Follow up on Stephen's keynote

The recording of the keynote at the onderwijsdagen is now online and can be found at:
http://videotheek.surfnet.nl/play_proxy/mmc/39829/downes.wmv.

Wilfred Rubens has written a review of this criticism in the elearning site. Paul Kirschner has written a response (both in Dutch). They can be found at:
http://www.e-learning.nl/subpage.aspx?l1=2&subaction=details&newsid=1671

The SMS wall actually did work!

It took some effort and some perseverence on the part of Pierre, but in the end the SMS wall did work and was put to good use in the debate Wilfred gave on the more ethical questions regarding the use of blogs and wiki's in education. I heard he will be posting about that soon.

Getting the SMS wall to work
Originally uploaded by kgrussell2

Do we need professors?

As a last session at the Onderwijsdagen I went and listened to Jacob van Kokswijk, this session had been arranged by a sponsor. I suppose it was a good resume: examples from other sessions came back: he named new findings regarding the links between short term and long term memory, and subsequent theory on students learning differently. Just as Stephen had done he mentoined the hole in the wall as an example of children learning of their own accord (informal learning).
As an example of people becoming organised in multiple virtual social networks he named the Google Open Social api. This is just an example of how we are all becoming connected and sharing knowledge. By the way: I am not quite sure I wish all my networks to be the same. Certain network sites are for certain goals...

But all this was leading up to the conclusion that teaching is going to have to change. However he offers no proof that old learning works (nor does he name proof for a different position). He has picked up all the news circling the web without wondering how applicable all these findings are. It brought me back to the question: do students want to have their learning taking place in their free-time space? This is a point Antoine van der Beemt questioned in his presentation.

For me the question 'do we need professors' was certainly not answered in this presentation. I believe we do still need some kind of professor even if it is a team leader (as in the example of the Kaos Pilot pedagogy....

Teemu Arina's session on slow pedagogy, an alternative in this age of speed

In his session Teemu argues for room for serendipity adaptability in learning. Teaching should provide students which adapt and adjust their processes. He offers various snippets of information and theories, but does not connect these, but as he explained later: 'Leaves this up to his audience to select the theories they find relevant.'

His session followed a philosophical approach analysing words and their meanings.
'How to cope in this age of information overload?' Marshall MacLuhan claims we can solve this challenge by pattern recognition.
Another point he argues is that in learning we should give room for serendipity: planning everything leaves no room for unintended outcomes. There should be more attention for slow pedagogy, we should concentrate on the learning process rather than the outcome of learning. By focussing on the outcomes we leave too little room for serendipity.

Motivation and engagement as basis for Kaos Pilots

I have just attended an inspiring session by Christer Lidzelius on the Kaos Pilots at the SURF onderwijsdagen. The subtitle is: 'Where creativity and innovation go to school'.
Very noticeable is the that in Kaos Pilots the primary purpose is: social improvement through personal growth. Students are selected for the three year bachelors' course not an academic merit but on passion. Students are assessed in a two day workshop on potential. In these two days they receive lots of direct feedback. 35 students remain.
In the course all learning takes place in projects. Faculty are teamleaders/coaches. Subject matter is based around three themes: Cultural Diversity, Sustainability, Social Leadership: a good leader is capable of making others leaders. The underlying pedagogical models are pretty straightforward. Focus is on the student, the world and values. The use of ICT not a specific role in teaching or learning, it is simply used as a tool in projects. The final project after three years is a project to improve things in society.
All in all I found it a very inspiring session, especially due to its focus on social improvement.

Blogs in education, success stories

Shame it's quiet in this session at the end of the first day of the Onderwijsdagen. In this session Rene Jansen from the UvA describes plenty of examples of application of web2.0 tools in higher ed. Blogs have been used for reflection on learning. This does spurn a discussion on whether you can use a blog for reflection, and can you do this on a public blog?
A nice conclusion from a research by Martin Kloos is that social software individual tools do not offer sufficient features to accomodate a community of practice, though a combination will work.
Two of Rene's students also explain their experiences. They have set up a knowledgecafe to share and grow together by setting up a groupsblog. Blogging was an important tool in developing skills in collecting and aggregating and reflecting on knowledge. 'Publicating-light' as they called it.

Stephen Downes' keynote... wow

Stephen Downes just gave a very passionate attack on the paper by Kirschner, Sweller and Clark: Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching. He was quite enigmatic that many arguments were not correct. I will not try to repeat his argument here, it is much better to watch the recording which has been made and hopefully will come online soon.
I think it was quite a surprise for many attendees that know Stephen from his blog and his views on sharing knowledge and standards, to hear an entire lecture on his pedagogical views that underlie his attitude to openness and sharing.
Tomorrow Paul Kirschner will be presenting a session (in Dutch) in which he will lead the debate between an advocate for the instructional approach vs. an advocate for the open approach to learning. This may be an interesting or surprising follow up for this keynote.

Preconference on Sharepoint as VLE

I am now attending a preconference at the SURF Onderwijsdagen on the use of Sharepoint in Dutch higher ed. It was very interesting to hear a description of the SHAPE Surf project. What made it really interesting was the embedding of the use of this collaborative environment in an 'action learning pedagogy'. Students were being trained as 'knowledge workers'. It certainly seems to be very suitable for this goal. On the other hand at the HAN courses are virtually unchanged and Sharepoint is used for content delivery. For that goal it seems simply too flexible and messy. So if you are going to change your teaching to a model containing a more active collaborative realistic approach, then Sharepoint should be quite useful.

A pipe for the Onderwijsdagen

Finally got round to reading some of my feeds and it paid off. From Stephen Downes blog I found a reference to just the tool I was looking for: Yahoo/Google pipes. I must give it a try and see if it can be put to use as a feed aggregator for conference reporting. Let's see if I can get all the edubloggers to subscribe...

And it worked! Brilliant stuff. We have now got a pipe combining postings from various bloggers which contain 'onderwijsdagen or owd2007' in the description (the body of the message) or the title. Most RSS feeds do not also send tags in a standard format so filtering by tag or category isn't possible for all postings.

You can find the pipe at: http://pipes.yahoo.com/owd2007/woPVKnaN3BGQwHbenkartA

If you want your blog added, do send me a comment (you may even already be in the list feeds)

Website Onderwijsdagen is now online

The website for the Onderwijsdagen is now online. The theme is the great tug of war between what is on offer and what really is demanded by teachers and students. There are great new pedagogical models out there describing whole new approaches to learning, but teachers and students are not always ready to adapt these new approaches and roles. And what is true of the beautiful vista's promised by using ict in your education? Is learning still not encouraged by a real life motivating teacher who is an inspiring subject matter expert? These are questions we want to address at this conference for ict in higher education in the Netherlands. We aim to match demand and what's on offer.

You can find the website at: http://owd2007.surf.nl/owd2007/ (only in Dutch I'm afraid).