Hole in the wall in real life

It was quite suitable, after all the buzz on the hole in the wall project, to hear Professor Sugata Mitra speak on technology and the application of ICT in education. After a keynote on the envoy of the minister on implementation of ICT in ed in Ghana, Sugata defended a very different appraoch. Rather than working on teachers and ICT facilities, Sugata argues that children are capable of learning on their own. They are capable of learning the basic ICT skill of browsing the internet. Children may be able to learn a language on their own, if they want to! Children in the south of India even managed to learn Biotechnology, being triggered to learn on their own, rather than being taught. Put these computers in public spaces rather than in the classroom. Children used their networks to extend their learning.
The final hypothesis: Can children complete the schooling on their own! still remains unanswered.

Instructivism vs free learning - the cultural dimension

Walking through the university magazine I ran into a short comment in an article by a researcher just down the hall from me. I was especially amused as this added an extra perspective to instructivism vs. free learning debate which popped up (again) at the Onderwijsdagen.
The researcher in question, Mayo Aziza, is doing research on language learning under children from Turkish or Morrocan parents in the Netherlands.
Her comment is:
"Het Nederlandse onderwijs met zijn sterke gerichtheid op zelf dingen ontdekken werkt voor kinderen met een taalachterstand averechts. Die kinderen hebben behoefte aan instructie, maar dat past niet in onze onderwijsfilosofie."
I would translate this as follows:
"The Dutch education system, with its strong focus on discovering things for themselves has the opposite effect for children with a language deficit. Those children need instruction, but this does not fit in with the principles underlying our education."
To add to the debate I wonder whether we are taking the cultural dimension into consideration when we are thinking about different approaches to teaching and learning. There are people that argue that certain types of knowledge and skills can best be taught through instruction, whereas others are best discovered in a more free setting. I would like to argue for also taking the differing cultural background into account when defending the preferred educational model. There must be researchers out there that have been looking at this aspect in more detail.

Weblectures in university magazine

A while back I was interviewed by the university magazine on the Weblectures project we are running here at Utrecht University. The article is now available in print and online. I was amused to see that the central debate: 'Will students still come to lectures?' was put on the poll. The results at this point in time can be found on the right. I find it quite noticeable that some students easily respond that they will no longer visit lectures, though once confronted with the facility they notice that visiting lectures is actually valuable and a recording does not replace attending the lecture live.

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.

Twente has also been busy recording lectures

The University of Twente has also been recording lectures. They have written an article in the University Magazine. Again: the same findings. The most amusing comment (one I have also heard here in Utrecht in interviews with students) is the remark that this may mean that other students might not bother attending early lectures. Strangely enough I never manage to speak to these 'other' students ;-)

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)

WebCT troubles caused by firewall issues

What's new... If there is one recurring issue in implementing ICT tools for education it does seem to be firewalls getting in the way. This seems to have been the case for the WebCT troubles at Utrecht University. This should now have been solved. You can read the article (in Dutch) in the university magazine.

The HvA is also recording lectures...

And yet another article on the success of recording lectures. This is a report (in Dutch) of the findings at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (Amsterdam Professional University). One thing that struck me is that in the fourth sentence organisational issues are classed before pedagogical issues. This for me does give the impression that the focus is changing on how recorded lectures are being regarded. They are being regarded as less of a pedagogical novelty and much more a facility which can be implemented a lot more broadly (as the TU Delft advertised lately).

Asus Mini notebook: an interesting inbetween

I am a very loyal user of a Palm TX, but it is simply to small for writing and browsing. On the other hand, lugging a notebook about is a pain (for my right shoulder mainly). So I was fascinated to see that Asus is working hard on the Eee notebook. What makes it interesting for me:
- Very portable
- Cheap
- Does the basics when I am on the move (reading and writing emails, checking feeds, writing blog, writing out matters)

Of course it is not a full blown PC. I was interested to see they are planning to drop it in the educational market. If you see what we expect our students to do, it may well be too limited (statistical analysis is one thing it will not (yet) do. On the other hand: if you see what our students want to do it is probably quite suitable: to be connected and share at all times through messenger or videocall through skype, type out basic reports, browse and watch Youtube and connect with iPod.
I think I am going to give it a try when it comes out here in The Netherlands. Many vids ar already available at Youtube. Here's one to give you an idea.

Which VLE for Utrecht?

The latest news scoop is that the advice for the next VLE at Utrecht should be appearing soon (by December). I have heard the buzz going round in The Netherlands that we are having serious problems. I am pleased to say this certainly does not concern Blackboard. We are running this on a local server and it is running extremely satisfactorily. As far as WebCT is concerned, all those interested can read the article in our university magazine.

For me this situation does raise a number of questions as to what is truly important in a tool for the support of teaching and learning. I have noticed that some are engrossed by visions of a myriad of pedagogical models and features. I would like to take a step back and concentrate on the basics: what teachers and students need is a system which is reliable and easy to use. I have heard arguments that all systems should answer to these basic requirements, but I have sadly seen many examples to the contrary. I also feel that the large majority of teaching staff are not looking for a system that will do absolutely everything, but rather a straightforward system that will let them do exactly what they want to do quickly and easily. If we are trying to look for an efficient use of ICT in higher education, this is a very basic place to start.

For now we are waiting on the advice...

Technorati test

I am just testing out the possibility of using the Technorati search service to search all blogs for a specific tag. As I want to do this regularly I have just set up an account. Click to find my Technorati Profile.

A new year running Bb 7.2

It is about time I started keeping up my blog. The new year started almost a month ago and by now work is settling down a little. Fortunately everything went well. This summer we went through an upgrade of Blackboard from 6.3 to 7.2. This went really well. The interface is really the same for the teachers and students and we only ran into one problem: The course list was not editable above the first 25 courses. Thanks to a posting on Patrick Klaassen's blog, that was soon solved. Long live the community of Blackboard admins in the Netherlands.
We are also back on track recording lectures and training students in the use of portfolio's. Life as usual...

Blackboard scholar goes for Social Networking

I just read a Blackboard release regarding Scholar: it has a number of improved features. I am slightly surprised by some of the features as it appears as if they are trying to create a social networking site, rather than a well integrated site to share bookmarks and materials. If this is the way they want to go, I feel it should be much more strongly integrated into Blackboard itself, rather than a separate service elsewhere.
You can find the information at: http://wiki.scholar.com/display/SCLR/New+Features