Advice to Teachers on Online Learning

Here are the answers to your questions:

The EdgeX website says this on your page "This to me is a society where knowledge and learning are public goods, freely created and shared, not hoarded or withheld in order to extract wealth or influence. This is what I aspire toward, this is what I work toward." While online learning would be less expensive and hence make learning accessible to many Indians, are there concerns that learning becomes very one sided with no real (as opposed to virtual) interaction?

Yes, of course there are concerns. I think most everyone working in this field today is aware of those concerns. The main point, however, is that those concerns do not create a case against the adoption of online learning.

In the first instance, while we often compare online learning and traditional learning with the presumption that traditional learning is more interactive, this is not in fact true. First of all, in many cases, traditional learning is simply not available, and learning that is not available is not interactive. Online learning *extends* the reach of learning to many people who could not otherwise access it. And second, many instances of traditional learning are not interactive. When I attended university, for example, I attended some very large classes. I never conversed with my instructor at all. I even had difficulty communicating with the teaching assistant. I was very much on my own. Most online learning offers a greater level of interaction than this.

In the second instance, the concern with respect to interactivity is taken as a general principle to the effect that online learning should enable, and even encourage, interaction. With this principle I am in general agreement, at least to the extend that interaction supports learning. Hence the form of courses I design and deliver - 'Massive Open Online Courses' modeled on a connectivist pedagogy - are based around the idea of connection and interaction. It is important, though, to keep in mind that the core of learning for the learner is essentially practice and reflection. The purpose of interaction is to support practice and reflection by creating an environment for practice and fostering authentic reflection. But again, online learning is *more* supportive of interaction than traditional learning.

How do you believe online learning is best used and could be used by Indian educational institutions?

Without having direct familiarity with Indian educational institutions (not to mention Indian culture and traditions) it is very difficult to describe how online learning is best used.

I think though that as a general principle the advice I give to Canadian teachers may well be equally applicable in India. The advice is this: to employ online learning to support one's own teaching and development before attempting to recommend it and use it for one's students. If I were to speak to an Indian teacher today, I would not offer advice on how to improve his or her classes, I would offer advice on how to use the internet to support his or her own learning.

Now clearly even here my advice would have to be taken with the understanding that there are conditions in India I cannot predict nor describe. So my advice could only be understood as my own description of what *I* have done in the online context to improve my own teaching and learning. I offer my own work, my own experience, as the example to draw from, with the understanding that each person's experience is unique, and what works for me may need to be adapted before it works for someone else. Or, as they say on the internet, "Your Mileage May Vary". YMMV.

When I talk about what works for me, I generally describe my process under three major headings: interaction, usability, and relevance. I foster a wide and diverse network of contacts and connections from around the world, in order to draw from the widest range of experience and feedback. To that end I have created what is sometimes called a 'personal learning network' supported by my own online writing as well as places where I can read blogs and comments. Under the heading of 'usability' I foster consistency and simplicity in my life and in my learning. To this end I strive to be clear about my values and purpose, to organize my knowledge around my own understandings, and to represent my understandings from my own perspective and in my own words. Finally, under the heading of 'relevance' I strive to ensure my learning serves my own needs as well as the needs of those whom I serve. I seek learning that is appropriate to the task at hand and accessible to me in both content and format. See more here: http://www.downes.ca/presentation/138

I think that if I understand that this is what my student will seek as well, it may change the way I teach. But I cannot understand how and why my students will seek this until I have understood my own motivations, and seen the benefits for myself. I can't simply *tell* people that "practice 100 times a day is good" (or whatever) - I have to actually do the practice myself, in order not only to know that it actually is good, but also why I would think so, and why I would find this valuable.

The Argument from Theft

The argument from theft once again rears its ugly head, this time in an OER discussion forum.

On 01/11/2012 6:44 PM, Jacky Hood wrote:

There is an alternative: stop forcing people to pay for research, education, etc. How good is something that requires jail sentences and fines to get people to pay for it?

Payment for all goods, not just government goods, is enforced with fines or jail. If you walk into a grocery store and take food without paying, you will be fined or jailed, even though food is necessary for life. Indeed, the establishment of a system of jails and fines is one of the major ways government subsidizes private enterprise; try doing business in a country without a functioning police force or judiciary (Somalia, say) and you get a sense of how expense it would be without this subsidy.

Yes, if something is funded by taxpayers, it should be generally available. However, the backers of the 'awful' bill have a valid point. No free enterprise organization can compete against institutions whose 'investors' must put up the money or face fines and imprisonment. Similarly private enterprise cannot compete against products that are free or priced below cost.

The 'investors' are not forced to invest as though by some arbitrary third party. The 'investors' are the people of the nation who have engaged in a free vote and elected representatives who have enacted the sort of social system they find essential. This investment begins, as mentioned above, with a functioning police and court system. The private sector has also been vocal about its need for an educated workforce, and the people of the nation had additionally supplied this. Another service these investors provide to the private sector is publicly funded research.

I would be happy to see the private sector (aka 'free enterprise organization') 'compete' with the public sector, but only given a level playing field - ie., we can attribute to the public sector the costs that the private sector would be forced to pay in order to obtain free content, but we would require that the private sector pay for what the public sector currently provides it for free: police and courses, an education system, and a research program.

The private sector is not being somehow unfairly treated if the population of a country decides to remove a public good from the realm of free market competition. This is usually done in order to subsidize private enterprise in the first place. In such a case, privatizing the service and ending public investment in the program would end up costing more - that's why people have freely opted through democratic government to invest some of their tax money supporting it.

Someone gets to decide what govenment schools/materials/research gets done and those decisions are not necessarily the ones that the payers would choose.

That's correct. In a democracy, decisions are made on the basis of "one person one vote". In a marketplace, decisions are made on the basis of "one dollar one vote" (and "ten dollars fifteen votes", etc). Naturally, the decisions made by the people with the most money will be different from the decisions made by the people with the most votes. But there is no good argument for favouring the decisions made by the people with the most money, as history shows they will make decisions in such a way as to make themselves even more money, usually at the expense of the public.

I've noticed that many academics favor taxpayer funding of art and science, but would balk at taxpayer funding of NASCAR races and bowling tournaments. The marketplace allows more choice for everyone.

No, the marketplace allows more choice for people with money.

It may be that the people, given the democratic choice (rather than one forced on them by the wealthy) would opt for more NASCAR and bowling. If so, then that is the correct decision. But my observation is that the people can generally be trusted. They are not perfect, but they are more trustworthy than the people with money.

Arguing that it's already been paid for so it should be open is a little like saying "if we already have slaves, we should make sure they do high quality work".  The better we make the results, the more we perpetuate the myth that it is OK to use force.

Again with the force argument. If you wish to work outside the domain of laws and police and courts, please be clear about this. Suggesting that measures put in place for the public good are some sort of slavery while measures put in place to protect the interests of private enterprise are something else is disingenuous.

The argument that 'taxation is theft' is dishonest and pernicious. It is propagated by those very people who have benefited the most from the protections offered by law. Measures that take a little bit of that wealth and spread it more widely are not some sort of slavery.  They are the dividend society receives for investing in, and enabling the profit of, the wealthy.

On that basis the argument that open educational resources are somehow 'unfair competition' is unfounded.

-- Stephen

Knowledge and Recognition

Responding to x28, 'Lower Levels of Connectivism'

First, it is probably more accurate to speak of 'domains' of connectivity rather than layers. The use of 'layers' suggests some sort of ordering (from, eg., small to large) that isn't really a defining characteristic. Using 'domains' allows us to recognize that *any* network, appropriately constituted, can be a learning and knowing system.

Second, this usage, "knowledge is found in the connections between people with each other," was a bit loose. I should have said 'entities' instead of 'people', where 'entities' refers to *any* set of entities in a connective network, not just people in a social network. I used 'people' because it's more concrete, but it was a loose usage.

That said, there are two major issues raised in this post. First, how is the sense of 'knowledge' equivalent in one domain and another. And second, how does knowledge cross between domains.

The first raises a really interesting question: does knowledge have a phenomenal quality? And is the nature of this quality based in the physical properties of the network in which it is instantiated? I can easily imagine someone like Thomas Nagel ('What is it like to be a bat?') saying yes, that there is something that it 'feels like' for a neural network to 'know' something that (say) a computer network or a social network does not.

Related to this is the question of whether such a phenomenal 'feel' would be epipehenomenal or whether it would have a causal efficacy. Does what it feels like to 'know' have any influence on our (other) knowledge states? Of is the 'feel' of knowing something merely incidental to knowing?

What I want to say is that there is something in common in the 'knowing' experienced by a neural network and the 'knowing' experienced by a social network, that this something is described by the configuration of connections between entities, so that we can say that 'knowing' for each of these systems is the same 'kind' of thing in important respects, without also having to say that they are the 'same' thing.

Different mechanisms create connections between people with each other and between neurons with each other (and between crows with each other in a crown network, etc). People use artifacts - words, images, gestures, etc. - to communicate with each other, while neurons use electro-chemical signals to communicate with each other. Though the patterns of connectivity between the two systems may be the same, the physical constitution of that pattern is different. It's like a contrail in the sky and a ski trail in the snow - we can observe the sameness of the parallel lines, and make inferences about them (that they never meet, say), while at the same time observe that they have different causes, and that it 'feels' different to create a contrail than it does to create a ski trail.

The same is true of knowledge. We can make observations about the set of connections that constitutes 'knowing' (that it is a mesh, that it embodies a long tail, that a concept is distributed across nodes, etc) independently of reference to the physical nature of that network. And yet, 'knowing' will 'feel' differently to a bunch of neurons than to a bunch of people (indeed, we can hardly say we know how a society 'feels' at all, except by analogy with how a human feels, which may not be a very accurate metaphor).

The second comment concerns how knowledge is transferred between networks (to put the point *very* loosely). There are different senses to this point - how someone comes to know what society knows, how someone comes to know what someone else knows, how somebody comes to know what nobody knows.

In the first instance - and I think this is really key to the whole theory of connectivism - there is no sense in which knowledge is *transferred* between any of these entities.

This is most obvious in the latter case. Learning something nobody knows *cannot* be a case of knowledge transfer. The knowledge must therefore develop spontaneously as a result of input phenomena (ie., experience) and the self-organizing nature of appropriately designed networks.

The organization that results from these conditions *is* the knowledge. The process of self-organizing *is* the process of learning. There are three major factors involved: the input phenomena, the learning mechanism, and the prior state of the network. There is a huge literature describing how such processes can occur.

In the case of one person learning from another, the major different is that the phenomena being experience consist not just of objects and events in nature, but of the deliberate actions of another person. These actions are typically designed in such a way as to induce an appropriate form of self-organization (and there is a supposition that it encourages a certain amount self-organization that one could not obtain by experience alone - the 'zone of proximal development').

What's important to recognize is that the learning is still taking place in the individual, that the other person is merely presenting a set of phenomena (typically a stream of artifacts) to be experienced, and that one's one learning mechanisms and prior state are crucial to any description of how that person learns.

One of the key elements I'd like to point to here is 'recognition'. This is a phenomenon whereby a partial pattern is presented as part of the phenomena, and where, through prior experience, the network behaves as though the full pattern were present. When we see half the letter 'E', for example, we read it as though the full letter 'E' were present.

To 'know' that 'A is B' is to 'recognize' that 'A is B', that is, when presented with 'A', one reacts as though being presented with a 'B'. Recognition lies at the core of communication, as it allows (for example) a symbol 'tiger' to suggest a phenomenon (a tiger).

What is important to understand here is that the recognition is something the *recipient* brings to the table. It is not inherent in the presentation of the phenomenon, and may not even be intended by the presenter (indeed, as likely as not, the presenter had something different in mind).

This also tells us how a piece of knowledge (so-called; there probably aren't really 'pieces' of knowledge) travels from one network to another network. Observe, for example, a murmuration of blackbirds. We humans (the neural networks) observe a flowing dynamic shape in the sky, like a big blob of liquid. We perceive the other network as a whole, and perceive it *as* something. We &recognize* a pattern in the other network.

When a human observes the behaviour of a social network, the human (ie, the neural network) can recognize and respond to patterns in that social network. The patterns are not actually 'created by' or even 'intended' by the social network; they are what we would call 'emergent properties' of the network, supervenient on the network.

So: a person watches 14 other people use the word 'grue' in such and such a context; when the person sees artifacts corresponding to 'grue' he *recognizes* it as an instance of that context. That is to say, on presentation of the artifact representing 'grue', he assumes an active set of connections similar to what he would assume if presented with that particular context.

As a postscript, it's worth mentioning that there's no sense of 'collaboration' or 'shared goal' inherent in any of this. Indeed, I would argue that the use of such terminology makes assumptions that cannot really be justified.

When we say that 'society knows P', what do we mean? *Not* that a certain number of individuals in society know P. There is no apriori reason to assume that social knowledge is the same as individual knowledge, and indeed, it is arguable, and in some senses demonstrable, that what society knows is *different* from what an individual knows. Why? Because the prior state is different, because the learning mechanisms are different, and most importantly, the input phenomena are different.

A society does not, for example, perceive a forest in the same way a human does. A society cannot perceive a forest directly. A human perceives a forest by looking at it, smelling it, walking through it. A society has no such sensations.

A human does not, for example, perceive a neural activation in the same way a neuron does. A neuron receives a series of tiny electro-chemical signals. A human has no such sensations.

A human can only recognize a neural activation *as* something - a forest, say. A society can only recognize a perception *as* something - en economic unit, say, a tract, or something we don't even have a word for.

A human can experience neural activations only in the aggregate - only as a network - in which it may recognize various emergent properties. This set of network activations (this 'sensation') is associated with 'that' set of network activations (that 'knowledge'). The same with a society. It can never experience the forest through the perspective of only one individual - it can only experience the forest through the aggregate of individual perspectives.

The whole dialogue of 'collaboration' presumes that a set of humans can create a fictitious entity, and by each human obtaining the same knowledge (neural state, opinions and beliefs, etc), can imbue this fictitious entity with that state. And by virtue of this action, the fictitious entity can then be assigned some semblance of agency analogous (but magnified) to a human agency.

Assuming that it makes sense to imagine such a creation (and there are many difficulties with it) such a construct does not have independent cognitive properties; it cannot 'learn' on its own, and it cannot 'know' more (or anything different) than any of its constituent human members.

Data

Responding to Cooperative Catalyst, Metrics and "Success"

I think data is important (it's the only evidence we have!) but I think that people take a very narrow view of data, which is unfortunate.

- they think, for example, that data is just numbers, when in fact data can be found in the full range of perceptions, including observations of emotions, visceral reactions, likes and dislikes, and more

- they think the only way to work with data is to count things, while in fact data provide a rich range of possible interpretations - connections, patterns, flows, etc

- they think data is cumulative, suitable only for iterations, when (as Kuhn pointed out) the right sort of data shows a greater and greater need for quantuum leaps of scientific revolutions - data about anomalies, data that needs explaining, problems, unanswered questions, etc

- they think data should show you a single 'objective' perspective, when in fact different sets of data yield different perspectives, where these perspectives taken individually and together amount to more than the mass of data aggregated

The problem is not with the use of data to make decisions - the problem is with the simplistic one-dimensional use of data to make decisions. Instead of attacking the data - which leaves you with no ground to stand upon - it makes more sense to attack the simple-mindedness.

Change the grounds! It's not that their approach is 'data-driven' or 'evidence-based' and yours is not, it's that they have very carefully selected a subset of the evidence that will 'count', while you are using a much broader, richer, and ultimately more accurate base of evidence.

(p.s. on the term 'data' - sometimes I use it as a mass noun, and say things like 'data is important', and sometimes I use it as a plural, and say things like 'data provide'; there isn't a single 'correct' way to use the term; its conjugation travels as your usage travels).

Memory and Memorization

From my post titled 'Wrong':

I get where Gary Stager is coming from. Learning is not the same as remembering. By the same token, I made myself a set of flash cards this week as an aid to remember my past participles in French. So there's another side to it.

Comments:


Vicki A Davis, January 6, 2012

Gary missed the whole point of what I was saying in my piece for the New York Times. The flaw with adaptive learning is we have no feedback loop to parents. The fact is that this weekend I have to help my fourth grader learn all of the irregular verbs, his spelling words, and the states and capital review for all 50 stated. many theorists argue we shouldn't be doing rote memorization but the fact is our kids are in a system that rewards it. I find that apps help make the learning happen in less time and with less strain on my relationship with my child but there is no feedback loop to help me know if he is getting it or not. Whether we like it or not, there are times our kids have to memorize.

nboruett, January 7, 2012 
Stephen writing from a bus heading to Dodoma Tanzania from daresaalaam a journey of six hours. Thank you for sharing the flash cards. I find the revised. Blooms taxonomy useful. You can not understand what you cannot remember. You then apply what you understand. The rest follow


My Response:

Vicki that's a fine comment for someone who was tired. :)

Here's my thinking: what we need to foster is not memorization, but remembering. However, in cases where we are unable to foster remembering, we need to turn to memorization.

Let me give an example from the perspective of cognitive load theory (I don't need the theory to make the example work, but it's more fun if I use it).

The traditional perspective is, we can remember only seven items at a time. So, I give you seven digits: 4 5 6 2 1 1 6 6 and that's what you can remember. If I give you more 3 2 1 1 3 4 9 4 3 2 you can't do it. Say.

But if you are good at remembering, you'll manage this with no problem because you'll chunk the numbers. 321 - 134 - 9432. Now we can remember it. It's a phone number. It's easy.

Moving beyond cognitive load theory, we are able to remember better if we are able to discover relations, threads, patterns or regularities between what we're trying to remember and something we already know. That's the (crude) purpose of menomics - we convert the long string of things to remember into a simple thing to remember and a rule to convert it into the long string.

This is what we're doing when we're theorizing (what educators like to misleadingly call 'making meaning'). What we're trying to do is to find the underlying thread that connects everything we're trying to remember. A theory. A perspective, or world view.

Sometimes you can't find these regularities overtly. Sometimes there's no rhyme nor reason, or its buried in complexity or antiquity. That's where practice and memorization comes in. By repeating and rote, your brain (which is a fantastic processing machine) will find the patterns you can't find cognitively, and you'll remember.

People who remember really well reach for these associations cognitively, and do the work required to produce them sub-cognitively. That's why, in learning my French verbs, I'm doing some memorization of the stuff there's no rules for (past participles for the irregular verbs), using a mnemonic to remember a subset ('vandertramp'), rules to understand verb-object agreement, and personal discovery to find the key underlying rule (that isn't in the book) that explains everything.

For those who are curious, here's the rule that underlies everything: the verb (extra 'e' for feminine, extra 's' for plural) always agrees with the direct object (You'll never see that stated in the French text, because most of the language is an exception - you see, you have to know what the direct object is, which means you have to have one, it has to be before the verb, and it is sometimes oneself, in which case you conjugate with être instead of avoir).

What you want is the underlying rule that explains everything (or, more accurately, a sense of what underlies everything, because often it can't be explained as a simple rule, but is just felt as a sense or a feeling (which is why cognitivism is wrong - you can't always 'make' this, you often have to grow it).

It's because when you have that underlying grasp of a thing, you are able to manifest expert behaviour - you can know what the thing should be without even thinking about it (which is a good thing, because when you add it all up, if you have a lot to think about).

So, to summarize: remembering really depends on understanding, which is why all the new-fangled progressive teaching methods work better, but understanding can't always be reliably created or scaffolded. It is better to teach students to be able to understand, but also to ensure that they know that sometimes the best and fastest way to understanding is a brute force process of practice and even memorization.

And I might add: this last bit is the work ethic and expectations part of it, and is the place where parents come in. A teacher is not typically in a position to instil the desire to undertake the effort required to practice and sometimes memorize, because this is something that is the result of socialization and culture - the product of a lifetime, not a one-hour-a-week class. 
 

Creating the Connectivist Course

Originally posted in One Change a Day, January 3

When George Siemens and I created the first MOOC in 2008 we were not setting out to create a MOOC. So the form was not something we designed and implemented, at least, not explicitly so. But we had very clear ideas of where we wanted to go, and I would argue that it was those clear ideas that led to the definition of the MOOC as it exists today.

There were two major influences. One was the beginning of open online courses. We had both seen them in operation in the past, and had most recently been influenced by Alec Couros’s online graduate course and David Wiley’s wiki-based course. What made these courses important was that they invoked the idea of including outsiders into university courses in some way. The course was no longer bounded by the institution.

The other major influence was the emergence of massive online conferences. George had run a major conference on Connectivism, in which I was a participant. This was just the latest in a series of such conferences. Again, what made the format work was that the conference was open. And it was the success of the conference that made it worth considering a longer and more involved enterprise.

We set up Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2008 (CCK08) as credit course in Manitoba’s Certificate in Adult Education (CAE), offered by the University of Manitoba. It was a bit of Old Home Week for me, as Manitoba’s first-ever online course was also offered through the CAE program, Introduction to Instruction, designed by Conrad Albertson and myself, and offered by Shirley Chapman.

What made CCK08 different was that we both decided at the outset that it would be designed along explicitly connectivist lines, whatever those were. Which was great in theory, but then we began almost immediately to accommodate the demands of a formal course offered by a traditional institution. The course would have a start date and an end date, and a series of dates in between, which would constitute a course schedule. Students would be able to sign up for credit, but if they did, they would have assignments that would be marked (by George; I had no interest in marking).

But beyond that, the course was non-traditional. Because when you make a claim like the central claim of connectivism, that the knowledge is found in the connections between people with each other and that learning is the development and traversal of those connections, then you can’t just offer a body of content in an LMS and call it a course. Had we simply presented the ‘theory of connectivism‘ as a body of content to be learned by participants, we would have undercut the central thesis of connectivism.

This seems to entail offering a course without content – how do you offer a course without content? The answer is that the course is not without content, but rather, that the content does not define the course. That there is no core of content that everyone must learn does not entail that there is zero content. Quite the opposite. It entails that there is a surplus of content. When you don’t select a certain set of canonical contents, everything becomes potential content, and as we saw in practice, we ended up with a lot of content.

Running the course over fourteen weeks, with each week devoted to a different topic, actually helped us out. It allowed us to mitigate to some degree the effects an undifferentiated torrent of content would produce. It allowed us to say to ourselves that we’ll look at ‘this’ first and ‘that’ later. It was a minimal structure, but one that seemed to be a minimal requirement for any sot of coherence at all.

Even so, as it was, participants complained that there was too much information. This led to the articulation of exactly what connectivism meant in a networked information environment, and resulted in the definition of a key feature of MOOCs. Learning in a MOOC, we advised, is in the first instance a matter of learning how to select content.

By navigating the content environment, and selecting content that is relevant to your own personal preferences and context, you are creating an individual view or perspective. So you are first creating connections between contents with each other and with your own background and experience. And working with content in a connectivist course does not involve learning or remembering the content. Rather, it is to engage in a process of creation and sharing. Each person in the course, speaking from his or her unique perspective, participates in a conversation that brings these perspectives together.

Why not learn content? Why not assemble a body of information that people would know in common? The particular circumstances of CCK08 make the answer clear, but we can also see how it generalizes. In the case of CCK08, there is no core body of knowledge. Connectivism is a theory in development (many argued that it isn’t even a theory), and the development of connective knowledge even more so. We were hesitant to teach people something definitive when even we did not know what that would be.

Even more importantly, identifying and highlighting some core principles of connectivism would undermine what it was we thought connectivism was. It’s not a simple set of principles or equations you apply mechanically to obtain a result. Sure, there are primitive elements – the component of a connection, for example – but you move very quickly into a realm where any articulation of the theory, any abstraction of the principles, distorts it. The fuzzy reality is what we want to teach, but you can’t teach that merely by assembling content and having people remember it.

So in order to teach connectivism, we found it necessary for people to immerse themselves in a connectivist teaching environment. The content itself could have been anything – we have since run courses in critical literacies, learning analytics, and personal learning environments. The content is the material that we work with, that forms the creative clay we use to communicate with each other as we develop the actual learning, the finely grained and nuanced understanding of learning in a network environment that develops as a result of our working within a networked environment.

In order to support this aspect of the learning, we decided to make the course as much of a network as possible, and therefore, as little like an ordered, structured and centralized presentation as possible. Drawing on work we’d done previously, we set up a system whereby people would use their own environments, whatever they were, and make connections between each other (and each other’s content) in these environments.

To do this, we encouraged each person to create his or her own online presence; these would be their nodes in the course networks. We collected RSS feeds from these and aggregated them into a single thread, which became the course newsletter. We emphasized further that this thread was only one of any number of possible ways of looking at the course contents, and we encouraged participants to connect in any other way they deemed appropriate.

This part of the course was a significant success. Of the 2200 people who signed up for CCK08, 170 of them created their own blogs, the feeds of which were aggregated a tool I created, called gRSShopper, and the contents delivered by email to a total of 1870 subscribers (this number remained constant for the duration of the course). Students also participated in a Moodle discussion forum, in a Google Groups forum, in three separate Second Life communities, and in other ways we didn’t know about.

The idea was that in addition to gaining experience making connections between people and ideas, participants were making connections between different systems and places. What we wanted people to experience was that connectivism functions not as a cognitive theory – not as a theory about how ideas are created and transmitted – but as a theory describing how we live and grow together. We learn, in connectivism, not by acquiring knowledge as though it were so many bricks or puzzle pieces, but by becoming the sort of person we want to be.

In this, in the offering of a course such as CCK08, and in the offering of various courses after, and in the experience of other people offering courses as varied as MobiMOOC and ds106 and eduMOOC, we see directly the growth of individuals into the theory (which they take and mold in their own way) as well as the growth of the community of connected technologies, individuals and ideas. And it is in what we learn in this way that the challenge to more traditional theories becomes evident.

What we’ve learned – at least to me – is that cooperation is better than collaboration, that diversity is better than sameness, that harmony is better than competition, that openness is better than exclusivity, and that understanding complexity is better than reduction to simplicity. These are, to my mind, the opposite of the bases on which traditional education is designed. Does that make connectivism a theory? In a real sense, that question is irrelevant. ‘Theory’ implies principles and abstraction; connectivism is, in practice, the opposite of that.

If that all we’ve learned, that’s enough. But I think, as we read what follows in this series, that the learning is just beginning.

Wrong on Education

Norbert Cunningham treats Moncton to his own special treatment of education, inspired by Margaret Wente (Globe and Mail Dec. 15: "Why Alex can't add (or subtract, multiply or divide)) beginning with his recommendations on math lessons flavoured by his own style of social psychology:

There's a problem here and it's not the educational specifics. Nor, in the case of bizarre approaches to teaching math, is it just that those in charge of our education system are themselves intellectually incapable of understanding basic principles of math (i.e. 'division' in math doesn't involve conflict and doesn't need to be called 'sharing,' which is a different idea). 

Though what he really wants to attack is the whole idea of sharing (if you can't wait for it, go down to the last few paragraphs) he's going to get there by means of attacking the education system. Which he doesn't really know about - but still has strong opinions on.

What we thus get are constantly changing 'standards' (improvements, we're told) that hide the fact the system is failing. When the statistics from year to year and decade to decade cannot be reliably compared, there's only anecdotes. But gosh the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming: our school systems is neither excellent nor getting better. 

That's our Norbert - "To hell with the statistics! I have good old-fashioned (made in the 18th century) New Brunswick intuition!" Before addressing editorial writer Norbert Cunningham's concerns about the dropout rate at Canadian schools, let's look at the actual data. Here are the statistics from Human Resources and Skills Development Canada:



And lest we suppose this is a snapshot of an isolated statistic, here are some more figures regarding educational attainment in Canada:


These tables illustrated an unmitigated path of success over 20 years, an almost ceaseless advance toward greater and more equitable educational achievement in Canada. The number of drop-outs was steadily reduced from 16.6 percent in 1990 to about half of that today. The number of people with college certificates or university degrees has steadily increased.

Perhaps the concern is that Canada is not faring well internationally? It's hard to make that case. Almost half of all Canadians completed post-secondary education, the highest percentage among OECD member countries, and well above the OECD average of 28.4%. Add to that trades and vocational certification (not included in OECD numbers) and Canada fares extremely well.



Similarly, Canadian students score exceptionally well in the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment tests, or PISA. The students in our best schools - in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia - score with the best in the world - they are the best in the world. Even in Canada's less advanced provinces, including here in New Brunswick, students score even with the United States in reading and well above the U.S. in mathematics - and consistently well when compared with the rest of the world. Read the numbers for yourself. And there's more data saying the same thing.

Yes, we could do better. In particular, our record in First Nations communities is of concern; "In 2006, 41% of the Aboriginal population had post-secondary certification; only 8% had a university degree." Rural communities tend to do less well than the cities, and regions slow to adopt newer educational methodologies - notably the Maritime provinces - also fare more poorly.

So, now, with some facts at our disposal (and there are many more painting the same picture; this is hardly cherry-picking) let's examine Norbert Cunningham's concerns.

He writes (and I'll quote at length, to set the stage):

In our post-war society it became increasingly difficult for people who dropped out of school to find good work with a reasonable hope for an economically secure future. Only a few decades before, it was the norm, particularly for boys, to quit school. University was not 'for everyone.' That evolved in the 1960s. And without at least high school jobs became scarce. But dropout rates remained higher than what most caring people thought was acceptable. It was also generally treated as irrelevant that the same dropout rates were far lower than ever before. What to do? The virtually unanimous answer from newly minted experts was to assume -- never close to proven to this day -- that the persistent dropout rate was caused by flawed teaching methods. That's given us fad after fad, failure after failure.

One wonders what data - if any - Cunningham is looking at in order to draw this conclusion. While the data depict a continuously improving situation, Cunningham reports"fad after fad, failure after failure." One has to ask, what failure? Yes, to be sure, eight percent is still too high (and is only partially mitigated by people who graduate high school as adults, such as myself). But where is the fad and failure in a generation of steady improvement?

But what Cunningham is really after is the straw man argument he sets up in the previous paragraph, the assertion by "newly minted experts" that "the persistent dropout rate was caused by flawed teaching methods." This was just an assumption, he argues. "Never close to proven to this day." And, he writes,

It ignores variability in human nature, interests and abilities. Can't talk about that, it's not fair, was the ethos; everyone's capable. It wasn't 'science' or even evidence based, just dogma married to incredibly sloppy self-justifying research. Both are still thriving.

Cunningham's argument errs on two grounds. First, it is simply not true that newly minted experts simply assumed that the problem lay in teaching methods. Numerous studies exist; we could, for example, examine this report that reviews 203 peer-reviewed studies on the causes of drop-outs:

The research review identified two types of factors that predict whether students drop out or graduate from high school: factors associated with individual characteristics of students, and factors associated with the institutional characteristics of their families, schools, and communities.

Exactly the opposite of what Cunningham claims! There was research, ample research, a wide-ranging series of examinations, and they identified factors related to individual students and their surrounding communities. Yes, teaching methods would be addressed - educators have little power to control socio-economic factors. But these pedagogical changes would address individual student variability and their community.

Different studies produce varying results, but the bulk of educational research yielded similar conclusions, leading to the development of what we today call "progressive" educational policies. These are the policies widely employed in places like Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia (and employed less frequently in places like New Brunswick, largely due to the protestations of people like Cunningham) and which have led - along with national advances in social equity and personal wealth - to the educational outcomes we see today.

(How does Cunningham react to proof that Canadians are the best in the world? Like this: "International ratings, such as PISA scores, become meaningless, for the problem isn't confined to Canada -- being near the top of rankings merely means you're among the best of a global crop producing increasingly impoverished yields." Never mind that absolute measurements - like literacy rates and drop-out rates - are steadily improving. There's still some mythical 'better' that only Cunningham can lead us to.)

Now we get two paragraphs of incoherent rambling (I'm sorry - but there's no other way to say it). First he argues that the putative failures were the "failure of a one-size-fits-all system to adapt to students. Quite so - but that's exactly what many of the pedagogical changes address.

Then he jumps to funding: "Could intractable dropout rates be the result of governments never (not once) putting the kind of money into education that would be required to eliminate dropping out?" Could be - but we see higher drop-out rates in Alberta, despite massive funding - the result of rural and First Nations conditions. Equity - not raw spending - is what makes the difference. 

Then he defends streaming. "We've seen bizarre, illogical efforts: 'streaming' was declared inherently 'bad' and discouraging to kids heading into a trade. Out it went, baby, bathwater and basin too. In New Brunswick that meant an end, until just recently, to even trying to teach trades." This would be a surprise to the New Brunswick Community College system - and inexplicable given the already-cited statistics showing a 50 percent increase in trades certification over the last 20 years. Discouraging streaming resulted in more trades education, not less. Because 'putting the dumb kids into trades' serves neither them, nor the trades, well at all.

Then he returns to an argument already widely accepted by today's educators: that "students are not widgets on an assembly line, each to be stamped out identically." 

The system isn't coming close to reaching all students. The path we're on fiddles with teaching methods rather than provide the resources to reach all. Lying to ourselves instead of fixing the issues or otherwise accepting reality makes only politicians and bureaucrats feel good. Few believe the lies about 'new' fads: witness decades of complaints testifying to their consistent failure. The culprits are primarily the politicians, administrators, bureaucrats and 'experts.' It's shameful. Deliberate, conscious choices have created a downward spiral of mediocrity.

After his attack on the Canadian educational system, which is doing better than most to cater to individual student needs (I actually wrote a column specifically on this a few years back - does he know that students in Edmonton, for example, can choose from any school in the city?) the reader is left wondering whether he knows what is happening in Canadian schools at all! Or even New Brunswick schools!

Perhaps he should view this video about 21st century learning in New Brunswick (from his comments we have to judge that he has never seen it). Or perhaps this brochure on the program: 

Public education in the industrial era was founded on discipline and facts. In the 21^st Century individual and societal success will be founded on creativity. Creative thinkers will be in demand to guide business innovation and to solve complex societal issues, some of global proportions.  NB3-21C is designed to produce creative problem solvers. Today, creativity trumps regurgitation of facts. Facts you can access on the internet.

This is not the system Cunningham is criticizing. And while the current government in pulling back on the progressive education program in the province (which will result, I can say confidently, in a reduction in the gains we've seen over the last few years) it has not abandoned it whole-scale and gone back to the traditional system. So what, exactly, is Cunningham criticizing? We can say confidently that he knows little to nothing about the Canadian system. My best guess is that he is probably attacking some of the American education reformers writing in the Conservative policy papers he reads from south of the border (that's just a guess - but what else could be be criticizing? A Dickens novel?).

Cunningham goes off the deep end to conclude his column:

Dump the 'experts'; dump the bureaucrats ensuring confusion about results reigns; and dump the lies to, and slander of, parents and other critics. Dump the assumptions of dogma for valid fact (and do the valid studies -- surprisingly few exist). Set curriculum and methodology locally. Real expertise does exist. Ban outside 'experts' from any contact with the system. 

One wonders what Cunningham means by an 'outside expert' - would I qualify, having lived in the province only 10 years?perhaps the people in the Department of Education who crafted the 21st century education plan would qualify, despite their focus on individual achievement and creativity. Who knows? Perhaps what he means is that curriculum and methodology should be set by the writers at the local paper. He certainly doesn't mean the teachers! Or maybe he does...

Development days that merely perpetuate a rotten system are worse than pointless. It's not as foolhardy as it may sound. It puts faith in the common sense, experience and intuition of teachers -- and goods one have plenty. They don't need, and never have, those 'experts' in universities who are using research methodology that'd earn a failure for any first year science undergrad in the next building over. I don't exaggerate. For heaven's sake, university administrators, it's time to insist on meaningful standards too. Anything less and nothing significant will change; we'll be waiting for an unlikely miracle.

Sure - depend on the teachers, he says. But make sure they don't get any of that book larnin! Because then they'll be filled with fool ideas (like, I guess, ideas from Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia? The best educational jurisdictions in the world?) 

In the end, Cunningham takes the same approach so many other pundits in the same New Brunswick newspaper have for so many years: attack anything from outside the province as unproven and untested, eschew 'science' (in favour of "common sense, experience and intuition") while at the same time attacking opponents for not being scientific (they just follow "a naive assumption"). And repeat repeat repeat the dogma of the day - that Canada's educational system is doing poorly and that it is the 'experts' that are to blame. To follow, I suppose, a "made-in-New Brunswick" approach (that just coincidentally favours some major corporations already entrenched in the province).

And he is appealing - you can see it pretty clearly if you read between the lines - to the age-old mythology that some people are just born geniuses, or gifted athletes, or musicians, or so on. That's the 'difference' (and not individual desire or creativity) that he celebrates. That's the justification, in his mind, for some people being 'gifted' and other people being 'streamed'. It's a rejection - implicit, never stated, and hence never defended - of decades of studies pointing to the socio-economic basis of educational outcomes. Cunningham believes that some people are simply better than others, that they deserve their privilege, and presumably their wealth. It's an appeal to a sort of social Darwinism that has no basis in evidence (but which lives on in the "common sense, experience and intuition" of people who have not been contaminated by 'science' and 'experts'. That's the dogma - if you note, it is repeated (repeat repeat repeat) throughout the column.

But it's wrong. If you look at the data on educational attainment - actually look at it, instead of pretending you did - you see that those nations that do well are those that practice a high degree of social equity. Read what the data says (see especially pp. 104-105 about achieving equity and improving support for weaker students). That separating and widening the difference between gifted and otherwise harms both. That even if the 'natural genius' theory is correct (though it probably isn't - more genius can be explained by hard work) the suggestion that the rich should get richer at the expense of the poor results in everybody getting poorer. Which is why - in a nutshell - the New Brunswick economy continues to struggle.

Cunningham's commentary does a disservice to education in Canada and New Brunswick, a disservice by labeling a generation of success a "failure", but misrepresenting the state of that educational system, by attacking the people responsible for that success, and by suggesting that there is some sort of local home-spun wisdom that would result in better outcomes. Wrong, on all fronts - and next time Cunningham deigns to write on education, he should do his homework.

p.s. the local newspapers are apparently going behind a firewall some time in 2012. Most people believe it's because they want the revenue - though most such efforts lose money. I think it's to keep columns like this, and the rest of the 'coverage' in this 'newspaper' hidden from public view and the increasing volume of criticism to which it has been subjected.

p.p.s the local newspaper restricts commentary to 1000 words. Having one's own blog - and being able to link to the evidence - is a lot better.