Like all the fake consulting gurus peddling various social media cures for business, what I find equally bogus and dubious is all the jargon-laden pontificating about "e-learning" or just "learning" as it is now pronounced with a kind of ideological and idealistic lilt in the tone of voice. Fleep Tuque is trying to get me to join some social experiment online involving 1,200 joining a course which will teach you...about a theory for how 1,200 people online can take a course lol. Talk about recursivity! The theory is called "connectivity"...something, and I told her that if I joined something like that, I'd have to be critical of all the jargony stuff that just boils down to old-fashioned collectivist theories that should have died in the last centuries. She told me that criticism was ok but that I couldn't get "all flamey". See, that's what I mean. That's why these things amount not to "learning" but "indoctrination". Hold a course...but make it about digital arts...as understood under some *theory*.
Following one link to another, I came across a blog that typified that jargon-laden approach. I've heard this fellow talked about with constant awe by Christian Renaud, so I'd have lots of time for anyone so recommended. Yet it irks me to find not only the jargon, which you are just supposed to accept at Newspeak, and also all this holy faith in networks. In fact, Fleep seemed to accept my question: ok, where are people going to find knowledge on these networks, except from people who learned...the old-fashioned way lol? If you, as a high schooler, for example, use Facebook to go find somebody who has an essay you can copy (something that is increasingly plaguing schools of course), well, won't somebody have had to actually read the book and write about it the old-fashioned hard way? I just handed my son a book and told him that it worked rather like the Internet -- that he should think of it as something like a "download". He could start at the left, and move to the right. When he got to the end of the page, there wouldn't be a click, but he could take his fingers and move the page -- well, like he would do with a game manual for WoW. Works very similarly.
I really loathe the term "learning leaders". It's a new term that you find spawned on all these social media and e-learning conference circuits, along with "thought leaders". What are learning leaders and thought leaders? They aren't people recognized in a field in some old-fashioned way, by holding a position on a university faculty or having published a book of serious scholarship (unlike the quickie popular books touting various business productivity gimmicks like "Getting Things Done"). Learning Leaders are just people "famous for being famous," said to be leaders just...because the conference organizer, which might be a company or a technology or software maker says so. This industry is hugely lucrative, because people are expected to pay upwards of $696 or $1050 or more to attend these spa weekend conferences, and usually they can get their companies to pay for them.
Education is Pulling, E-Learning as Pushing Restorative Elixirs!
There are two kinds of education -- oops can't use that word, because that comes from apparently an evil Latin word that means to pull things out of people -- stuff that you had to cram in! Well, two fields of "learning". The first is school for kids, K-12, and then college for teenagers and young people. The second is corporate training, or learning on the job, or learning about the job. This latter area is filled with enormous amounts of bogus stuff. Everyone who has ever worked in a company knows what I mean -- "training seminars" and "leadership seminars" are enormous shipping containers of cotton wadding and plastic bubble wrap that are basically about trying to impart corporate culture or procedure or "the way we do things here". They are often about motivation and trying to get people to be "more productive" but the entire industry is "about itself". It's often not knowledge that transfers. That is, if you went to one company's "leadership training series" that wouldn't apply as credit at another company's "leadership training seminars" -- you'd have to start over to level up. There's an enormous amount of bullshit packed into this stuff if you ever look at it even slightly critically from the outside -- it's mainly just about a kind of tribal bonding. The workshops all follow the same generic formula -- some charismatic speaker with a short Anglo-Saxon name like "Tom" or "Randy" or better yet, a long Indian name to impart the sense of guru status. Then comes 8 methods or 6 points or 4 things you must really know -- always a list, always numbered, always on Power-Point. Punchy slogans, and funny little buzz words, slogans, anecdotes.
The patterns fit the age-old rhythmes of the medicine show, the tent meeting, the revivalist campaigns across America in another age, or political organizing like the Comintern or the SDS, with all the fervour, zealotry, extremism that can imply. What's presented at these "learning" occasions isn't actual research with double-blind studies, weighted for geography, sociological surveys, real data found scientifically. It's just a lot of some guy's anecdotes strung together with some pithy phrases. If he has someone managed to publish a book somewhere with these pearls of wisdom, then so much the better -- some people can publish a book on the strength of having first been on the conference circuit, which they can then reinforce forever more by being on the conference circuit by publishing a book.
How to bootstrap up to that first conference-circuit invitation? Well, Twitter a lot. Oh, and FriendFeed!
The Webvolution is Eating Its Children!
Here's the sort of breathless gospel we get from the "Webvolution" (groan):
"Market economies typically are characterized by extended periods of stability occasionally punctuated by short unstable periods that forever alter the economic landscape. In the past, disruptive technologies such as the printing press and the steam engine were catalysts in redefining the economies of their respective eras. In the information-age economy, the Internet has emerged as the primary disruptive force of our time—driving unpredictable changes in our economy while simultaneously challenging the viability of the 20th century enterprise."
Actually, I bet we could find a dozen market economists from real life, so to speak, who might disagree with this, nothing that the instability in fact rights itself in time, there's a sense of equilibrium. And here we go again with "disruptive technologies" -- as I've often noted, the Internet is a big phone, hooked up to a big truck. There's only so much you can get out of it in terms of revenue, given that we haven't gotten virtual commodities in virtual worlds to be spread as a truly mass phenomenon yet. We're working on it, however!
"Today, we live in an innovation-focused, knowledge-enabled economy where work is increasing rapidly in complexity and velocity. Computers have migrated from being information crunchers focused on optimizing productivity to people connectors focused on creating economic value through human interaction. In this increasingly flat, transparent, and globally interconnected world, organizations or individuals that cannot change as fast as the environment within which they operate are destined to regress to a mean of mediocrity."
And here we go again with the punch line of all these new religious doctrines -- somebody always has to die. Somebody always has to be disrupted. Somebody always has to regreess, and become -- the horror! -- mediocre due to the train of progress crushing them. These theories about harmonious collaboration in groups always turn out to have such an undertow that is always crushing some enemy, some backward laggard who is not innovative and won't e-learn the right way, dammit!
And please, I do want to know: how does economic value get created merely through people being connected? This is of course the doctrine behind the "connectivity" cult mentioned above. You link people and they all get together in a group and they...all collaborate on having a course about people getting together in groups and collaborating.
When does the money change hands?
But like the tent preachers of yore, the fire and brimstone talk is clear: you don't want to be one of those mediocre, unconnected, disrupted people failing to innovate and becoming a total wash-up. So buy the $39.95 innovation tape and sign up for the next leadership seminar -- or else!
An Internet of Shop-Keepers
And now, here comes our friends from Big Blue, who don't just fly around Second Life getting themselves Ruthed on OpenSim and sit in Linden office hours, but are out there e-learning and leadership-training themselves and predicting the Next Big Thing:
"Internet technology makes rich exchanges possible without the need for formal structures. The nonlinear dynamics of this new information ecosystem are challenging the traditional structures of enterprise. In fact, a recent study from IBM’s Global Innovation Outlook suggests that the future might consist of a billion one-person enterprises—people who act as free agents moving freely and frequently from project to project as their skills, focus, and passion shift."
Of course, IBM will be there to provide the machines to do the watching over with loving grace...
I honestly wonder what people are smoking when they contemplate amazon.com's Mechanical Turk thing growing to a billion one-person enterprises. I love the idea, being self-employed myself, but the reality is, I hook up to enterprises that have the capital to maintain organizations the way they do need to be maintained, still with buildings, payroll, management, hierarchy. Like Clay Shirky, Tony Driscoll seems to imagine that the glorious future will both be made by all these connected collaborative groups unhinged from institutions and corporations...and that there will be all these one-person shops where I just chase around from job to job collecting micro-payments frantically like gleaners of corn in the fields...
Like others before him who have flogged both connected networking groups as value generators AND individuals freed to pursue jobs online, Driscoll hasn't provided a single use case, a single actual business doing this.
Where are they?
Stone Soup!
And more collectivism, and more stone soup:
"Today, people work, communicate, and learn across time zones and physical boundaries. Information no longer moves in one direction from top to bottom or from teacher to learner. Instead, information has a social life all its own. It moves through time and space based on the desire and ability of individuals to interact with it—and with each other—to make more effective decisions or develop keener insights. In the Webvolution era, information is the currency, individuals are the transport mechanism, and conversation is the transfer mechanism. As Webvolution unfolds, the scarcity paradigm that undergirds most modern economic theory is reversed. Information is a non-appropriable resource. It can be shared without being given away."
Yes, institutions of all kinds have gained from the ability to work across borders and time zones. But that's enhanced them, not disrupted them. I can't think of a single business model where someone has figured out how to make money from this. Even if we look at Second Life as that incubator of prototypes, well we know the flaws (see the next post).
Information is tied to people -- it comes from people. To be sure, Wikipedia often blurs that distinction and erases the provenance of a lot of information -- how often have you kept looking at other links on a topic on Google and found pages from which Wikipediasts have copied stuff wholesale without even a reference, or only a buried footnote not explaining that they are basically reprinting some other page?
And there it is again, that mystical belief that the Internet has already achieved communism where everything is shared, everything is free, everyone works and gives to the collective, and there is never any poverty or scarcity.
Lots of Information Still Locked Up
Information continues to be appropriated everywhere, of course, once you get outside the Western world and its affluence and its free Internet, and see the Internet as it appears in Russia or China or Sudan or Saudi Arabia. Of course, this irrational exhuberance about information wanting to be free simply is unexposed, or not thinking about, the poor world, and the world that is very much still operating under the most ancient of hierarchical structures -- and not showing any sign of removing them, and in fact only getting weak-minded Westerners to applaud them either as "different and world stuff that I should find cool" or "superior by force" or "enemy of my enemy, and therefore my friend."
No, as I've noted before information, whatever it's "free" and "copyable" and "non-scarce" status at least in the rich world, is not the scarce commodity: knowledge, and curatorial selection are what is scarce. Experts who can cut through the storm of noise to find the good stuff. Not just "tools" that do that; but people, people who are trusted, and often who became knowledgeable because they did those old fashioned things like sit and listen to professors or read books page by page, and think about them.
"Within this context, the Internet itself can be conceived of as a persistent, worldwide community of learners. Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old CEO of social networking juggernaut Facebook puts it this way: “The other guys think communication is a way to get information. We think information is a way to foster better communication between people.”
Sure, the Internet is all about learning all the time, following topics, consuming them like a sponge. I know way more than I might have ever known 15 years ago about technology, snapping turtles, Honus Wagner, the noosphere, and a host of sundry things I've clicked on. But unless I happened to have that old Honus Wagner mint-condition baseball card, how did I monetarize this? Who pays me for learning? And once having learned, where does my knowledge go?
And where Zuckerberg seems youthful and naive is on the idea that mere communication adds value. Sure, it adds a feel-good. It's great that I have 87 friends on FB, most of whom I have never met in RL, are not real friends, and some of whom are just hawking various products and have made me a friend in order to get me to interact with their brand. I'm not sure even Zuckerberg is getting paid these days, you know? But I don't paid to keep expressing, opining, voting, credding, twittering -- and the sum total of all these communication connectivity confabulations is...zero. That is, it's nice to chat, the way it used to be nice to sit on your porch, if you had one, and chat with the old folks and anybody who stopped by. It's nice to have folks from out of town come visit. It's all nice. But, it doesn't pay the bills.
Optimalizing Efficiency Congruent With Enterprise-Level Consultative Performance Paradigms
There's lots and lots more jargon-laden stuff that looks fairly bogus, like this:
"Performance Improvement – Applying consultative performance consulting approaches to specific business situations to drive organizational effectiveness and business outcomes.
Business Unit Enablement – Aligning tightly with the operational needs of the business and governing the learning investment to yield optimized business unit productivity".
I don't think I need to go to 10 more leadership seminars to translate what this is about: people selling software and hook-ups will sell so much of it that like computers and the Internet itself, they will force businesses to feel guilty and lost and behind and mediocre unless they buy into all this crap and spend on it and add it to their already creaking infrastructure. Then they will have to make "talent" to "adapt" to it and then "manage this at a systems level".
All of this rather vague and convoluted stuff of course fuels entire layers of corporations and their activities. I remember working in a department at Xerox that had people who did this stuff all day...but they seldom had as much to do as those who were in the engineering and R&D and product testing departments -- working in them all as a casual temp I could see the striking differences of how the modern corporation was structured. When I once complained that I didn't have enough letters to type or jobs to do,I was told to take extended trips out for coffee and donuts and not reveal this lack of activity to anyone...
How Will Kids Learn?
OK, once you're done debunking all the business e-learning stuff -- and few people in corporate jobs are likely to be able to have the luxury to debunk it, there's the problem of schools for kids.
We all know that schools don't work, but in part, the reason they don't work is that all kinds of child-centric and collectivist and constructivist ideologies were foisted on schools and kids for the last 30 years, and those rewarmed socialist theories didn't work. All that hype about structures of knowledge and culture is now being debunked, but leaving panic -- and of course failing kids.
If you have kids, you know they love repetition -- lots of it -- reciting, songs, chants, poems. Reading to them and showing them videos as they grow up, you know what it is to hear "again! again!". So obviously, that old form of repetition and rote learning for basic things like the alphabet, the times tables, the major world wars and such -- that matters and there should be more of it.
But after those basic building blocks are mastered, then how can children be taught to think? Unfortunately, rather than learning from the failures of the past decades' various collectivist and constructivist and child-centric theories to restore some basics, the new "learning leaders" merely want to dress these up in cyber clothing and declare each learner as merely a node in a network that will somehow magically keep feeding him with free information that he will somehow magically digest and become analytical with.
At this stage of exuberance and irrationality and zealotry about all of this stuff, we're just not seeing a lot of really good independent scholarship about its effectiveness (like you can't find reliable study of the effect of video games because of the know-nothing shouting going on by the game industry itself and its cheerleaders on sites like Terra Nova). You can't find good journalism about this, even, as the news media feels itself guiltily put on the run by all this "disruptiveness" too (I'm actually thinking lately they may have the last laugh on this, because all of them are transforming to diversified websites with blogs, podcasts, forums, Twittering and fashionable pieces on subjects of interest to the flash mob, and are even adding monetarization by predicting the news, not just clicking on the ads. Are we going to see news coverage shrink further as it chases stories that gather more predicters and for whom advertisers will pay more?)
Edu Microchunks
What would be great is if some of this stuff would start to work in a practical way for real people, once the jargon, the conference-circuiting, the bestselleritis coverage of it all starts to die down and we can see what is really available for use.
Online schooling has a reputation as being really sub-par, and really low-class, precisely because of its use of flashing ads and spam that bludgeon you to death, and reward your innocent click or query by email with endless spam calls at home and junk mailings if you should yield your address in the hope of getting a free coupon for dinner at Olive Garden lol. These schools all seem dubious and fake, and they seem to have to bombard the masses with constant ads for their services in the hopes of finding the most needy and credulous.
But what if that could start to ebb, and if the really credentialed schools began to offer their accumulated stores of reputation and knowledge for micropayments for microchunks?
Wouldn't it be great if not only you could earn a law degree over 5 years, in $50 chunks if you needed to, and if your leveling up to say, only 1/168th of a law decree somehow was appreciated at your job, and became part of a skill bar that was on your online resume that added to your value? What if you could use your life knowledge and "life credits" in fact to go take a GRE-style exam and in fact add that as a credential, without having to sit through some boring MBA classes with witless adjunct professors from failed businesses teaching not doing?
What if kids failing high school could pick out what they really want to learn, and not have to wait until they are 18 in order to access something like a DeVries kind of place that teaches you computer repair? What if you could get all of this in Second Life, and pay for it in Lindens?
What if you could not only access MIT's online educational archives or whatever they are called, but also access the actual education MIT sells for a huge price, but in micropieces? Or for that matter, in whole pieces, if you had the time to sit online?
While I think this sort of freeing up of the stores of knowledge would be great for asynchronous learning, there's still the issue of teachers. How can they get paid? How can they stretch themselves thin to serve as mentors to 1200 people, instead of 20? Probably only through dilution of value, because while "information being copiable removes scarcity" and allegedly "transforms economies," the reason these economies aren't being transformed, and remain just as problematic with scarce -- and even more scarce credit, especially for women and minorities -- and with job opportunities diminishing for those with less wealth to acquire education -- is precisely because you cannot multiple teachers. Teachers *are* scarce. Ask anybody who has given up their lucrative jobs in the commercial sector to go teach in New York City's schools -- and hear their stories of how appalling the system is, and how it crushes teachers, and how even the union ultimately crushes teachers who might like to do something differently.
Even if you were able to harness all sorts of retired people or volunteer people who wouldn't mind teaching online for free, you still wouldn't solve the problem of credentialing them, and their students. The reason why there are hundreds of colleges in Second Life now, but not a single adult-education continuing-ed class that I can pay for in microchunks in Lindens is precisely because of the problem of credentialing.
All the geeks hate the music industry for DRM and anti-theft devices and think they should "have a different business model" and stop fighting their customers' endless copying and monetarize musicians a different way by...uh...concerts (which they will beam on their i-Phones now to friends who didn't buy tickets) or...uh...t-shirts (which don't represent a really solid revenue stream to carry the business) or ad jingles (on television? Which is dying, remember?)
So, what about a university that has to worry about the erosion of its knowledge product that costs $40,000 a year for a student, with a professor who costs $120,000 a year, let's say, if it becomes possible to offer that product for $400 or $40 online? (Professors can be found in Bangalore or Vladivostok to work for less).
Of course, those identifying "disruptive media" trends only clap in glee if some white guy is stiffed out of a job somewhere, as long as it is not them, as a consultant, telling everybody at seminars about other white guys getting stiffed out of a job somewhere...
Ultimately, I feel there is a great deal of e-vasion about e-learning -- a refusal to come to grips with the problems of keeping people paid in livlihoods, not finding new ways for them to have volunteer hobbies online, and practically giving people credentials that matter, which aren't merely a certificate from a webinar. I don't think really solid business models and case studies are being brought forward that really prove that all of this "innovative e-learning" stuff is working. I never see Beyers Sellers/Robert Bloomfield bring forth and actual such business case study that applied all of these Metanomical newfangled thingies and succeeded. We never hear how Manpower or Kelly Girl or whatever really improved their bottom line and really saved dollars or trained people more effectively -- we merely have a wand waved in front of our faces with assurances that this might be so, or could be so, or will be so. Show me the money!
If I see jargon and lots of words that end in "ly" then I know it is from a bullshit artist con man. Too bad idiots swoon to the trill of nebulous shmuck and will pay to listen to it's uselessness in person.
Posted by: Ann Otoole | 08/03/2008 at 09:49 PM
This line kinda jumped out at me and I've been scratching me head over it a bit as I read through the rest of your post..
'She told me that criticism was ok but that I couldn't get "all flamey". See, that's what I mean. That's why these things amount not to "learning" but "indoctrination".'
So its indoctrination and not learning because she doesn't want someone being disruptive? Doesn't sound like anything out of the norm to me. Even if it was to take place in real life, live, with a bunch of other people who were interested in what the teacher/professor/whomever was speaking about, and someone was being disruptive and not adding to the topic, they'd be asked to leave too. By disruptive, or as she put it "flamey", I don't mean heated discussion, or even debating, but persistent interruption, going off topic, etc., you get the point.
So tell me please how this request she made makes this "indoctrination" and not "learning"? Last time I checked, being disruptive or "flamey" was unacceptable for any type of learning activity.
-Fox
Posted by: Fox Stirling | 08/03/2008 at 09:51 PM
No, Fox, that's not it at all. Criticism isn't disruption. In fact, what people in these little conformist e-groups (like Metanomics) want is to just have one or two "leaders" who guide the ideology and everybody else as enthusiastic cheerleaders. They don't want people questioning or even just using reason and common sense. They want everyone to be in a constant state of wooting and self-adulation and self-referentiality with regard to the project and the group.
I don't go "off topic," I criticize people and concepts that need criticizing. Often, for the group that is in worshop-mode, this is "off topic" because they expect only indoctrination.
"Flamey" is one of those perjorative ideas that comes from these heavily geeked up controlled forums that only have cheerleaders and amen-corners. People "out of step" are heavily and tribally discouraged. The concept has completely lost its legitimacy in a setting like SL where Lindens can bark crap at you like, "No philosophizing about how the world will be affected by interoperability".
In a setting where people are arbitrarily banned if they don't suck up to the devs or resmods, "flaming" has no meaning. It's a very capacious and often misused term.
In a real classroom, you would not likely find such adulatory zealous idiots because people tend to get very giddy online, and follow leaders much more slavishly and fear dissent much more, it's interesting to see.
I think that a course that is forcing you to adopt an ideology about how courses themselves should be taught online, instead of saying "let's discuss and debate and explore this" is "indoctrination". Whenever I see a wiki, I also can smell indoctrination because wikis are always run only by a few people who enforce homogenous thinking and conformism. It is very hard to edit a wiki outside the groupthink -- wikis, far from leading to genuine scientific collaboration, often dump down thinking and force people to imbibe whatever doctrine is laid out by those few with the time and the obsessiveness to fill up the wiki.
Education is not a software project. And yet once again, we aer seeing people apply the narrow concepts of their open-source extremism on how software should be made to every other human enterprise. Code writers are now experts on education, too, like everything else *cough*.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 08/03/2008 at 10:00 PM
A couple of points:
1) There's being critical during a discussion, and then there's being a jerk during a discussion. Most people know the difference (re: "flamey").
2) I mentioned it to you specifically because I thought you would bring a different and critical perspective to the conversation. If I weren't genuinely interested in constructive criticism, I wouldn't have mentioned it. I'm not some drooling fan-girl, I think some of the ideas have merit and some don't really resonate and I personally want to take the class to learn more about it.
3) This course is a) absolutely free b) set up explicitly as an experiment and exploration of the topic (not as if the model chosen is gospel) and c) taught by tenured faculty who hold academic appointments and who are credentialed and have written scholarly books. In fact, if you want academic credit for the course, you can register and pay for it.
For anyone else who might be interested, I personally think it's an interesting concept and one of the first attempts to define a learning theory that accounts for the existence of the internet - i.e. the fact that _so much_ information is now available so rapidly, and increasingly from anywhere (if you have access/resources, admittedly.)
I've posted about it at my blog (http://fleeptuque.com) and invite anyone else who may be interested to participate as well, either as part of the Second Life cohort I'm organizing or through some of the other means.
And for the record, the theory is called Connectivism. See http://www.connectivism.ca/about.html for the bullet point description.
Posted by: Fleep Tuque | 08/03/2008 at 10:26 PM
She did say that criticism was ok, but I suppose the line between constructive criticism and disruptive, "flamey" criticism (there is a difference) can be subjective depending on the target's opinion of the two.
Either way, I'm off the main topic here, so I'll leave it at that.
Posted by: Fox Stirling | 08/03/2008 at 10:26 PM
Fleep,
1. You said criticism was welcome, and you invited me to come because you thought I'd add something, but then you doubled back and admonished me and said "Don't be flamey". Sorry, but that's no good. If you think my criticism is flaming, then don't ask me to be in something. Don't give me little lectures like Beyers on Metanomics. That's bullshit, and you know full well that people heckle me in a group like that in the most outrageous and nasty ways, with no intervention, not only because of the colour-blindness and moral blindness of the mods and owners, but because my views are dissident views on the PC stuff like open source religious doctrine.
2. Having credentials and tenure doesn't impress me. I'm sorry. But there is an awful lot of dreck out there, especially in education, the last refuge of scoundrels.
3. I may join it ANYWAY and see how free something like this really is to accept criticism, as I suspect it will serve as a magnet to many PC types goggling avidly at the new collectivism.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 08/03/2008 at 11:08 PM
There are portions of this episode of Frontline that deal with the way some teachers are dealing with students familiarity and appetite for the Internet as a source of information. I wish they had expounded more upon this particular area. It is still interesting watching.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/kidsonline/
Posted by: Dirk Talamasca | 08/03/2008 at 11:58 PM
Prok, I found this discussion very interesting. Many of the "employed academics" you mention are finding themselves pulled in the opposite direction; they, more and more, do have students who see their learning as a business investment that increases their value as people in the job market.
Unfortunately, this gives them huge problems, which usually come down to having to choose between failing people and thus failing to satisfy their "customers", or passing everyone and destroying the value of their product. This is also combined with the fact that a downturn in the employment market in a particular field can reduce student numbers and cost the academics involved their jobs - but the academics can do nothing about it.
So if learning-for-the-sake-of-learning is making a comeback via social networking then this is probably a very good thing. You are, however, right that this needs to be allowed for economically somehow.
Posted by: Yumi Murakami | 08/04/2008 at 12:30 AM
I didn't mention tenure/credentials to impress you, but rather to address the comments in the 3rd paragraph of your post: "What are learning leaders and thought leaders? They aren't people recognized in a field in some old-fashioned way, by holding a position on a university faculty or having published a book of serious scholarship.."
Re-reading, I see that I may have taken that out of context, I thought that was a criticism of this particular course, but I think now maybe you meant that more generally about thought leaders.
As for the SL cohort, I'm hoping there will be a good mix of in world veterans and people who have not experienced Second Life before. In either case, I'll be facilitating the weekly discussions and will not tolerate anyone being abusive to you (or indeed to anyone else!), I'm hoping for a good conversation around the themes of the course.
Of course, if you participate via one of the other forums besides SL, I hope you post about your experience. I doubt I'll have time to check out all the options myself and I don't know if using SL will ultimately be of benefit or not. Guess we'll see!
Posted by: Fleep Tuque | 08/04/2008 at 12:34 AM
Fleep, I see "learning leaders" and "thought leaders" as jargon on every advertised seminar from here to breakfast. Everywhere. And the "leaders" are sometimes credentialed in some conventional way, but sometimes not, famous for being famous, for having published a book that is largely sold at seminars, all recursive.
Perhaps these Canadians are leaders in their field, but perhaps, as Yumi says, they are merely scrambling like all professors to be relevant to people who feel that for $40,000, they should be buying something is fairly automatic.
I'm tired of SL groups, Fleep. The people in them are insular, insecure, neuralgic, close-minded, and usually not very bright. I seldom find any smart people; I just find a lot of smart asses.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 08/04/2008 at 02:29 AM
Prokofy: "Unfortunately, rather than learning from the failures of the past decades' various collectivist and constructivist and child-centric theories to restore some basics, the new "learning leaders" merely want to dress these up in cyber clothing."
True. I'm afraid of this, too: There's a lot of obsolete ideology on its way in Metaverses (and the Net at all) regarding eLearning. - Where empirical data and assured knowledge is missing, obsolete or even obscure ideas rise.
Smile! Gerrit - We speak Online.
PS: I know Fleep as an open-minded, critical discussion partner. I'm interested to see her conclusions of the experiment.
Posted by: Gerrit Eicker | 08/04/2008 at 02:57 AM
“…we merely have a wand waved in front of our faces with assurances that this might be so, or could be so, or will be so. Show me the money!
I agree. Most of the guests in our Metanomics Archives (http://metanomics.net/archivesbydate) are seeing what is possible, and are willing to make the investment, but haven't turned a profit yet (or, if they are a non-profit, they haven’t found a way to achieve their mission more effectively in virtual worlds than in the real world). We are still in the experimental--and money-burning stage--of the metaverse. I am not sure I see a big problem with this. As an exec at virtual world developer Forterra told me back in the Fall, "we said we could start turning a significant profit, but our investors said "if you start making money now, you are doing it wrong." Their investors though it was time to be developing product and losing money, not making a profit. Profits come later.
However, next week we have a for-profit educator that seems poised to be profitable pretty quickly. Language Lab teaches English as a second language, and charges $24.95-$79.95 per student per month—in Second Life, mostly to people who have never heard of Second Life before, and came in entirely for the language instruction. I think their business concept is a winner, and I don’t say that simply because they are a sponsor. They use a staff of instructors and actor to immerse people in a foreign land, where they must use the native tongue in homes, restaurants, dance halls, job interviews and even airports.
It’s worth point out that this is an extremely traditional form of learning, except that they use Second Life. No “nonlinear dynamics of disruptive ecosystems” here. Just a simple story about being able to travel virtually to a foreign land to practice language skills virtually face-to-face with native speakers, but with no travel costs.
Finally, I wonder if Tony O’Driscoll and other connectivists are confusing education and learning with productivity. Virtual worlds allow virtual collaboration, and collaboration can be a great input to productivity (used wisely). But true learning is so often one person, alone with reading material. The traditional rule of thumb here at Cornell is three or four hours of study per contact hour in class. I don’t think reversing the ratio to allow more collaboration actually leads to better education. There is just too much to read and study and think about—alone—before you have something to say.
Posted by: Robert Bloomfield/ Beyers Sellers | 08/04/2008 at 10:34 AM
It is the function of those of us in the Information Technology departments at universities and colleges to investigate, present and even propose the suitable tools for use in education. The institutions we are employed by are the ones who pay the bills. Our reputations are on the line about what technologies we recommend. Therefore, it is essential that we see through the hype.
Posted by: California Condor | 08/04/2008 at 10:50 AM
Oh, I find that a load of crap, "If you are making money now, you are doing it wrong." Um, maybe you're just early at making the profit that is supposed to be down the road for everybody *cough*?
First of all, there *are* some projects that in fact *do* turn a profit, and find ways to do so (NMC for example). And obviously a non-profit isn't going to make a profit, but it can be monetarizing in some way to pay costs. It can be measuring the value -- and so far, it's mainly hype.
Language Lab strikes me not so much as "education" in the sense of the university, but a service, a business that provides a service needed in the marketplace, like computer operation. It has to turn a profit or it can't pay teachers. So it charges for the service.
So a combination of that business-like approach is needed, plus more of a frank commodificatino of education. It's the non-profit politically-correct squeamishness about doing that which both leaves the way open for a zillion cheap and dubious spammers to fill the attention space, and the failure to figure out how to measure and credential education outside of the ivy-covered walls. Sure, it's great to sit around and read Dostoevsky -- I did that. But at some point, if you wish to learn Russian and read Dostoevsky, there isn't any getting around the steps you have to go through one by one to master the language. In that sense, I think it's great that Language Lab is sticking to the simple story, which nobody has been able to improve upon much over the ages -- to learn a language, you have to simulate life situations and talk to natives. What better place than Second Life? But why can't chemistry be done this way, or law? (Of course, if it were, that would ruin the prestige of all the pompous lawyers running around SL trying to credential themselves online as "international lawyers forging the New Age).
Sure it's hard to take something like "Shakespeare" or "Comparative Religion" and box it up in such a fashion, and yet, schools will be forced to do this, because somebody else will if they don't.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 08/04/2008 at 11:18 AM
Greetings
You bring up some interesting points. Thank you for your insights even if many of the points raised were a trite hackneyed, for an old hack like me.
It is a pity you are so long-winded. A summary of your points would be most apropos methinks.
For someone who claims to espouse old-fashioned values, you seem to have missed the lessons on concision and cogency. This is a pity. May I suggest you take a class in old-fashioned rhetoric? It would help you to communicate in a cogently old-fashioned way.
May I venture a piece of advice? Adopting a holier-than-thou tone, as you seem to do in your missive, is more likely to get the reader to scoff at your ideas rather than cogitate on them. Personally, though, I find that your energy, and an apparent need for provocation, has a certain charm.
Oh dear, it seems that I am being a holier-than-thou prig at your expense. As an old-fashioned advocate that should please you, should it not?
Posted by: Michel Labour | 08/04/2008 at 11:57 AM
Um, I've taken classes in old-fashioned rhetoric in college years ago. So? I'm not going to be changing anything about the way I do things. You can skim.
In fact, you may have been affected more than you think by the truncating and dumbing down of texts online.
Yes, I'm happy to validate that yes, you are a prig.
Do you imagine you are the first to tell me to write shorter, and not to take a forceful stance with my opinions? and you won't be the last. I won't be changing anything about my "tone". In fact, it works quite well in countering the holier-than-thou tone of these e-learning e-vangelists whom you never bothered to counter yourself, now, did you? They are insufferable.
I wonder when people like you make these little hortatory interventions what they imagine the results to be. "Gosh, I never realized that, guess I will completely change course, truncate all my writings and bow and scrape and feign humility with the rest of them" lol. Seriously, that's ridiculous. I'll be doing no such thing.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 08/04/2008 at 12:37 PM
A thing unmeasured is also uncontrolled and potentially of negative value. That is why people who really care about productivity in their corporations not only have trainings (which may be home grown or may include such seminars), but also measure as much as possible the prior/post training differences.
It turns out that such measurements show that there is a short term boost to productivity no matter *what* methodology you use for team building or trainings. The reason is simply a placebo effect created from the fact that you did *something*.
There is an old piece of research where GE or some similar company (I don't have time to look up the reference) went out and changed the lighting to be brighter to help the factory workers. Productivity increased. Then they went and put the old lighting back in, claiming that (after a suitable waiting period) that the bright lighting was creating glare.
Productivity increased.
It had nothing to do with the lighting of course; it had everything to do with employees noticing that they were being paid attention to.
I have noticed similar effects myself when we institute some harebrained idea... unless the idea is actively destructive, there is a short term benefit. Sometimes you even hit upon something that "sticks": those are the things we keep and repeat.
Companies that do trainings live off of this placebo effect. It continues to work unless your people are embittered enough that they see through the charade.
Posted by: John Lopez | 08/04/2008 at 04:07 PM
That was Western Electric, at their Hawthorne Works near Chicago, hence the name "Hawthorne Effect." No matter what the researchers tried, efficiency went up--and they eventually realized that the cause was that the subjects were treated decently.
Posted by: Melissa Yeuxdoux | 08/04/2008 at 06:48 PM
The focus of 'connectivism' for both George and Stephen is the 2D Web.. blogs, wikis etc. Neither have indepth experience with Second Life or other virtual worlds. Fleep, I will be attending this 'course??' myself, as I did the Connectivism Conference held online in 2007. This is not new, but does require a good critical eye. There have been critiques regarding connectivism as a 'learning theory' and from an historical view from those who specialize in computer science. I myself am sitting on the fence and hesitate to use this concept until there are people who would like to seriously look at it.
Posted by: Zana Kohime | 08/05/2008 at 11:24 AM
Hi Prok,
I appreciate your comments on e-vasion. I think many of us in education are trying to make sense of what's going on. How is technology impacting society? How are different tools influencing communication? What does this do to validity of concepts/information? Obviously, anyone with web access can create content and share with others. For most people, a desire to belong to a group exceeds the desire to think critically. As such, groups of like-thinkers form and pursue a particular line of thought, creating their own mini-gods and attendant rules.
Your criticism of fluff (though you said it more colorfully) is important - we do need to question concepts and ideas...and evaluate what level/type of evidence exists to support our claims. With this "course", I'm hoping we'll have an opportunity to have meaningful conversations with others who share a desire to try and explain what's changing in society and how we ought to react in order to stay relevant. But "relevant" may mean that our education systems takes on a dramatically different feel than it has now. Illich's notion of learning webs offer possible insight.
But we don't know. We are feeling our way in the dark. Connectivism was an attempt to feel my way. Some will find it to be a useful framework. Others won't. This course is an attempt to more fully define how broader changes impact how we learn. I will consider it a success if it generates a reasonable level of discourse - for and against - and begins to form a base on which we can evaluate the gap between what we are doing and what we ought to be doing...
George
Posted by: George Siemens | 08/05/2008 at 08:14 PM
Hi George, I'm glad you're taking a thoughtful and critical approach rather than the usual thin-skinned justification one constantly sees in social media especially when related to education and libraries.
You never said a truer word with the comment, "For most people, a desire to belong to a group exceeds the desire to think critically." That's SL in spades. That's SL through and through, and what makes it so loathsome, especially on activities like the JIRA.
Take a ride through the SL Jira at jira.secondlife.com if you want to see the horrors of modern technology and its affect on communication and "participatory software design". We are living inside software. I tell you, SL is the place to be to see how all these social media things actually work and influence people, as they are right there, and their feedback is right there, and you don't have to guess -- and it's all in concentrated and accelerated form. Everything about Twitter was anticipated even as far back as the Sims Online stalker button, everything that rose up as an issue on Twitter about tracking could have been seen in the SL "mute".
The early Well culture and Linuxy geeky culture has been tremendously damaging, horribly restrictive, with all its terribly limiting tribalistic notions of "troll" or "patch or GTFO" or "if you don't like it, leave" etc.
I simply don't share your idea that "we don't know" or "we are felling our way" as I feel we have been immersed in it for 8 years at least, through TSO and SL and other online virtual communities. There isn't a lot of critical writing about this genre and these experiences but there is a lot of blogging and journalism and I think that counts and it's important to keep the record for scholars to come.
I don't think you need to form exotic new theories about things oh, E.M. Forrester said with "Only connect" in the last century and have been around since the dawn of time. I think in fact you have to take a very weather eye to inclinations to simply resurrect old discredited collectivist theories and rewarm them up on the Internet.
Perhaps there are aspects like acceleration, but it seems to me with a lot of the social media, you are merely mastering a tool and its set of features and the lingo and banter on that particular site, with its particular culture. It's a language so often without any content that is about the tool itself.
I find that in the SL educational world, where the course is about...having a build in SL. Or about "digital arts" or "communications and its affect on groups" or something endlessly recursive. So in that sense, it feels precious and self-referential, and not normal and useful.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 08/05/2008 at 10:49 PM