Living, Learning, Communicating in an Immediate World

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Living, Learning, Communicating in an Immediate
World

• ADETA, October 2007
• George Siemens

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• For the most part, educational futurism is a
  mixture of trendiness, bad psychology, and
  technological impressionability
• Carl Bereiter

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Mixed messages

• Networks and tools
• Access and impact
• Granovetter meets Gibson
• Students and employees
• Their World
• Our need
• Our response?

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1. Networks Tools
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Learning

• Neural network
• Conceptual network
• Physical network
• People
• Content

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What do networks do?

• Understanding yields understanding
• Nodes increase opportunities for more
  connections (history, multi-faceted understanding
  of disciplines)

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• ...the tools we use, when learning, shape and
  very largely determine what and how we can learn
• Kieran Egan

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Immediately?

• Access OER,
• Find
• Connect
• Communicate Mobile

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Immediately?

• Locate
• Collaborate wikis
• Create
• Share Presently

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Immediately?

• Plan
• Publish blogs
• Interact two-way dialogue
• Tie it together

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• We shape our tools and then our tools shape us
• McLuhan

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What have tools done?

• Opened access
• Distributed control
• Raised noise
• Immediacy
• Symmetry of effect
• everything gets impacted (information)

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Rhetoric of the electrical sublime

• long-standing, naive, and utopian expectations
• Carey Quirk

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2. Access and Impact
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Educations future will be shaped in developing
countries

• China HE enrolment doubled, 2000 2003
• 16 million. Exceeds US
• India by 2010,
• 40 of all HE education
• will be distance
• Carnegie Foundation (2006)

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Access

• 70 level in many countries (Net)
• Mobile/PDA (21) web access doubled in
  2003-2005-2007
• 88 have mobile
• Steep decline after age 55
• Oxford Internet Institute

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IT Ownership

• 73 own laptops
• 91 have high speed
• 86 mobile phone
• Net Generation age group is more highly engaged
  than older students in technologies that enable
  socializing
• ECAR Study (2007)

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• We live in a society in which the channels for
  distribution of change are carried with us as
  part of daily life.
• Sharples, Taylor, Vavoula

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• Mobile computing, portable devices, and
  ubiquitous broadband mean that we have access to
  people, information, and data wherever we may be
• Horizon Report (2007)

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What is the impact of immediate?

• Control shift
• Weakened filter
• Can you spare 4 billion?
• Real is fake

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3. Granovetter meets Gibson
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Weak ties

• Empirical evidence that the stronger the tie
  connecting two individuals, the more similar they
  are, in various ways
• Mark Granovetter (1973)

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• Weak ties provide people with access to
  information and resources beyond those available
  in their own social circle but strong ties have
  greater motivation to be of assistance and are
  typically more easily available.
• Mark Granovetter (1983)

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Weak ties

• weak ties of communication
• weak ties of information
• (content is not understanding)

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Gibsons Affordances

• Action potential
• Preconditions for activity
• Agent, object, interaction
• Affordance is a property of this interaction

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• Nature of ties is an affordance of the medium
• object, actor, activity
• Parent/child (twitter, IM)
• Friends
• Colleague
• Some one youve never met f2f

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• A new medium does not add something it changes
  everything.
• Neil Postman

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4. Students and employees
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• This isn't the MTV generation we're talking
  about this is the everything, all-the-time
  generation
• Tim Blackmore

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Millennials
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• Coddled, narcissistic praise junkies
• US Navy

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Engagement
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• Participative web user-created content
• OECD

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Capturing

• Capturing what used to be transitory
• Mobile phones
• Justin.TV
• Their lives are being captured and shared

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Their view of IT in courses

• 60 - improved my learning
• 40 - more engaged when IT is used
• 73 - more prompt feedback
• 58 - helps me better communicate with classmates
• 59 - better control of course activities
• ECAR Study (2007)

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5. Their World
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What type of world will our students inherit?

• Complex
• Information saturated
• Conflict-riddled
• Self-destructing
• Hopeful
• Democratic
• Innovation
• Equality

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Need for advanced learning

• 2 of every 3 new/replacement jobs require PSE
• Canadian Council of Learning (2006)

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6. Our Need
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• Understanding requires time, depth, sustained
  attention
• Takes 10 years to become a master
• Howard Gardner

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• Complex tasks require
• greater engagement and
• focus
• than weak attention ties permit

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• Ubiquitous computing and wireless connectivity,
  embedded in physical environments, will turn
  physical places into aware contexts
  environments that recognize people, information,
  and activities, and respond appropriately.
• Map of Future Forces Affecting Education (2006)

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• Digital literacy
• Information literacy
• 21st century skills
• Harvard curriculum
• Play, performance, networking, distributed
  cognition
• (Jenkins)

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Depth...

• Slow Learning
• Geetha Narayanan
• Deep smarts
• Deep understanding

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Disciplines of Understanding

• Reflection
• Review
• Connections
• Socialization
• Explication
• Slow, deep, immersive
• Multi-faceted

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7. Our response?
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How have these changes impacted education?
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Stages

• Adopt tools and methods
• Adapt practices
• Adjust policies

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• Exist in the spaces they exist, understand their
  culture

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What shall we change?

• Libraries
• Classrooms
• Policies
• Schools
• Accreditation
• Experts
• Curriculum

Change toward understanding. NOT Educator
peer-pressure
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• www.elearnspace.org
• www.connectivism.ca
• www.knowingknowledge.com
• http//ltc.umanitoba.ca/wordpress