This is my presentation on 19 June 2014 at the Scaling corporate learning online symposium organized by George Siemens and hosted by Corp U.
Tag: learning
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Sustainability
In a complex, knowledge-driven society, learning, education and training are key to sustainability. Sustainability initiatives need to explicitly make learning strategic in order to succeed in the face of growing challenges. No organization, no sector can do so alone.
Professionalization alone is not the answer. Education is failing to prepare humanity for disasters, climate change, globalization or conflicts. Existing partnerships do not address this gap. Attempting to do more of what has been done in the past is not the answer.
There are three main reasons why a profit-making enterprise has a shared interest in sustainability:
- To increase and maintain stability
- To resolve crises so that business can continue
- To improve the economy
This is what links profit and non-profit sectors. Learning is the unexplored conduit.
Photo credit: Under the floorboard
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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.
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Mobile learning: the “anywhere” in the affordance of ubiquity
When I look at my Facebook friends online, I can see that most of them are connected, almost 24/7, via their phones. Those connected from a laptop or desktop computer (shown by a green dot instead of a little phone icon) are an ever-dwindling minority.
As Scholar is meant to be a social application for learning, I thought it might be useful to reflect on what mobile means for learning. Recently, I invited mobile design expert Josh Clark to explain to a Red Cross audience why we should design our applications (including those for learning) using a mobile-first strategy. He’s not a learning guy, but I haven’t been able to find a learning expert with useful insights on these issues (as I explain in my conclusion). You can read about Josh’s work on the web here, for example:
Josh’s first point is that we have a “condescending” view of mobile, seeing it as a “lite” version of the “full” desktop experience. This view is wrong, and to demonstrate this he debunks several mobile myths: “We have some really stubborn myths about mobile users, really screwing up the way we provide mobile services.”
Myth #1 is that “mobile users are rushed and distracted”, with a short attention span. With mobile learning, this has translated into little info tidbits or short exercises. MIT’s Open CourseWare (OCW) iPhone app, for example, starts up with a message warning that it’s “a subset” of the OCW catalog.
Yes, sometimes you use your mobile device for information on the go. But that’s far from the only use case. Mobile is also on the couch, in the kitchen, on the bed, or during a 3-hour layover… and, last but not least, sitting on the throne (according to Josh, 40% admit to using phones in bathroom).
Those mobile contexts allow us to concentrate and focus on content. They are non-traditional (for now) contexts of engagement which can make learning more pleasurable (because of the level of comfort, by saving us from boredom during that layover, etc.).
So what do users expect from a mobile application? 85% expect mobile to be at least as good as desktop. Why would this be any different for students or other learners? We do everything on our phones that it seems obvious we are now at a point where the concept of a distinct, discrete mLearning makes no sense.
OK, so if mobile doesn’t necessarily mean rushed users, what about small screen sizes? Doesn’t that physical limitation place limits on learning?
The screen size raises the issue of visual presentation of learning content. Yes, we have built a lot of user interaction and interface conventions on the assumption of a 4:3 or 16:9 screen ratio. This goes back a while for machine learning, starting with Macromedia Director interfaces in the 1990s that imposed 640 x 480 pixels as a “standard” screen size for interactive, animated content. So we have at least 20 years of thinking reliant on the model of eLearning that some are now trying to painstakingly reduce by changing the “e” in learning to the “m”.
I agree with Josh that the real answer is not in this alphabet soup. Don’t confuse context with intent. We make too many assumptions from screen size. Screen size should not be an excuse to limit functionality. Using small screen does not equal wanting to do less. It would be like saying that because paperbacks have smaller pages, you have to remove entire chapters. The trick is to make complexity uncomplicated. There’s a difference.
Mobile websites/apps should have full content/tools. Yes, they may be displayed differently and hierarchy may change. Some devices may be better suited to some tasks than others — so EMPHASIZE different content on different devices. But don’t arbitrarily give me LESS. That goes not only for individual sites but for families of sites.
A lot of people ONLY use their phone. And of course perhaps the more expected numbers from developing world: In Egypt, 70% of net users rely solely on their phones. In India, it’s 59%. Ghana: 55%. Kenya: 54%. Nigeria: 50%. OK, you say, but these are developing countries where desktop computers and broadband access are expensive. But wait, what’s this… 25% in the US and 22% in the UK use only their phone. Another 28% of US mobile web users mostly use mobile web.
And, if we are talking about teaching young people, I’m sure these stats are much higher.
This group of mobile-only or mostly-mobile users definitely expect to do everything on mobile. If we care about reaching them or teaching them, we have to care about hitting them on mobile.
For individual-learner click-through online learning modules, I’ve recently sent out two requests for proposals to over 20 companies that specialize in building such modules to support adult learning. Not a single one actually can currently deliver a mobile-first strategy. Yet, the tools and techniques to build a single code base (using HTML5 to replace Flash for animation and a technique called responsive design) already exist and are in wide use in other areas — just not in learning. Yes, they all know it’s a long-term trend, but in many of the responses I received they proposed to build a separate, “lite” version of the “real” learning modules. Exactly the opposite of what I think is needed. And the stats cited above (as well as more insightful analysis from Josh and other designers) make a strong case that this needs to happen today, not in some distant future.
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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?
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Maybe old learning isn’t so bad, after all?
When I first saw Professor Cope’s photos of a 1983 elementary school classroom, I scoffed. It was so obvious that the “communications and knowledge architecture” was one-way, focused on rote learning and rewarding good behavior which involved staying safely “inside the box”. How easy to critique, deconstructing all of the ways in which this particular “banking” form of education was unlikely to intentionally “deposit” anything that might actually be useful to the future lives of these school children. How awful, I thought, and how at odds with everything I try to put into practice with respect to my own professional role. Today’s MOOCs and flipped classrooms, with their objectives of making active knowledge-making ubiquitous, make 1983 look like the Dark Ages of education.
And yet. And yet this classroom very closely resembles the ones in which I grew up, with 5th grade in 1980 as a reference point. And I was one of the kids for whom it was an enjoyable experience. I thrived in that environment. I wanted to sponge up the facts and figures, and was proud to raise my hand, hoping the teacher would pick me. Group work simply wasn’t as much fun or rewarding as the individual recognition and praise from the teacher. It’s only when I jog my 42-year-old brain to recall what made me enjoy school so much that I realize it was the interaction, the creativity, and the serendipity. But the scaffolding was sturdy and reassuring precisely because it was so rigid and didactic.
The same with university. In my professional life, I proclaim my belief that the time for “post-campus education” has arrived. Speaking to a group of young interns, I explained recently that they could expect that their life-long learning had only just begun, and that by abandoning the oh-so-twentieth-century sequence in which you complete your degree and then go to work, they could more actively shape their future careers.
And yet. I was a first-generation college student, going to a university in the U.S. when both my parents never made it past elementary school. My father was put into an orphanage. My mother was denied the education she strived for when her school was closed by the French colonial forces when the Algerian Revolution started. The university campus was for me the site of life-changing experiences.
Today I am also the father of three boys. Nassim, my six-year-old, learned reading, writing and arithmetic this year. When it comes to his education, my approach is far-removed from cutting-edge education. I make him read and re-read texts, do and redo addition and subtraction exercises, drilling it in and checking constantly to see if it’s sunk in yet. Rewards are limited or non-existent with me. Sometimes he resists, complaining about the repetition or that it’s “too hard”. But he also seems to genuinely enjoy completing the exercises. I do this because I’m concerned that his public school teacher is going to be too “slack”, because he goes to school in a poor neighborhood in Paris where many of the kids face tough life circumstances, have parents who do not know how to read and write, and are considered by many (including teachers) to be destined for vocational training leading straight to unemployment. Especially if they are of Arab or African descent.
So, what to do with such blatant contradictions between my professed interest in “new learning” and my personal experience? I believe this contradiction can be productive, meaning that I try to mobilize it to understand why colleagues and other interlocutors express skepticism about innovation in learning, whether explicitly or implicitly. And, yes, I’m also trying to rethink how I work with my sons after school. The world is changing. If we want learning to be supportive, participatory, inspiring, motivating, flexible… it’s not (only) because that will make learning a more pleasurable experience. It is because this is how our children (or those of others, for those to whom parents have delegated mass public education) will get the chance to develop the knowledge and skills they will need to not only survive but thrive — in the online classrooms before they learn the hard way, IRL.