Crash course in learning theory

You are really passionate about helping people learn, right? If not, you are probably reading the wrong blog. Are you feeling that the information passing model of elearning sucks? Want to get the best advice? Read on.

Kathy Sierra from The Creating Passionate Users has written a wonderful Crash course in learning theory. Since she also provided a summary pdf, so let's put her theory into practice.

OK, now print out the first seven pages from this summary pdf. Yes, I know I have been advocating paper-less office, so only the first 7 pages, NOT the whole pdf.

With a pencil in your writing hand (mine is the right hand, what's yours?) and the print-out in front of you, go to Crash course in learning theory and start reading, taking notes as you work thought the post.

Go, read it and come back afterwards. Press that [back] button, ok?


















Welcome back, now check your hand written notes. What? You have not got any written notes? Go back, try again.














Welcome back again. OK, compare your hand written notes with the last two pages of the summary pdf. How do you score? Laminate your notes and hang them up in front of you. Read daily!

I Will

via Blue Skunk Blog via ....


The original post is about the difference between learning with technology and without technology.

Doug Johnson added the angle from teachers.

Please make sure you read these lists. Wonderful reading any way.

The cost of a laptop per year? - $250

The cost of teacher and student training? – Expensive

The cost of well educated US citizens and workforce? - Priceless

Picture credit:
http://doug-johnson.squarespace.com/blue-skunk-blog

The World is Flat

a presentation by Thomas Friedman, author of The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century via OLDaily

This is a brillant presentation and worth the bandwidth and time to veiw the whole presentation. If you are going to miss the most, don't miss the last 10 minutes when Thomas talked about how the flatting of the world will affect our future - how to prepare ourselves and our kids to participate in this flattened world.

When the collaborative tools are available to everyone, the difference is in the ability to imagine, the ability to create. It is important to think positive and be creative positively.

Smart Power Strip

We, elearning professional, use computer and monitors, right? How often do you switch off your computer AND monitor when finished?

I use my laptop mainly these days because I can use both the laptop screen and a second attached monitor so that I have more screen estate. When I am not going to use my laptop for a while, I close the lid which will automatically put it to hibernation. In that mode, my monitor would theoretically auto turn-off and go into standby mode. However, it is still comsuming some power - the standby transformer of the laptop and the standby power of the monitor.

It does not sound saving a lot of energy if the power board can automatically switch off the power supplied to the standby device. But this is what this piece of cool tool does and I think it really matters.

This is so simple. You plug your PC into the main socket, and then plug your printer, scanner, monitor etc into the other sockets. When you turn off your computer, the smart unit shuts the power off to the other sockets. Saves power from constantly-on transformers, saves the environment, and saves lives from electrical fires caused by overheated DC adaptors.

I have read (but cannot verify) that there is a 90% lost during journey for the power generated at the power station to our home. That's every Joule saved at the consumer end will save 10 Joules at the generator! When added up, that would help.

I am going to buy a few if I can find an Australian version.

GreaseMonkey and Equivalents in other browsers

from Information Research, Vol. 10 No. 4, July, 2005

In case you don't know what is GreaseMonkey:

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML ("user scripts") to any Web page to change its behavior.

Here, the article listed some efforts to make the same functions available to the other browsers, in case you still have not switched over to Firefox.

Two scripting extensions have just been introduced for Internet Explorer: Trixie and Turnabout. The Opera browser supports user scripts, and Apple's Safari browser has a plugin called PithHelmet.

I have not checked them out and am wondering if the scripts are inter-changeable with GreaseMonkey.

Standardised Tests and Teachers' Pay

via Autono Blogger which leads me to Apcampbell reference to an New York Times article: Houston Ties Teachers' Pay to Test Scores.

HOUSTON, Jan. 12 - Over the objections of the teachers' union, the Board of Education here on Thursday unanimously approved the nation's largest merit pay program, which calls for rewarding teachers based on how well their students perform on standardized tests.
...
The pay incentives are to be based on three components, or "strands."

One will reward teachers based on how much their school's test scores have improved compared with the scores of 40 other schools with similar demographics around the state. Another will compare student progress on the Stanford 10 Achievement test and its Spanish-language equivalent to that of students in similar classrooms in the Houston district. The third measure will be student progress on the statewide Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test, as compared with that in similar Houston classrooms.

Interesting? I hope that our Howard Government does not know about this!

I came from Hong Kong, with an educational system based on examinations. I, myself, was a victim of the system as I was a late bloomer. I knew how to teach students to score high marks in standardised tests quite early in my teaching career.

Many young boys and girls have passed through my classroom, some very smart and performed very well in public examinations as well as very successful today; others less successful both in public examinations and today's life. BUT, equally important to note is that there are many who were not very good at public examination have become very successful in life and vice verse. Although there seems to be a statistical correlation between public examination results and success in life, however, I would be very foolish to draw the conclusion that public examination results and success in life is a causal relationship. It seems to me that the success factor is not the result, but the attitude.

Linking teachers' reward to standardised test performance is still one more step more remote to determine the success of a student.

The problem of designing an incentive system for teachers is the lack of tools for valid measurement. In many cases, the effort of a teacher would not be appreciated until many years afterwards. When the administration executives are basing their reward packages in short intervals (5 years?), they will not have the vision nor the will to look for long term benefits which cannot be measured in the short term.

We have also seen a gradual decline in the particpation of joining the teaching profession. In Australia, education faculty is one of the faculty admitting students at the lowest possible entry level. Some join the profession based on a passion, many enter the education faculty as a second or last choice.

The social status of teachers are not high too, pay not great, work load high and working environment bad. Who will join the teaching profession?

However, it is the time when educating our next generation is one of the most important and rewarding investment a government can make. As the society is entering a post-industrial era, when information becomes freely available, when repetitive tasks are taken over by automation, when low cost productions are out-sourced to developing countries, now is the time for the government to ensure that our next generation can compete in the new economy. The new wealth will depend on creativity, on new ways of manufacturing and on new ideas. In short, creative, adaptive and highly motivated citizens.

These young people, when they enter the work force, will need to have such a high productivity that one working person may need to support three to four dependents.

There is no sure way to achieve that. But Chinese traditional wisdom is to invest in education. Physical wealth or intellectual properties can be destroyed by war, change of policy or any circumstances beyond our control. The ability to adapt and adopt, the ability to create and survive (the result of sound education) stays with us.

Standardised tests measure conformance, even when they are effective. But we no longer need interchangeable workers in an assembly line. We need individual who are uniquely suited to solve unique problems on a daily basis. I don't think standardised tests can predict the achievement of these type of citizens.

Not Invented Here

Christopher D. Sessums left a comment in D’Arcy Norman's post: Albert Ip on Learning Objects.

Here at my uni, we seem to operate under a “not invented here” motif, i.e., if it wasn’t created by me, I’m not going to use it in my class.

That is a very sad situation. As a high school teacher for nearly 20 years, I was native enough not to recognise this situation when I was doing my PhD. Bascially, the virtual apparatus framwork was very similar to "learning engine" project by another staff member at the unit I was doing the study. At that time, VAF was demonstratively a better idea. The Director has asked us to work to produce a consolidated solution and I agreed. However, once the agreement was reached, the project started a nose-dive. Was that NIH in its full glory?

That was almost 8 years ago. Thing has changed today?

In the book Co-Opetition : A Revolution Mindset That Combines Competition and Cooperation : The Game Theory Strategy That's Changing the Game of Business (Paperback) the authors argue that

your competitor does not have to fail for you to win. Conversely, you don't have to fail either. Your failure, in fact, can hurt your competitor. It is better, the authors assert, to have both cooperation and competition.

I have also jokingly remarked many times that R&D as in research and development actually stands for "repeat and duplicate". It is through repeating an experiment that scientific theory gets established. It is through duplication that techniques are learnt and you climbed to the back of the giant before you.

It is really very sad to see academic, who should have understood this better than everyone else not to acknowledge the work of the colleagues and whole-heartedly adopt other's good practice. In my humble opinion, it is the first step of further innovation and discovery.

Argubly, NIH may as well explain why people cannot agree on a common understanding of "learning object" - everyone wants to put a spin on it.

Virtual World and Real Life

Clickable Culture has a post describing the bad feeling left behind to the Second Life citizens by a real life company carrying out a failed experiment in Second Life.

I don't have any details about the experiment and hence not in any position to make any comment.

However, I know that there are many educators, tempted by the low cost availability of virtual world are looking at virtual worlds as a platform for teaching and learning.

I have been, and am now still not convinced that a virtual world with citisens of anything beyond your own class will be a good platform for simulations, role play or rule-based for educational purposes. I would question the wisdom of dropping a learner to the deep end of the pool in order to teach swimming. The very nature of simulation is to reduce the complexity into a certain level which will provide a reasonable challenge to the learners, yet provide a safe environment for making mistakes and not overwhelming with complexity beyond the current level of the learner.

A persistent world, by its very nature, will have different levels of sophisticated participants. This is not necessary not a good or bad thing. However, from a teacher's point of view, getting the group to focus on specific agenda will become more difficult once people beyond the class participate in the activity. In the virtual world, some of the dangerous acts would have less consequence, we may, hence consider virtual world meeting the requirement of providing a safe environment for making mistakes. Unlike simulation which start from fresh everytime, the persistence of the world will mean any mistake will presist as well. Again, whether such persistence of mistakes is good or bad for instructional purpose is very much depend on how it is being used.

I am not drawing any conclusion at the moment. This serves as a "progress report" of my effort to understand how virtual world may be used educationally.

Game As Critic As Art

via Clickable Culture

For those like me who cannot read any Spanish, there is an abridged English translation to the essay accompanying the event:

• Part 1: Reverse-engineering; the reward of defeat; new systems of social justice.
• Part 2: Simulated violence to denounce real violence.
• Part 3: Educating with games. Against the simplification proposed by the game industry.
• Part 4: Case-study of two proposals.
• Part 5: Recommendations, diffusion, investigation.

The essay listed many games designed to convey a social message. While a number of these games are not in English, but the translation still gives you an idea of what that is about. In particular, please make sure you read Part 4

videogames are a great medium to convey political and social messages because they can relate between themselves hundreds of variables in the same time. It doesn't mean that games can model perfectly a society, but at least, they can help players get a better understanding of complex situations.

Interactive Learning Fails Reading Test (Or Does It?),

via OLDaily

What I am not happy about is the reporter who reported this story in the first place and the "quality checking" procedure of the publishing "journal". This should not have been published in the first place AND it does not have any value for the general uninformed readers.

Rather, I would like to use this as a springboard for another topic.

In the Slahdot discussion, b17bmbr (608864) said,

I am a high school teacher (seven years junior high 3 years high school) and have yet to find a piece of software that is effective and better than a more traditional approach.

Well, let me describe to you a sucessful use of technology by Mary Noggle. She is currently teaching literacy to a group of radiologists in her community college. She searched the web and found some interesting cases involving radiologists in a hospital. She devised a scenario based on the cases and asked her students to roleplay different fictional characters devised. Using a discussion forum, her students enjoyed the experience. While she admits that it is not as good as running a full role play simulation using Fablusi, it is good enough to get her students very engaged.

Technology is always a tool. The art of helping people learn still lies in the hand of the teachers. Hoping to have a software to automate this process is a false expectation - at least with today's technology.

Despite All Our Games

by Shannon Drake

Games are addictive for the same reason anything pleasurable is addictive: Our brains give us little pats of wonderful chemicals when we do enjoyable things. Sometimes the wiring wins.

Shannon asserts that despite all these years of evolution, we are still simple organisms subject to Skinner's behaviourism like a rat in a cage, as demonstrated by the undoubtfully additive power of games. Do the educators miss anything?

Games and game designers have been telling us a number of things, see e.g. Educational Games Don't Have to Stink! Now we can add to this list that it is the triggering of pleasure which makes games additive. How can we make courses pleasurable so that students are constantly being pat by "wonderful chemicals when we do enjoyable things"?.

RIP-ping on Learning Objects

via OLDaily

I have urged people to stop the debate and get real. I don't know why I am on this again. Perhaps my interest is still alive. Perhaps it is from David Wiley which I cannot afford to miss.

Those familiar with my work will notice that David's argument is almost the same as mine. You don't expect I have something to add, don't you? WRONG! Read on.

Just a bit of history to fill you in why I developed the thinking I have today. I started my journey into modular, reusable construction of learning resources with the concept of "virtual apparatus framework". The first proposed specification dated back to 25th August, 1997. At that time, I recognised that there will always be technical requirements for educators to compose an interactive and engaging webpage. I found Paul Fritz's Director based components extremely interesting, but he was primarily only interested in Director-based development. One of his tool is a graphing tool which can both display different types of curvea and recognise the curve drawn by a student using Bezier curve fitting techniques. Comparison to standard answers can be done by noting the starting point, the end point, the starting gradient, any (and location if any) characteristics etc. He also has another component which can interact with his graphing tool by sending commands between different components. At the time, I was independently working on similar concepts based on Live-connect, Java-applet and javascripts on webpages. I saw the value of a common standard approach to integrate all these together, hence the "virtual apparatus framework" proposal. Unfortunately, for political reasons, we did not further any work.

Back to the present. David wrote about "localisation" in his post. I suppose by localisation, he did not mean translating an English webpage to a Chinese webpage. If I have read him correctly, localisation means modifying the learning resource (or whatever you want to call it) to fit the learning context at hand. He cited resources in format such as "Flash files, Java applets, Photoshop images with many layers, and the like". To me, localisation means the ability of *any* educator to take a digital learning resource and makes the necessary changes herself. Is that a big ask? Yes, it is. Frankly, with my technical skills (I wrote Fablusi all by myself) and daily work related to learning technology, I am not confident to say that I can do that. The creation of Paul's graphing tool is not just programming skills in Director. It also involves good understanding of mathematics and digital graphics.

So, what is the next possible scenario?

What about creating a webpage with all these wonderful resources embedded within? Yes, that's much closer to the expected skill set of educators.

I realised that creating "content" is the easy part. The demanding skill is in creation of interesting interactions either among the students or between student and content. I believe it is still true today. One of the contributing factors to the success of blog in education is the easy of creation and use!

To me, in the term "learning object", we should emphasis on the "object-oriented programming" characteristics of object. These objects should have well defined "behaviour" and can be easily controlled by external parameters or commands. In addition to the graphing tool, what about an image viewer which will show different layers controlled by the students or the teacher while within the context of the learning at hand? Easy to create, yes. Can anyone just rip out one in an hour? I don't think so. I believe a lot of teacher will find this object very useful!

The ultimate ideal is all these wonderful "learning objects", when embedded in a webpage will behave co-operatively. That's the "virtual apparatus framework" dream.


*Fritze, P. & Ip, P. (1998). Learning Engines - a functional object model for developing learning resources for the Web. In T Ottman & I Tomek (Eds.), Proceedings of ED_MEDIA & ED-TELECOM 98 Conference. (pp. 342-7). Frieburg: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education.

Kennedy, D. & Fritze, P. (1998). An interactive graphing tool for Web-based courses. In T Ottman & I Tomek (Eds.), Proceedings of ED_MEDIA & ED-TELECOM 98 Conference. (pp.703-8). Frieburg: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education.

Ip, A. & Fritze, P. (1998). Supporting component-based courseware development using Virtual Apparatus Framework script. In T Ottman & I Tomek (Eds.), Proceedings of ED_MEDIA & ED-TELECOM 98 Conference. (pp. 597-602). Frieburg: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education.

Realities: physical, virtual, imagined & rendered physical

I have been very interested in virtual world such as Second Life and its application in education and training.

My argument has been that it would be better to activate the learner's imagination to create the reality rather than designer's imagination. However, again as I always maintain, it is a matter of choosing the right tool for the right job.

Today, I have posted Looking beyond 2020 - rendered physical reality in Learning 2020. With the advent of rendered physical reality, the matrix of tools obviously increased and we need to think beyond the current box.

Knowledge and Information, are they the same? Take 2

Since I wrote Knowledge and Information, are they the same?, I am becoming more and more uncomfortable when these two terms are used interchangeably. A strong feeling is growing inside me that said without a proper understanding of the difference between externalised information and internally coherent knowledge that we have, it would be very difficult to fully understand how learning may be best advanced. I am not a philosopher, so I don't know much about any previous debate/discussion in this area, if you can point me to any resource, it will be highly appreciated. Anyway, the following paragraphs explain why I am feeling so uneasy about this.

The essence of the "knowledge" and "information" distinction is the recognition of the boundary between "me" and "the rest of the world".  Knowledge is part of me (obviously one other part is the material (my body) which supported my biology existence), my being, my conscienceness.  This knowledge has been built to the current state via all the sensory inputs that I have been able to utilise.

I am not a good writer.  I know prefectly well that the words that I put down do not reflect 100% what I really want to say.  I also know that the way you interpret these words may be quite different from how I have interpreted and will interpret these words.  I also know that no matter how hard working I am as a writer, I will never be able to write down ALL of my knowledge.  So as externalized information, all my writings combined will only represent a small part of the knowledge that I have.  

Since the start of humanity, we have been trying to externalised our knowledge and trying to pass that onwards. With the advent of printing, these externalised partial knowledge (information as I prefer to call them today) of many great minds have been accumulating faster and faster, to the point that I will never able to read them all and hence will never be able to incorporate them all into my knowledge.  With today's technology, lots of them are at my finger tips. I will be contantly enchanted and enlightened by more reading and hence extending my knowledge.  But before I get the chance to read them, these externalised information, remains as "non-knowledge" to me.

Does this great collection of manifestations constitute as knowledge? If I own a copy of such manifestation, can I say I own that knowledge? Or, can I say I know the "partial knowledge the writer tried to manifest in that information"?

So in order for a piece of information to become part of my knowledge, I need to exert certain effort to make that information cross the "me" and "not me" boundary AND incorporate that into my current knowledge.

I suppose "learning" is this effort.

Pedagogy is the art of

• convincing someone to put in the effort to get information across and to be integrated to be their knowledge
• helping people to make this effort more effortless :-)
• directing them to some sources of such information

I prefer not to call this process as knowledge transfer. Obviously, giving a learner a pointer to some information is only a small part towards helping the learner to learn.

Let's take some action

It seems that the debate of "learning objects" has been heating up again. I am tired of this. It is time that we take some action.

Here is what I think the current situation is:

1. We cannot arrive at a common definition/understanding, not in the near future. In fact, I don't believe we can in any timeframe.


2. The current meaning attached to LO only serves a "information as knowledge" model. It does not server other pedagogical paradigms


3. The concept of re-use, and inter-operability are still valid and should be encourage. [Associated with re-use is the issue of discoverablity. Associated with interoperability is the issue of standardisation.]


4. The current most commonly adopted model is SCO from SCORM. However, SCO only does the communication with a LMS for tracking purposes. There are a limited number of data storing capability by LMS (such as student names, scores, etc.)


5. SCO as an aggregation unit only helps courses compilation. It does not contribute to the production of quality learning content.


6. SCO supports a solo learning model, not in alignment with the social constructistic paradigms.

Here is what I think we (people interested in technology-based learning) can and we should do. Stop the debate and get real. Accept that there are more than one best way to learn and support the multiple views of learning objects.

For those who subscribe to "information transfer" model:

1. There are different atomic sizes for LO. The most important thing is that it is useful to solve at least one problem for you, be it re-use, simplification of workflow, better design, nicer look... Do NOT claim the high ground and ended up useless. (e.g. the most re-usable atomic size of digital object is bit. But that is totally useless in our field of endeavour!)


2. SCO as a building block for a course is a good start. We are going to work upwards as well as downwards.


3. Interoperability of courses involves recognising the learning outcome and skill level. This requires understanding of work such as recognisation of previous experience and so on. I am NOT interested in this. So, someone please pick this up.


4. We should also see the benefit of building blocks to be used within a SCO. A way to make all the building blocks to appear, at least for look and feel, has been suggested. [Overcoming the Presentation Mosaic Effect of Multi-Use Sharable Content Objects from Implementation Issues of SCORM]


5. The problem of storing SCOs at different repositories (with different domains) has been solved also.


6. Adding interactivity (ie make the building blocks look slightly more intelligent by adding appropriate javascript) can be done using Unobtrusive Javascript. This is worth investigating. (e.g. sortable table, rich-text input fields, drag & drop and others, tree control...)


7. For a background data source support, we can use AJAX frameworks.


8. For interoperability among the building blocks, we can use virtual apparatus framework

For those who subscribe to "social constructivitistic" paradigms:

1. Continue to use blog, RSS, discusson forum as our building blocks (ie LO :-) ).


2. Use websites as objects and integrate the functionalities into your coursea.


3. Read Stephen Downe's OLDaily.

For the rest of us:
Pick from whatever that suit the job at hand. Why argue! Get the job done and move on with it.

Request for Action
OK, enough of this. Here is what on the table.
I have this "virtual apparatus framework" concept for a long long long... time. I have also this web site as well. I am happy to continue to pay for the hosting and will install a wiki to it if there are more than 10 people interested in taking on board this idea of interoperability between building blocks and start from fresh if deem fit. Let me know and I will do something.

My Learning Outcome of the "Britannica Vs Wikipedia Debate"

I have been following the development of "Britannica Vs Wikipedia Debate", see here , here and here without really drawing any conclusion. Smelly Knowledge added yet another point of view, The Emergence of Meaning: Wikipedia As Object-Centered Sociality.

If we can accept that an article is a manifestation (one of many) of the author's knowledge of a subject matter and that the knowledge (or understanding) is in a constant changing stage, I can cope with the debate and may be able to take a side.

Articles in Britannica are the compromised manifestation of a group of people (called writers here after) selected by a group of editors.	Wikipedia is a massively multiparticipant distributed collection of articles which are, again, manifestations of the writers of these articles.
I don't know about the article writing process in Britannica, but I would suppose that there may be disagreements of the manifestation among the writers AND the final version is the result of an EDITORIAL process.	There are disagreement of the manifestation as tracked in the history and compromise process is done via the public discussion which is also publicly available - a different EDITORIAL process.
The editors who selected the writers are not themselves active participants of the community interested in the subject matter. This is a matter of "knowing who". OK, put it bluntly, the editors are not expert in the field!	The writers are self-selected. This is a matter of "knowing what". Presumably, the writers are active participants of the subject matter community. Here "self ego" applies. [The writers probably think they are the expert in the field.]
Britannica is part of a business whose objective is to maximize the return of investment. I am not saying whether it is good or bad at the point, just pointing out the fact and the implications. Hence, the subject matter of articles are selected to meet the need of the majority of potential readers. Obviously there would be a cut-off point where it was considered not worthy of inclusion if the number of potential readers of a particular article falls below a certain number. The long tail is typically cut off!	The business model of wikipedia does not depend on tight economic rationale to maximize return of investment. The cost of inclusion of articles catering for a small reader is near zero and hence not a factor in the decision in whether it should be included or not.

I cannot agree to the position that says "Let Wikipedia Be Wikipedia". Both Brittanica and Wikipedia are in the same market place competiting for market share (among other competitors). They both serve the need as a first place to look when someone encounters a new subject matter.

I also cannot agree to the position that says wikipedia is a little slop at the microscale [as] the price of such efficiency at the macroscale. [The Probabilistic Age] In time, Wikipedia would be efficient at microscale too. But Brittanica and Wikipedia are self-correcting (ie when errors or faults are found, later editors would correct them). However, Wikipedia obviously has a much shorter revision cycle and thus allow the self-correction to happen faster and more efficiently. There is not probability operating here. Yes, we may apply statistical methods to compare the articles against the illusive scale of quality. When you randomly pick an article, the quality of the article as measured may be calculated from the statistic as a probability. Each and every article has its own quality scale determined by the community of practice and frankly within any community of practice, I don't think a common quality scale can be defined easily.

Authorship and authority looks too similar to my liking (English is not my first langauge!). The fact that one has authored an article in a subject domain does not automatically assign the status of authority to that author. The days when only a selected few can author have long gone. Reputation is likely to be a good indicator of the authority status in a subject domain. However, reputation is NOT citation count. (I jokingly suggested that I could increase my citation count of an article by writing really stupidly and attacking the popular authors. Most of these authors would reply and hence my citation increases.) Reputation also does not diminish by being anonymous.

Being published by a reputable publisher also does not ensure reliability of information. An efficient self-correction mechanism is much valuable to the users of the information (at least in the market where Brittanica and Wikipedia are operating).

When there is no SINGLE best manifestation of any knowledge, the next best thing we can have is a dynamic manifestation of that knowledge domain, maintained by the community involved with that knowledge domain and have a short self-correction cycle.

Those academics who refuse to accept references to wikipedia from their students, please rethink your position. I don't think your argument is strong enough if you take away your self-interest.

My verdict: I will use wikipedia as my first point of research when I encounter a new subject domain.

Knowledge as an Object?

Artichoke has left a wonderful comment to Libraries, e-learning & Games.

I have been struggling to identify why I am made uncomfortable by many of the claims about LOs and showcased examples in my edu_blog www.artichoke.typepad.com

Do you think the answer lies in that LO's often represent "knowledge as an object" which doesn't fit well with contemporary understandings of learning.

I identified well with the uncomfortable feeling and have been struggling to make sense out of this confusion myself. To me, two of the sources of such uneasiness may due to

1. our interchangeable use of the words "knowledge" and "information" which are not necessarily the one and the same thing.


2. learning is considered the same as acquiring "knowledge", hence building collection of information IS ASSUMED to be learning.

[Knowledge and Information, are they the same?]

If we can accept that information is external to us and knowledge is our internal constructs of the world, things started to feel a little better. Yes, reading is ONE way of importing information, but will that import stays depend on yet another set of conditions. I would argue that pedagogy is the art of helping people to efficiently acquire and expand people's internal world.

When a scientist discovers a new way of doing thing or interpreting the world, she may publish as papers, she may also give lectures on the discovery. These papers and lectures are manifestations of her new-found understanding (knowledge) AND these manifestations are not necessarily the same. Another scientist after reading from the paper may repeat the experiment, the thought-process or argument. Such processes help him to import the manifestations to become part of his knowledge (also verify that the new discovery is inline with the community understanding at the time). Many great discovery started as a controversy and was not accepted by the community!

When I am co-authoring a paper with someone else, this can be interpreted as we are trying to come to a compromise of a manifestation of our individual understandings of the subject matter. If we are really passionate about the subject matter, any disagreement in the manifestation (temporary as in the form of drafts) will cause great changes in our individual knowledge internally until we can arrive at a mutually agreeable position. Is that learning? I suppose yes.

Learning communities are great way for the active members of the community to learn. Other may learn equally efficiently by reading elsewhere or vicarious participation in learning communities. Learning ecology is one way of cultivating learning communities, but I don't believe it is the ONLY way of promoting learning. Human is flexible enough to approach things in different ways under different situation.

Aviators, Moguls, Fashionistas and Barons: Economics and Ownership in Second Life

This paper, which you can download in pdf format via the links describes the result of allowing exchange of digital creation within Second Life and the potential of being a valuable learning tool.

Some [players in Second Life] have even setup databases in the real world, tracking inventory, sales, and customer data from their multiple stores within Second Life. Using this data, they adjust product lines, prices, and advertising, acquiring skills and knowledge that would be acquired at far greater financial risk in the real world. For example, residents have discovered that Sunday is the largest shopping day in Second Life and that attractive but simple displays generate more sales. Undoubtedly, some will eventually transfer their newfound business acumen back into the real world.

Reliability of information

The argument of the validity and reliability of online information, such as wikipedia, has been a focus of discussion.

"Cloning pioneer did fake results, probe finds", New Scientist reported. The flawed study was published in May 2005 by Hwang and colleagues in Science (vol 308 p 1777).

Is there a way for Science to attach a note (or some kind of notice) to readers of this particular article in all its circulating copies that the work reported in the paper has been found deliberately fabricated?

I believe wikipedia, in fact most online publications, would be able to do this quite easily.

Libraries, e-learning & Games

Stephen Downes said [OLDaily, December 23, 2005] "Librarians and libraries will play a key role in e-learning". I would argue that opportunities of librarians and libraries to play a very significant role in e-learning existed almost from day one. Back in the early days when IEEE was embarking on its journey to produce standards for learning technologies, Frank Farance was defending his definition and described that learning objects as the result of the association of learning assets (reusable learning resources) with LOM (learning object metadata). [What is a learning object, technically?] The notion of metadata is very much from library science (may be "reinvented" by those uninitiated IT partitioners).

While comparing Circulating Libraries and Video Rental Stores, Richard Roehl and Hal R. Varian looked at the history of libraries circa 1725-1850 which, according to them, were not much different from Video Rental Stores, including the role of erotic content in fueling their growth. Obviously, since then, the role the libraries have evolved to become, as Les Gasser, Associate Professor for Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,

what he would dub the ‘b-model': a box of books, an institution that organizes and stores information as a free service to the community and as a cost effective way to promote knowledge in society, [reference]

It is interesting to note that after acquiring the rew role,

there's pressure to maintain this box of books status quo, and deep historical conflicts to keep “low culture” from invading the institution through battles against adding fiction, paperbacks, children's picturebooks, A/V media, and toys to collections.[reference ditto]

As libraries continue to evolve and find their new roles in the new digital era, a recent report from the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) as summarised by Stephen Downes:

recommends that librarians take the lead in the consolidation of Learning Object Repository management and licensing practices, in order to bring an orderly approach to management and use of shared instructional across Canada.

Comparing this with the conclusion from the Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium, as written by in the Event Wrap up that suggests libraries should embrace

beyond simply adding console titles, gaming magazines, and strategy guides to public collections – though all were suggested practices – and into ways gaming might be strategically positioned to bridge the divide between traditionalist views of the institution as a stolid information repository and of libraries as modern civic centers.

This begs the question: "Will there be a role of libraries, or content repositories in today's digital era? If yes, what it would be?"

I am not convinced that libraries, at least in their current form, would survive as "front-people for publishers' licenses and access restrictions." [Stephen Downes]

What about the k-model as suggested by Gasser:

with libraries functioning as a community intelligence center, a “university for the people,” through active promotions of resources and knowledge. Under this model, libraries can play a central role in introducing innovation to society, assimmilating the new, and exploring and making sense of the cutting edge.

Well, what do you think?

Learners as teachers as learners

via OLDaily

On the subject of students/children teaching teachers/parents, this reversal of traditional roles needs support and change of attitude from the teachers and parents and won't come easy.

My daughter, who learns Mandarin at school and speaks English elsewhere except occassionally Cantonese at home, played with a 2 and half year old boy who only speaks Mandarin last night. During the time, the boy brought a piece of Lego to her and asked (in Mandarin) what it was. My daughter was thinking how to answer and before she came up with an answer, the little boy told her the answer that it was a toy (in Mandarin). He kept on repeating the word toy in the hope of teaching my daughter how to pronounce it. The immediate reaction of my daughter was that she was suppose to teach the little boy, not the other way around.

Oh, if a 14-year girl has already developed this sense of uni-directional teaching attitude, the roles of teachers and parents to play the recipient role will need great change of attitude. Hope the Netherlands Safe Internet Day work out well. Please keep us posted, Josie Fraser.

Second Life as a potential learning platform

Those of you who may recall my writings about rendered world, e.g. Learning Context: Do we need to render it? and Imagining the World: The Case for Non-Rendered Virtuality - the Role Play Simulation Model may think that I am changing my mind. Well not exactly. I always argue that the selection of a technology depends on its use. AND I am constantly looking at ways to use new technology. This post does not imply that I have found a use of Second Life, rather this post may mark the beginning of such an investigation.

At the time of this writing, Second Life has just welcome its 100,000 residents. So there are already quite a number of people in this virtual world, and there are about 2000 players online. Second Life is also one of the most extensible virtual world where players can build in-world objects, buildings and so on. These creations are recognised by the Second Life developers and allow to be shared, given to or traded both in the virtual world using the in-world currency Linden dollars as well as in real-world using US dollars.

There are already quite a number of published articles on the use of Second Life, notable may be Educause presentation at Southwest Regional Conference 2005 Second Life: The Educational Possibilities of a Massively Multiplayer Virtual World by David M. Antonacci and Nellie Modaress.

Second Life's own education wiki has quite a long list of suggested use of virtual world ranging from economics, business, social sciences, humanities to science and mathematics. Obviously, as a business, there are charges to use Second Life as an education platform. However, they do have same incentive programs for educators who are willing to test the water. There is also a fairly active forum by the players on using Second Life for educational use.

I will likely to write more on this subject as I find out more about how we may use Second Life.

About the Second Life links in this post. All Second Life links here embedded a personal referal ID. If you follow the link to sign up a free trial account (or better still to become paid player), I will earn some in-world Linden dollars.

Collaborative Learning Activities Using Social Software Tools

After a break of almost 2 months, I managed to post a new item in Asynchronous Collaborative Learning Activities today. :-)

Season Greeting

Please accept without obligation, implied or implicit, the best wishes, referred to as this greeting hereafter, for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, politically correct, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral, non-specific sexuality, celebration of the winter solstice holiday in the northern hemisphere and summer solstice holiday in the southern hemisphere, practised within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your preference, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all and a financially successful, personally fulfilling, emotionally enchanting and stimulating, and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2006, but with due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures or sects, in a world filled with love, peace, joy, harmony, diversity, tolerant, good will, and respect, clean air and water, and having regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith and your preference to the choice of blogging software, RSS reader, email system, web browsers, including but not limited to the free Firefox and/or Internet Explorer with due considerations of their respective differences to the interpretation and implementation of W3C web standards, computer platform, brand of microprocessor, type of visual display unit, keyboard, mouse or any other pointing device, operating system, including but not limited to singular or a plurality of variations, whether for a fee or free open source, and Internet service provider connected by modem, permanent modem, broadband, or otherwise, or dietary preference of the wishee.

This greeting must not be read if you do not accept the terms and conditions of this greeting. By reading this greeting, you have indicated your explicit acknowledgement of accepting this greeting in the aforesaid manners . This greeting inclusively, exclusively and non-exclusively cover you, your spouse, whether same or different gender and/or whether such relationship is legally recognized or illegal in certain jurisdictions, including singularly and plurally, previous, present or future, your children including natural, adopted, by-law or sponsored, dead, alive, or unborn, and/or your parents, related by blood, by-laws, adopted, or sponsored dead or alive. Upon being covered by the greeting of the aforesaid greeting in the same aforesaid manner, those covered wishees will extend the aforesaid greeting to the same relates they have recursively and infinitum.

By accepting this greeting you are bound by these terms:

* This greeting is subject to further clarification or withdrawal.


* This greeting, including but not limited to all its associated tangible and intangible good will and best wishes, is freely transferable, duplicated, distributed, copied and reproduced as is.

* This manifestation of the greeting is copyleft under GNU license or other open source license similar to GNU license and or Creative Commons when and if such license(s) is/are enforceable in certain jurisdictions is freely transferable, duplicated, distributed, copied and reproduced provided that any further addition or alternation shall not impose any limitation beyond those implicitly or explicitly expressed this clause.

* Any alteration and addition, including but not limited to the syntactic, semantic, linguistic, artistic, aesthetic, spiritual and material improvements, shall only be made to the original greeting in the same good faith and honour of any reasonable person and that the proprietary rights, including but not limited to the intellectual and moral rights, publishing rights including but not limited to publishing via the blogosphere, by email, by web sites, on CD and/or any electronic means, and or the right to perform in private and in public to a small, medium or large group of present or remote audience and or the rights to transmit, preserve and retransmit by any physically means or electronic means of the wishor are preserved, acknowledged and/or enhanced.

* This greeting implies no promise by the wishor to actually implement any of the wishes.

* This greeting may not be enforceable in certain jurisdictions and/or the restrictions herein may not be binding upon certain wishees in certain jurisdictions and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wishor.

* This greeting is warranted to perform as reasonably may be expected within the usual application of good tidings, for a period of one year or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first.

* The wishor warrants this greeting only for the limited replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wishor.

* Any references in this greeting to "the Lord", "Father Christmas", "Our Saviour", "Santa" or any other festive figures, whether actual or fictitious, dead or alive, shall not imply any endorsement by or from them in respect of this greeting, and all proprietary rights in any referenced third party names and images are hereby acknowledged.

* Any names or terms used in this greeting, whether trademarked, copyrighted, copylefted, patented or have been placed in the open source under GNU, Creative Commons or other open source licenses belong to their respective owners and promoters.

* The wishee expressly agrees, by the acceptance of the greeting, that the greeting is accepted and enjoyed at wishee's own risk. Neither the wishor, its affiliates, nor any of their respective employees, previous or current employers, friends, relatives, spouse past, present or future, agents, third party providers or licensor's warrant that the greeting will be uninterrupted or error free; nor do they make any warranty as to the results and effectiveness of the greeting.

* The wishee may not without wishor's prior written approval disclose to any third party the results of any benchmark test of the performance of the greeting.

* The wishee expressly acknowledges and agrees that in order to protect the integrity of certain third party mechanism of enjoying the wishes, the wishor may provide for security related updates that will be automatically downloaded and installed on your holiday iterary. Such security related updates may impair the movement, enjoyment (and any other activities during your holiday which specifically depends on the said wishes) including disabling your ability to laugh and/or smile, i.e. certain way of enjoying a holiday protected by digital rights management.

* The wisher reserves the right, at any time and from time to time, to update, revise, supplement, and otherwise modify this Agreement and to impose new or additional rules, policies, terms, or conditions on your use of the wishes. Such updates, revisions, supplements, modifications, and additional rules, policies, terms, and conditions (collectively referred to in this Agreement as "Additional Terms") will be effective immediately and incorporated into this Agreement. The wishee's continued enjoyment of the wishes following will be deemed to constitute the wishee's acceptance of any and all such Additional Terms. All Additional Terms are hereby incorporated into this Agreement by this reference.

A false Wikipedia 'biography' - follow up

The publishing of a false biography and the subsequent media reporting brings wikipedia to the focus again. Here are some views which touched me.

1. Jimmy Wales, wikipedia founder's response. [as cited by apophenia]

Imagine that we are designing a restaurant. This restuarant will serve steak. Because we are going to be serving steak, we will have steak knives for the customers. Because the customers will have steak knives, they might stab each other. Therefore, we conclude, we need to put each table into separate metal cages, to prevent the possibility of people stabbing each other.

What would such an approach do to our civil society? What does it do to human kindness, benevolence, and a positive sense of community?

When we reject this design for restaurants, and then when, inevitably, someone does get stabbed in a restaurant (it does happen), do we write long editorials to the papers complaining that "The steakhouse is inviting it by not only allowing irresponsible vandals to stab anyone they please, but by also providing the weapons"?

No, instead we acknowledge that the verb "to allow" does not apply in such a situation. A restaurant is not _allowing_ something just because they haven't taken measures to _forcibly prevent it_ a priori. It is surely against the rules of the restaurant, and of course against the laws of society. Just. Like. Libel. If someone starts doing bad things in a restuarant, they are forcibly kicked out and, if it's particularly bad, the law can be called. Just. Like. Wikipedia.

I do not accept the spin that Wikipedia "allows anyone to write anything" just because we do not metaphysically prevent it by putting authors in cages.

2. A recent press release by Nature's investigation of the accuracy of Britannica and wikipedia on scientific entries:

suggests that Britannica's advantage may not be great, at least when it comes to science entries. In the study, entries were chosen from the websites of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica on a broad range of scientific disciplines and sent to a relevant expert for peer review. Each reviewer examined the entry on a single subject from the two encyclopaedias; they were not told which article came from which encyclopaedia. A total of 42 usable reviews were returned out of 50 sent out, and were then examined by Nature's news team.

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.

3. Someone post a question "Accuracy reliability of entries Britanica (or comparable sources) vs wikipedia" with a $60 price tag in answers.google.com. The current answer leads me to Edward Felten's conclusion.

Overall verdict: Wikipedia’s advantage is in having more, longer, and more current entries. If it weren’t for the Microsoft-case entry, Wikipedia would have been the winner hands down. Britannica’s advantage is in having lower variance in the quality of its entries.

Finally!, an appropriate educational use for PowerPoint

Yes!

As an agent of change, the example cited is

Seventh and eighth graders teaching their teacher how to improve presentations using PowerPoint gives me hope that there is an appropriate use of PowerPoint after all.

Powerpoint is still Powerpoint is still Powerpoint. However, using it as a content so that teachers can learn from their students is a noble way of bridging the gap and accelerating the notion that teachers are NOT authoritive sources of information, but agents to help other learn.

This is a difficult mentality to overcome. I hope this is the example of many to come.

The pedagogy is in the activities not in the content.

via OLDaily

I have been very frustrated with the lack of progress in the discussion of "learning object". I automatically skip over any post with LO as part of the title, ... until I saw this "Urinal as a learning object".

As D-Arcy Norman comments:

It ain't art unless it's art. It isn't a learning object resource [my edit] unless it's used for teaching and learning.

Hey, learning resource is NOT learning object*.

Harold Jarche also opines:

any object + learning context = learning object

I would, if I may, modify Harold's equation to:

any resource (object as a physical artifact or other information as in resources) + learning context = learning opportunity

learning opportunity + appropriate meaningful activity = learning

If I send you a great paper, give you a good reason to learn from the paper, but if you don't take any action with the paper (except accept the paper and file it somewhere), is there any learning?

If "knowing that a solution is my file" is counted as "learning", I rest my case.

*I use object as in "object oriented programming", not object as a physical object.

Future of Jobs

I have been interested in the future of jobs for various reasons including a selfish one as I have a young daughter as well as a boarder interest of my passion in preparing our next generation. I have been worrying that developed countries cannot sustain the current level of living standards both because of the general trend of inverting the population primaid as well as hyper-competition from developing or underdeveloped countries where the labour cost is serveral order of magnitude lower.

While information can move around the world in time which, in most cases, will not influence our decision to choose one over the other, physical goods need time to move from one place to another. This creates a new opportunity, as noted by Professor Preiss for manufacturing within developed countries.

... even the garment industry, currently dominated by Chinese manufacturers, which make 70 per cent of the world's clothes, was starting to win back business by using new technology to offer customisation, albeit not at the very bottom of the market.
[sic]
"The customer chooses the style, of skirt or blouse on a computer graphics system, then is measured accurately in a room with a three-dimensional camera. The personalised clothes are delivered a few days later."

I don't agree that this is viable in the long term if the delivery still takes days (by that long time, the garment would have been made in a developing country and shipped to the customer by air). But the Professor Preiss' idea still holds. When this garment is to be delivered in hours, then local manufacturing becomes essential.

The developed countries should be moving towards mass customisation instead of mass production.

Questions and Answers

Ask Jeeves is a search engine which accepts questions and returns results from searching the web. It is NOT really "Questions and Answers".

Google Answer is a user-pay service where you can ask a question and nominate a price for the answer. " More than 500 carefully screened researchers are ready to answer your question for as little as $2.50 -- usually within 24 hours." All the previously answered questions are available and forms a variable source of information.

Yahoo Answers currently in beta is a social networking based system. It is free to ask a question and anyone can answer (provided you log in using the YahooID).

I find Google answers has provided me with some answer with very in depth research whereas the Yahoo answers seems to be more suitable for student's work. This may be the result of pay verses free.

How to reduce the graffiti in your institute's toilet

Keep the user occupied using this:


The next steps may be:
1. print re-usable learning objects on the toilet paper,
2. play saved lectures in podcast format.

A false Wikipedia 'biography'

from USA today.

When online information can be provided by anyone anywhere anytime with any motives, we need to learn to be more careful. However, even if we are trying to cross-reference and double check with alternate sources, it may not help. As noted, other sites may grab the same information from the same source such as Reference.com and Answers.com get information from wikipedia verbatim. Such double checking obviously will provide no additional value.

This will post an interesting question as we approach how we can educate our students to rely in information from the greatest information source....

Make the grade with 10 homework helpers

from Microsoft via Sega Tech

Here are 10 websites mainly for students to find information.

Student ethnographies of World of Warcraft

via BoingBoing

For those interested in studies related to Massively Multiplayer Online Games, this is a great site with lots of info, albeit done by undergraduates.

More Creativity resources

Another two wonderful resources on this issue:

Creating Passionate users
Being Brave is Tricky

ITConversations
A TechNation Podcast of the interview of Thomas Kelley (author of The Ten Faces of Innovation : IDEO's Strategies for Defeating the Devil's Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization).

Broken key in my laptop

My 4-month old laptop's F12 key broke off. Initially, I noticed the key was not aligned with the other keys. When I pressed it a couple of times, it came off and stick to my finger.

Here is an experience by Doug Johnson: Open letter to Steven Jobs, Apple Computer. My laptop brand also starts with an A, but it is not an Apple. Unlike Doug, I have not dropped my laptop.

I don't know what the reception will look like when I bring it for repair. I'll post the result here later.

When Teachers/Technies Don't Get It

Here is an interesting debate between the teachers and techies.

When Teachers Don't Get It: Myths, Misconceptions, and other Taradiddle and a reply from Blue Skunk Blog: When Techies Don’t Get It.

I am a teacher by nature and a techie by need. Hence I understand the argument and frustration from both ends. As a techie, I want my all wonderful, interesting, engaging software to be used by every possible classroom. As a teacher, I am juggling with time to cover all the things need to be covered, my personal time is already fully occupied by the marking, preparation and constant personal interactions with my students (on every level thinkable). So here is my check-list of software which may be incorporated into any classroom.

1. Near-zero preparation time. [Fablusi failed miserably in this item.] Unless it requires no exact time for a teacher to prepare a lesson using that particular software, it will not be used en mass in classrooms.


2. Must not increase the workload of teacher.


3. Must be used in groups and with flexible group size, just in case the number of machines in the classroom or lab changes unexpectedly.


4. Zero training required in using the software. The focus is not technology skill in most classroom. There are other things which are more important in the mind of the teachers.


5. Engaging and appropriate to the students. Come on, give the teacher some relief so that s/he can work with other kid who needs special help.


6. Build in assessment.


7. other bells and whistles which no teacher cares.


8. Clear learning outcome.

Tags: educational software

IdeaExplore

I suggested the theme for December. Please contribute your insight to this question: What can we do to help our children to prepare their career?

"Our world is changing, our schools are failing..." is a common complaint of today's education system (example). The situation is compounded by the rapidly changing economic environment, too. In his book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Friedman talks about the connectedness of the business world and proclaims that future workers can collaborate without leaving their favourite cities. Hence, the world is flat. However, Richard Florida, John Seely Brown and a number of authors disagree. The world is actually becoming spikier. Anyhow, developed countries are moving away from the industrial age, and the education system which was designed to produce replaceable workers no longer meets the need.

In response to this month's theme, please indicate the hat you are wearing (e.g. as a parent, a teacher, an education minister...) and what you would do to solve the specific crisis you identified.

Resources: Innovation and Creativity

Here are some online resources that relate to Innovation and creativity:

From ChangeThis:
The Life Cycle of the Creative Soul
The Creative Generalist

From HBS Working Knowledge
Time Pressure and Creativity: Why Time is Not on Your Side
Creativity—How Can I Get Some?
The Secrets of Successful Idea People
Understanding the Process of Innovation

Creating Passionate users
How to come up with Breakthrough Ideas