Content, Connections, Conversations

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Content, Connections, Conversations

• ODCE
• George Siemens

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• We are in the midst of a technological,
  economic, and organizational transformation that
  allows us to negotiate the terms of freedom,
  justice, and productivity in the information
  society
• Yochai Benkler

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• I am not sure of what I absolutely know
• The King and I

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Toffler on education

• "Mass education designed for the industrial age
  meets the needs of neither the pre-industrial
  village nor the post-industrial future...indeed,
  all education - has to be totally
  reconceptualized."
• -Alvin Toffler Revolutionary Wealth

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Gates on education

• By obsolete, I mean that our high schools--even
  when they're working exactly as designed--cannot
  teach our kids what they need to know today.
• Bill Gates
• http//www.eschoolnews.com/news/showstory.cfm?Art
  icleID5586

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HolisticContext
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Content

• Open
• Mashups
• Participatory
• Createco-createre-create
• Educator concern current up-to date materials
• (McGraw-Hill Ryerson 2003)

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Growth of Open Content

• OCW, Utah financing
• http//opencontent.org/blog/archives/311
• Open publication
• http//plosone.org
• Openlearn
• http//www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/home.php
• OCW MIT
• http//ocw.mit.edu/index.html
• OCW Finder
• http//opencontent.org/ocwfinder/

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Content is not a strategic advantage
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Conversations

• Global
• Open
• User-controlled
• Two-way
• YouTube as election platform
• Rich James
• http//global.cscc.edu/TLRC/Blog/Entry.asp?P77

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Our devices

• 2.7 billion mobile phones
• 800 million cars
• 850 million PCs
• 1.5 B phones
• 1.5 B TV sets
• http//communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2007/
  01/putting_27_bill.html

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Communities

• Content (Flickr)
• Issues
• Goals (43 Things)
• Interests
• User-filtered

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To be connected is to enable input
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• All the knowledge is in the connections
• David Rumelhart

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Connections

• To stay current
• To know and be known to belong
• Linking, relating, connecting
• Digital life portfolio
• Constant
• Mobile
• Twitter
• Persistent Presence

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Where does knowledge reside?

• Vygotsky, Wittgenstein, Spivey
• Landauer Dumais more than should be revealed
  (http//lsa.colorado.edu/papers/plato/plato.annote
  .html )
• The network is the learning

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Connectivism

• Knowledge is held distributed within a network
• Competence/learning occurs through network
  creation
• Technology performs grunt cognition
• Capacity to stay current
• Knowing where/who
• Sense-making/pattern recognition

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• Tools reflect a changed manner of relating to
  each other and relating to content.
• Wikipedia
• Blogs
• Wikis
• Podcasts
• Betzi Bateman My initial fear, which I still
  have, is that people will confuse the wiki
  technology with Wikipedia.
• http//csuinfobits.blogspot.com/2007/02/wikipedia-
  ban.html

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• We make sense of the world and of our role in it
  by finding the most focused and most
  comprehensive configuration of images and words
  which are relevant to whatever situation is at
  hand
• Derrick De Kerckhove

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What is a network?

• Nodes
• Connections

http//www-personal.umich.edu/mejn/networks/
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Elements of complex systems

• Components
• Interactions
• Emergence
• Components interactionsemergence
• (Olaf Sporns)

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Networks extend filter
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• Value point of education is in
  connections/conversations creating networks to
  manage information deluge, capturing/filtering
  key ideasproviding foundation for learning
  beyond classes

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Knowing today means understanding ambiguity and
uncertainty
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Todays Knowledge Ecology
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Connections of a certain type are valuable

• Relevance
• Of value for information sharing
• Dense connections reduce adaptability
  (Beinhocker)
• making connections that generate insight
  (Cross, Laseter)

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Pattern recognition
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Scholarship

• a shift from publication as product to
  publication as process
• http//www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub108/evolution.
  html

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• The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to
  the stormy present
• Lincoln

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Trends in Ohio

• 202 increase in faculty teaching online (from
  2004)
• 279 increase in degrees/certificates online
  (from 2002)
• 11.4 enrolment (from 2004)
• student body enters traditional education with
  expectations built on mobile devices, sharable
  content, and collaborative learning
• OLN 2006 Annual Report

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Innovating

• History of innovation
• Lone genius (Einstein, Edison)
• Organizations (Bell Labs, PARC)
• Networks (pharmaceutical, academic)
• Innovate with end users learners
• Content can be shared shift from organization
  as silo, to organization as node

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Dual level activities

• In-classroom adoption
• Pedagogy/andragogy
• Skill development
• System-level (policy) change
• IP
• Content sharing
• Alignment with what it means to be educated
• Resource allocation

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Models to move forward

• Good management kills innovation
• Seed
• Select
• Amplify
• "Do something.  If it works, do it again.  If it
  doesn't, do something else." FDR
• Via Ohio IT Skills Blog http//blog.ohioitclearin
  ghouse.org/

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• www.elearnspace.org
• www.connectivism.ca
• www.knowingknowledge.com
• http//ltc.umanitoba.ca/wordpress