Tag: connectivism

Insomnia against the grain – and putting Bloom to bed

Summer 2016, Day 1. “So, that puts to bed Bloom’s Taxonomy… that reliable workhorse,” sighed C. “What do we use in its place?”

“We don’t”, answered the Walrus. “There is no successor to neatly replace Bloom’s. It’s still there – and can still be useful. It’s about changing the way we think and do the design of learning. Just look at how we are building our course in real time.” And we are. Observing the accelerating flow of applications for the #DigitalScholar course is more than a spectator sport. It is turning me into an insomniac. It is about feeling who is out there in the interwebs, somehow ending up with a course announcement from a brand-new (read: obscure) foundation based in Geneva, Switzerland. Reading motivation statements, trying to figure out how they connect to boxes ticked… It is on that shifting knowledge landscape of what is shared, across time and space, that we are sculpting the experience we hope amazing, starting on the fourth of July.

In fact, we’ve already started. Slack, Facebook, and Twitter accounts are all set up to connect participants to each other even before they connect with the course and the #DigitalScholar team. Never mind that some folks might struggle with Slack, may legitimately feel overwhelmed, frustrated, or annoyed by so many different platforms before the course has even started, and that using Facebook for anything related to work could well be anathema… Yet getting used to the multiplicity of tools, purposes, and intent is part and parcel of what we need to learn.

This course doesn’t even have a name. Instead, it is about becoming a #DigitalScholar. That is no hipster hashtag, by the way. It is part of a taxonomy of New Learning that sees technology as not just enabling or mediating learning, but affording us a new economy of effort, the means by which we can afford to extricate ourselves from the miasma of the learning-and-development of the Past. Becoming a #DigitalScholar is not about content. It is about metacognition (thinking about thinking) far more than about cognition. It is about figuring out what it means to be human in a Digital Age, a far more significant question than the gruesome dichotomy between real and virtual that leads to the sterile dead-end of our IRL fetish.

In Minecraft, you do not have to sit through six-minute video lectures about the different kinds of building blocks before taking a quiz testing your ability to recall them. Mastery learning implies that there is some end point, some learning objective that you reach. You can build and measure what you build or how you got there – but isn’t what you build (and how you did it) what really matters? Can a badge – or even 1,000 discrete, specific, networked ones in the blockchain – represent what we know and experience?

Winter 2014. Cointrin, Geneva’s airport lounge. “Just stick to what you know,” said the Roly-Poly High Priest of Learning. “Maybe you can convene a group of humanitarian folks and build an L&D network around shared needs. Start there.” A sensible enough proposal. I already knew more than a few really bright folks pushing technology for learning in various international organizations. Yet my gut hated the idea, recognizing something unsavory about that pattern. It has taken me two years to figure out why – and to build something the potential of which rests on success (or failure) in convening learning leaders from as many different quarters as we can.

One key weakness of our humanitarian learning culture rests in our insularity. (There are also many strengths). We think we are different because of the nature of the business we are in. So we neglect meaningful connections to external systems. And yet when we engage with learning leaders outside our little corner of the Universe, the gaps between what we do and what they do can lead to a kind of ghoulish fascination for the opulence and the confidence of the corporate learning space, where CLOs erect brick-and-mortar campuses, deploy transformative leadership acceleration (not just development) programs to tackle their most wicked business problems, and lead teams with capabilities that we can only wish for. Witness the rare heads of learning and development who lavish budget to join corporate learning networks with no clear strategy of what might be transferable or how, given the differences in context and mission. Meanwhile, most of us work with shoestring budgets and struggle to lock down an appointment – never mind recognition, support, or funding – with our CEO, or, more likely, the head of HR that we report to.

Yes, the learning I know is about saving lives (think first aid, disaster response, or emergency health) and about building a sustainable future. I’ve learned many humbling lessons about how difficult it is to apply theory and principle to chaos. The chaos of your industry may be of a different nature. But they are connected, part of the same messy world we share. Education is privileged to be the science of sciences. It is the meta layer of the networked data society. It eats communication and knowledge management for breakfast. And I can no longer think of what I do in learning in isolation of the rest of the world. Limiting the unit of analysis to one organization, its people, or even its industry is a constraint of the past. In fact, I refuse to conceive a learning initiative that does not cross boundaries. It is a necessary condition for learning to provide a way of seeing trends developing in the world today. The incoming signals amplify the sense of what that condition might mean. That is why I am finding it hard to sleep. And so eagerly looking forward to walking on the edges for four weeks with a multitude from everywhere.

Image: WallpapersCraft.

June 21, 2016
Scaling corporate learning

If you are interested in the strategic significance of educational technology for workplace learning, make sure that you do not miss the open, online symposium happening 18-19 June 2014.

The event is organized by George Siemens and hosted by Corp U. I will be facilitating sessions with the World Bank and OECD, as well as presenting on partnerships between corporate and non-profit learning leaders to scale up humanitarian education.

You’ll find more information on George Siemens’s post about the event and (later this week) on this blog.

Photo: Estádio Nacional de Brasilia. Imagery courtesy of Castro Mello Arquitetos.

June 16, 2014
Pipeline

“In a knowledge economy, the flow of knowledge is the equivalent of the oil pipe in an industrial economy. Creating, preserving, and utilizing knowledge flow should be a key organizational activity.” – George Siemens, Knowing Knowledge (2006)

Photo: Oil Pipeline Pumping Station in rural Nebraska (Shannon Ramos/Flickr)

May 2, 2014
Power of Humanity, Power of Education: Presentation at the AIESEC Youth 2 Business Forum, Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt (20 August 2013)

Power of Humanity, Power of Education from Reda Learning

September 19, 2013
Learning in a VUCA world: IFRC FACT and ERU Global Meeting (Vienna, 31 May 2013)

Presentation at the IFRC FACT and ERU Global Meeting (Vienna, 31 May 2013), exploring how we learn in a complex world.

June 1, 2013
Badges for online learning: gimmick or game-changer?

As I’ve been thinking about building a MOOC for the 13.1 million Red Cross and Red Crescent volunteers, I’ve become increasingly interested in connectivism. One of the platforms I’ve discovered is called P2PU (“Peer To Peer University”), which draws heavily on connectivist ideas.

Surprise: on P2PU there is a debate raging on about badges, of all things. I initially scoffed. I’ve seen badges on Khan Academy and have read that they are very popular with learners, but did not really seriously consider these badges to be anything more than gimmicks.

It turns out that badges are serious learning tools, and that makes sense from a connectivist perspective. A white paper from the Mozilla Foundation summarizes why and how, drawing on an earlier paper from P2PU’s co-founder Philipp Schmidt.

George Siemens’s (2005) connectivism theory of learning is said to go “beyond traditional theories of learning (such as behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism) to include technology as a core element”. So badges in this theory would use technology itself ot make connections between learners.

First, it is claimed that badges can capture and translate learning across contexts, with more granularity (detail) than degrees or cumulative grades, with a badge for each specific skill or quality — and showing off progression over time as badges accumulate (like medals pinned to a soldier’s chest or a general’s stripes). Therefore badges could signal achievement and be matched to specific job requirements.

Second, badges are meant to encourage and motivate “participation and learning outcomes”. They are feedback mechanism — both gateway and signpost — on a learning path, ie showing what can be learned and when, as in Khan Academy’s Google-style map going from basic addition to multivariate calculus. In addition, they can also cover or highlight informal or soft skills of the kind that formal education doesn’t account for. And, in fact, making new badges available can be done in real time, fast enough to keep up with the pace of the fastest-changing fields (like IT or web development).

Third, badges are thought to formalize and enhance social connections, as they can be considered a mechanism to promote identity and reputation within a learning community. By doing so, badges may in fact foster community, bringing together peers to formalize teams or communities of practice.

There’s quite a bit of enthusiasm online for badges as successors to pre-digital forms of accreditation and authority, like university diplomas and CVs. For example, Jacy Hood, director of College Open Textbooks, declared in a blog comment: ”We are optimistic that Mozilla Badges will become the new international educational currency/credentials and that traditional education institutions will recognize, accept, and award these badges.”

Edutech blogger Mitchel Resnick explains that he is an increasingly lone voice to express skepticism about badges:

I worry that students will focus on accumulating badges rather than making connections with the ideas and material associated with the badges – the same way that students too often focus on grades in a class rather than the material in the class, or the points in an educational game rather than the ideas in the game. Simply engaging students is not enough. They need to be engaged for the right reasons.

For Resnick, it is the perception of a badge as a reward that throws back to behaviorist thinking:

When we develop educational technologies and activities in my research group, we explicitly try to avoid anything that might be perceived as a reward – what Alfie Kohn characterizes as “Do this and you’ll get that.” Instead, we are constantly looking for ways to help young people build on their own interests, and providing them with opportunities to take on new roles.

However, it really depents on the “Do this” component: what is the learner being asked to do? If it can be performed without engagement, then Resnick may be right. This implies that the reward component may not be the sole function of the badge itself but will depend on the activities required to obtain it.

I started writing this as a badge skeptic. Yet, I’m already starting to think of additional benefits: in a visual online world, badges are visual indicators, rather than text on a screen. They can therefore mobilize visual symbols to trigger our cultural and emotional sensibilities, without requiring reading effort on our part. By looking a badge, we can recognize its shape, colors and design and identify its meaning. This is pretty powerful stuff for learning.

What do you think?

September 20, 2012
Thinking about the first Red Cross Red Crescent MOOC
You have no doubt heard about the Red Cross or Red Crescent. Some of you may be first aiders or otherwise already involved as volunteers in your community. My organization, the IFRC, federates the American Red Cross and the 186 other National Societies worldwide. These Societies share the same fundamental principles and work together to build resilient communities by reducing risks associated with disasters and, most important, by leveraging a community’s strengths into a long-term, sustainable future. The only distinguishing feature from one country to the next is the emblem in an otherwise secular movement: Muslim countries use a red crescent and Israel’s Magen David Adom uses the red “crystal” (offically recognized as an emblem) inside the star of David.

Learning is a fundamental driver for the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. People become volunteers, very often in their youth, to develop life-saving skills through extremely social forms of learning. The connection between youth, volunteers and learning are the very core of what we do to “save lives and change minds”. There are 13.1 million volunteers in the Red Cross and Red Crescent worldwide with a shared thirst for learning. This is a potentially massive, multilingual classroom — and the affordances of technology can help us realize the previously-unthinkable goal of linking these minds and hearts across borders for the purpose of learning together, from each other.

So where do we start sharing and, yes, co-constructing knowledge? Historically, the IFRC’s approach could be described as “trickle-down”: the Federation worked with the leadership of its members to provide guidance and expertise. Eventually some of this reached the communities where most volunteers work, at the grassroots.

In the last three years, something amazing has happened. IFRC invested in an online learning platform and made it open to all. Despite some limitations of this platform from a “new learning” standpoint, over 25,000 people have joined and they have already completed more than 30,000 online courses (which have been self-directed, individual click-through slides with a quiz at the end), with a completion rate close to 50%. 60% of these learners are volunteers from our National Societies — and most of them probably discovered the platform on their own, without being told to access it by their national leadership.

So, where do we go now? I’m thinking about a MOOC.

IFRC is organizing a global youth conference to bring together 150 youth activists from the Red Cross and other organizations, like YMCA, Boy Scouts, etc. Initially, the idea was to get them to write on our Learning network’s blog in answer to a set of questions about how youth are using technology to change the world. We did this with pretty amazing results in the run-up to RedTalk #12, an online webcast event. The mechanism was clunky: we used forum posts and pasted them into WordPress blog posts… We did not have recursive feedback, the multimodal meaning was limited to posting photos and videos as attachments to the forum posts, there was no formative assessment (only a post-event self-assessment), and the questions were the same for everyone. Despite these missing affordances, we collected an amazing 50 pages of writing from young people in 12 different countries and the live event brought together over 200 people in a powerful moment of communion and knowledge sharing.

So, why a MOOC?

IFRC’s youth policy declares that youth have “multiple roles” as “innovators, early adopters of communication, social media and other technologies, inter-cultural ambassadors, peer-to-peer facilitators, community mobilizes, agents of behavior change and advocates for vulnerable people.” That’s a tall order for young people.

If I had to formulate learning objectives, they might look something like this:

By participating in the MOOC, participants will develop their knowledge and skills to:
- discover and reflect how different technologies permeate our daily lives, by engaging with various online technologies used for social change and sharing experiences with others through a global online conversation in the run-up to the event.
- define technology and its place in humanitarian and development practice, by listening to and engaging with the RedTalk guest’s story during the one-hour live webcast.
- clarify what technology means in the context of a local/global humanitarian and development work.
- identify gaps in our understanding and use of technology, including the Digital Divide and inequalities in access related to gender, race or ethnicity, socio-economic status, etc.
- invent new ways of using technology to make our communities more resilient.
To explore these, across the broad diversity of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, requires a flexible, localizable scaffolding. The aim is to start with the 150 conference participants but to open it up to anyone, anywhere. I can imagine weekly activities that people could do at their own pace, after adapting them to their local context. For example, I’d love to have K-12 teachers — wherever they may be — enrolling their students into the MOOC’s weekly activities, adding their voices to the mix. But I wonder if the objectives would be relevant — and, if they’re not, how to make them so?

At this point, it’s just an idea in search of a platform and an audience beyond our own youth and volunteering networks.

So what do you think?
August 17, 2012
A few of my favorite excerpts from George Siemens’s Knowing Knowledge (2006)

My own practice (and no doubt yours) has been shaped by many different learning theorists. George Siemens, for me, stands out articulating what I felt but did not know how to express about the changing nature of knowledge in the Digital Age. Below I’ve compiled a few of my favorite excerpts from his book Knowing Knowledge, published in 2006, two years before he taught the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) with Alec Couros and Stephen Downes.

Learning has many dimensions. No one model or definition will fit every situation. CONTEXT IS CENTRAL. Learning is a peer to knowledge. To learn is to come to know. To know is to have learned. We seek knowledge so that we can make sense. Knowledge today requires a shift from cognitive processing to pattern recognition.

Construction, while a useful metaphor, fails to align with our growing understanding that our mind is a connection-creating structure. We do not always construct (which is high cognitive load), but we do constantly connect.

We learn foundational elements through courses…but we innovate through our own learning.

The changing nature of knowledge

The Achilles heel of existing theories rests in the pace of knowledge growth. All existing theories place processing (or interpretation) of knowledge on the individual doing the learning. This model works well if the knowledge flow is moderate. A constructivist view of learning, for example, suggests that we process, interpret, and derive personal meaning from different information formats. What happens, however, when knowledge is more of a deluge than a trickle? What happens when knowledge flows too fast for processing or interpreting?

Knowledge has broken free from its moorings, its shackles. Those, like Francis Bacon, who equate knowledge with power, find that the masses are flooding the pools and reservoirs of the elite. […] The filters, gatekeepers, and organizers are awakening to a sea of change that leaves them adrift, clinging to their old methods of creating, controlling, and distributing knowledge. […] Left in the wake of cataclysmic change are the knowledge creation and holding structures of the past. The ideologies and philosophies of reality and knowing—battle spaces of thought and theory for the last several millennia—have fallen as guides.

Libraries, schools, businesses—engines of productivity and society—are stretching under the heavy burden of change. New epistemological and ontological theories are being formed, as we will discuss shortly with connective knowledge. These changes do not wash away previous definitions of knowledge, but instead serve as the fertile top of multiple soil layers. […]

Or consider email in its earlier days—many printed out a paper copy of emails, at least the important ones, and filed them in a file cabinet. Today we are beginning to see a shift with email products that archive and make email searchable and allow individuals to apply metadata at point of use (tagging).

Knowledge has to be accessible at the point of need. Container-views of knowledge, artificially demarcated (courses, modules) for communication, are restrictive for this type of flow and easy-access learning.

Everything is going digital. The end user is gaining control, elements are decentralizing, connections are being formed between formerly disparate resources and fields of information, and everything seems to be speeding up.

“Know where” and “know who” are more important today that knowing what and how.

Once flow becomes too rapid and complex, we need a model that allows individuals to learn and function in spite of the pace and flow.

We need to separate the learner from the knowledge they hold. It is not really as absurd as it sounds. Consider the tools and processes we currently use for learning. Courses are static, textbooks are written years before actual use, classrooms are available at set times, and so on.

The underlying assumption of corporate training and higher education centers on the notion that the world has not really changed.

But it has. Employees cannot stay current by taking a course periodically. Content distribution models (books and courses) cannot keep pace with information and knowledge growth. Problems are becoming so complex that they cannot be contained in the mind of one individual—problems are held in a distributed manner across networks, with each node holding a part of the entire puzzle. Employees require the ability to rapidly form connections with other specialized nodes (people or knowledge objects). Rapidly creating connections with others results in a more holistic view of the problem or opportunity, a key requirement for decision making and action in a complex environment.

How do we separate the learner from the knowledge? By focusing not on the content they need to know (content changes constantly and requires continual updating), but on the connections to nodes which continually filter and update content.

Here is what the connectivism implementation cycle looks like as a mind map. (Click on the image to download the PDF).

Source: George Siemens, Knowing Knowledge (2006).

Image: TEDxNYED

July 19, 2006