at www.changecopyright.org which is just getting going, and Mozilla wants teachers and young people to be involved in.

#OEB16 the exhibition ideas and a great peer reviewing tool

What do you look for, when you are wandering through multiple online learning stands at a conference? I start out looking around just out of curiosity, but as soon as I get a few stalls further… I get ideas. Positive and negative one’s.

Let me start with a really nice surprise. The Peergrade was the best surprise (for me). David Kofoed Wind (from Denmark) built this during his PhD years. It is a truly practical, amazingly efficient and directly applicable peer reviewing software. And, any teacher can use it for free. The software is written in python, with some java scripting… and it looks magnificent.

You can use the software to let students or learning peers of any kind to review the work of others. The software offers:

·        A really easy to use option for setting up a comprehensive rubric (yes/no questions, commenting feedback, scaling options)

·        A nice interface to use these rubrics for evaluation, and nice additions for grading these learner reviews

·        Dashboard visuals that let you see disparities at a glance. Useful meta visuals to see where a potential discussion happens (good from teacher perspective)

So, as a teacher, you can see in just a couple of glances which projects or documents are creating skewed reviews/discussions, where you might need to add your own feedback to clear the air of a discussion, you can also immediately see how good the reviewing process is of each learner, you can even discuss meta reviewing data… I was truly impressed by the scale of the options and the practical use of the program. So have a look if you are searching for a peer review option with multiple uses. The dashboards are really worthwhile to have a look at, such meta-learning visualisation options… Really, great. Especially, as learners will get more feedback on their work and get a deeper understanding of what the actual process from different angles.

Another option which triggered an idea, was provided by LinkLearning. The development of this self-contained software is still in progress, but it made me think. The software enables courses to be built in the cloud, but the learner can use the courses both online and offline (nice and necessary contemporary element for every type of LMS). They also use a very visual layer for courses, which helps to stay on top of content. But what got me excited was the fact that you could build your own course, and than integrate it in any type of LMS (if I understood correctly). This means you could let students/learners build a course or part of a curriculum, by using (creative commons based) course content from the web, not only curating content, but constructing it into an actual course, while letting you keep that course set-up as you move to other platforms. So, I thought that would be something nice, being able to build your own curriculum. This would be useful for training teachers ... I think I might go for something like that in a future class. A long project, asking students/learners to build me part of a curriculum that would be useful for them later on as well, so closely related to a niche topic of their choice, that they could simply use (either immediately, offering them authentic teaching credentials, or later, saving lesson prep time).

On another note, most of the stalls at exhibition events look magnificent, they are made out of big colourful cardboard … just to make an impression. And most of those stall carry big hype-driven words: personalised learning (which is interpreted on many occasion as: it is available on any mobile, truly funny), or take control of your own learning (which is mostly not what I would consider it to be actual curating your own content for learning, but rather meaning: we provide you the content, and you plan when to learn it). This year I also started looking at stalls that I simply do not get.

Companies (more then one!) that offer assessment ID security… Why?! For if we need such software’s, than it is clear to me that education is not at all as disrupted as some say it is. Software that will keep an assessment taker from using any type of solution that might help her/him in solving problems at hand in a test is more an expression of bad assessment tests. First of all, a test of any kind should be so well conceived, that a) you would never be able to solve it without already existing deep knowledge, even if you had 3 hours of any type of internet access and b) that those type of assessments should only make up a fraction of any complete curriculum testing. Why would assessment without access to any type of help be considered as the ultimate testing option ?! It is completely non-social, and thus non-human – thank you Aristotle.  

42 or why one college does not wipe out previous options #education

When the BBC reported on the French/US college named '42', which is build around the idea of peer learning, without the interference of teachers. This new educational initiative (and yes, I do choose 'educational' to be in the description) was once again propagated as a unique solution to education.

Although I am not a product of traditional formal education, and I do acknowledge gaps in the formal education system, I also think there is no single educational or learning solution. This fits in with the idea that I do not think Human is the single species on earth, nor that Earth would be the single, life creating planet. Evolution is seldom based on single solutions, it is the complex and ever changing dynamic of different elements. MOOCs and 42 are not the solution for education, just as humans are not the solution for peace (clearly). It is a positive, engaging combination of elements that makes things happen, one where ethical considerations are discussed and used as guidelines for next steps, or - in case of nature's evolution - options are tested out in a natural equation that is aimed at keeping a balance, a mutual beneficial equilibrium. So at best, each element is a timely part of the overall equilibrium to move us forward, or simply to keep us moving.

Admittedly this no-teacher solution does have benefits, as peers learn from each other, which increases problem based solutions, collaborative efforts... etcetera. Yes, this works for those reasons. But do have some side remarks: coding lends itself to peer-to-peer learning as it is already set up as Lego building blocks in many cases (not all, I admit). This means that although no teachers are present at that moment in time, others (which could be seen as teachers as they choose content, made combination of coding combinations) did provide the basic foundation. Having said this, this approach also risks of duplicating what exists (true, could also happen in traditional schools, but that is why philosophy is in many cases part of any curriculum to have the hope of critical field thinking triggered). Coding does not start from scratch, just like language... but critical thinking does review language (gender capital embedded in words, sayings that divide society...) and this should happen for the coding language as well, while it is coded. This enriching historical context is something that is not something you learn early on in life (exceptions noted). Which is why it is a real positive addition to any type of learning.

The 42 college seems to work and I am honestly glad that it does. All initiatives resulting on getting more people educated get my vote. But I do hope there is room for a critical thinking influx that will enable critical thought. In the article Dan Butin already points out the benefits of having professors/teachers present to provide thought frameworks. But critical thought is necessary in all tech-oriented subjects, just like it is necessary in less-tech fields. Creating code, possibly adding algorithms, inside of Northern context made technologies to promote this coding... it risks to flatten diversity, which in the long-term slows down evolution. Or at least that what I think, but I admit I am trying to figure out how much diversity is good, and if there is such a thing as too much diversity. But still... any education and learning should at least try to be critical in order to at least ponder on possible effects of any chosen process.

For those who wonder about the name of the college '42', it is a reference to forty two as being the answer to life, the universe and everything (according to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy written by Douglas Adams).