P of O Banking Metaphor and Virtual Money

Chapter 2 of P of P also impressed me with the "banking" metaphor and the problem of seeing education as the rich teacher making a deposit into the mind of the poor student.

A couple of scattered thoughts at this point. Maybe the banking metaphor is not so evil. We can make a deposit and build up credit in the noosphere but it doesn't have to be in a particular bank but rather it adds to the general balance of knowledge in the world of ideas. We don't have to pay the outrageous fees and overdraft charges the the Bank of Corporate Education gouges out of us. Learning is actually more like a Green dollar LTSystem or a gift economy. but we are bamboozed into paying for Corporate Education for what is freely available.
Here is a whole other angle on the banking money thing. Freire was writing in the 60's. I can't remember when the world abandoned the gold standard for currency but it is within my memory so it must be around then. Regan era, I think. With the gold standard each $dollar unit was actually represented by the equivalent value in gold bullion. So if a country printed a million dollars of banknotes there was the expectation that it be backed by something tangible a Fort Knox full of gold.
World economic volume surpassed this system so the world mostly abandoned the gold standard for currency and the dollar was allowed to float. Essentially, money is no longer real but is virtual. If I have $100.00 in my bank account it doesn't mean that somewhere there is an actual $100 bill representing my wealth.

We don't even think about the fact that we only really have virtual money but we are concerned if we have virtual education. Something interesting there? We are economic cyborgs.

BYOD for Digital Emanicipation

Remember when you had to go to a priest or a scribe to have a letter read or written? Nah, fundamental literacy has been pretty much an expectation of enlightened society for a few hundred years. Pockets of under-privileged people have always persisted for whom lack of literacy has resulted in exploitation and disadvantage. One of Paulo Frierie's main missions was to emancipate the poor by promoting literacy and his harshest criticisms was for systems and institutions that deprived poor people of access to education. We have a similar circumstance today with respect to digital literacy. The ability to participate in our current society is, in part, governed by our ability to use information and communications networks. Society recognizes this and increasingly, digital literacy is seen as an essential skill which is being infused into the regular school curriculum.

What's the Story, Morning Glory

I was listening to a snippet of a CBC Ideas radio show today Paul Kennedy Aging by the Book on the topic Narrative Gerontology. The idea is that the richer you tell your life story the more resilient you are in old age. I checked Wikipedia and created a new entry when I found nothing there. The program and my subsequent research gave me some interesting ideas for the creative non-fiction class that I have been trying to get off the ground as part of a journalism minor in the English and Creative Writing department at the local University. People tell stories naturally and great story tellers are always in demand. We can learn how to tell better stories, for the entertainment and illumination of others but also for personal transformation and to provide closure for ourselves and others. Some authors studying aging determined that we sometimes begin writing the final chapters of our life stories long before they are due in response to social pressures, expectations of retirement, diminished physical capacity. They called this "foreclosure and suggested that this resulted in unnecessary unhappiness and depression. As I thought about these stories I was reminded of an older story in this blog Secret, Sacred and Cover Stories. I'll have to think about this some more and see what emerges. One of the most well regarded self-help/mutual aid organizations, Alcoholics Anonymous employs the therapeutic effects of story telling. The fourth and fifth steps involve the development of a personal moral written inventory which is then shared aloud with another person. The amounts to the story of a persons life to that point. For alcoholics, the therapy comes from the recognition of the way that their emotions and attitudes had been infected by the disease of alcoholism. The act of writing down the personal inventory, detailing the way that fear, resentment and sex (three issues if left unresolved were considered to be the most likely to return an alcoholic to active drinking) was essential to the change of character necessary for recovery. The act of telling that story to another person provided additional therapeutic punch and allowed the individual to hear themselves tell their story aloud. Seeing your story on paper and hearing spoke provides the transformational power. Transformation and transformational learning theory (Merzirov, 19xx) Information and communication technologies provide a potent means of amplifying this already powerful effect. If a picture paints a thousand words, then a 5 minute YouTube video paints 10,000 words. Applying digital multimedia to the personal story telling amplifies immensely. Whereas in the past the creation of audiovisual artifacts required costly equipment and extensive training, current multimedia is much more accessible. Everyone has a smartphone which has the capacity to create audio and visual materials and to share them in an instant.

Wikispaces being fattened for market like Mendeley?

I've been using Wikispaces for years. I have a number of free wikis and pay for a few others. Over the years I have been recommending Wikispaces.com to the teachers and graduate students who I teach in a variety of settings, online and face-to-face. I always liked Wikispaces because of the WISIWIG editor and the simple process of getting set up. I feel that it is important that professional educators have a web presence, an e-portfolio or personal encyclopedia that allows them to explore and develop in their own web- based multimedia applications, their own website. I hope that they model the process to the students that they will soon be teaching. This is the essence of education for me, encouraging independent learning. When I say I want people to take ownership of their learning I mean it figuratively AND literally. Do your work in your own space and not in some institution's Learning Management System (LMS).

 I am currently teaching a group of pre-service teachers how to use ICT and social media as part of the Literacy with ICT across the Curriculum initiative mandated by the Manitoba department of education a few years ago. People learn how to use the Googleverse of Maps, Blogger, YouTube, Gmail, Calendar etc. Skype, Mindmeister, Brainshark, Audacity, Vocaroo and any number of web applications. They are encouraged to set up their own instances of all of these things (using their own anonymous accounts while they are learning) and to use a central web-space as a display/demonstration/reflection/personal learning environment. Mostly, I have recommended Wikispaces as this central space  because of their policy of support for educators and because of the excellent education community that has emerged around Wikispaces and for the excellent support that I have always received when ever I have had occasion to need help directly from Wikispaces. The current group is the ICT class for the Brandon University PENT program. Things have been going well and people have been putting their work in a Wikispaces wiki. We are at the point where I want to start demonstrating the collaborative and communication dimension of wikis but when the students try to make their Wikispaces wiki public they are asked to pay a $1.00 fee.

While the cost is not onerous, the problem is that the Wikispaces subscription requires a credit card or Paypal account that students don't necessarily have. Wikispaces says they are trying to eliminate spammers who have been setting up wikis for unspecified and undocumented nefarious purposes. What it looks more like to me is that Wikispaces is trying to build up a customer base who have provided a billing option. I don't begrudge them wanting to be compensated but it seems a little suspect to me that they are doing this. I would happily cough up the $15.00 to set every class member with a Wikispaces account. I can set them up as members of my Wikispaces Classroom but that doesn't support the principle of personal ownership. I don't want people to work in my learning environments, I want them to work in their own personal learning environments.

One of the reasons that I am a bit suspicious is the recent example of Mendeley. Mendeley is a wonderful web-based bibliographic tool that has a social networking dimension. You can set up Mendeley groups to share bibliographic resources and to establish scholarly communities of interest. I have established a number of Mendeley groups on a range of topics with significant numbers of followers. I started doing this with Zotero many years ago and when Mendeley came up with something similar, thought I would try it out. The groups have been working and sharing and building up a huge repository of user generated content in an open platform. Recently, Mendeley announced that it had been purchased by Elsevier publishing. Reactions have been predictably unfavorable because Elsevier is not known for its support of open scholarship. So now all of the user-generated content is owned by Elsevier and it seems likely that they will be selling that data as part of their regular business practices.

When I first signed up for Mendeley I was a little concerned about putting my eggs in a commercial basket and I feel vindicated in that hesitation. I have continued to develop my Zotero collection and groups so that I am not worried about losing data. Zotero is a different type of enterprise, established with a Carnegie Mellon Grant and maintained by George Mason University. Although anything can happen, I feel more confident that Zotero is not going to sell me and my content and connections to a publishing company or to a learning management corporation.

 Another similar situation is Moodlerooms where the CMS behemoth Blackboard has been acquiring some of the partners of the open source Moodle platform. Blackboard is hardly an open source or open access proponent and is not likely to hesitate to capitalize on the BS and T that educators have been freely helping develop over the years. No question the corporatization of education is well underway.

I have no illusions about the motives of corporations -- more profit each quarter. Is Wikispaces planning to do the same thing? I will be putting my eggs in another basket although it is hard to figure out exactly where to go. Likely Google Sites for the meantime.

Scholarly Competencies for Graduate Learners in the eLearning Discipline

Scholarly Competencies for Graduate Learners in the 0eLearning Discipline by Glen Gatin

Google docs version in case the Scribd link above gives grief. 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1PvrnDa4fLfpuTKZUpSf0U-OAMaI1qgdu9zP934R9mbw

Unchallenged assumptions

One of the obligations of graduate scholars is to challenge taken for granted assumptions. One common unchallenged assumptions in elearning ( and education generally) is the notion of learning styles. Beginning scholars in this field should be aware that the learning styles theory is contested. This is the case with all theories and scholars are charged with the testing and verification of theories. One of the most common criticisms of learning styles theory is that the theory has not been very well supported by empirical research. To understand some of the dimensions of the scholarly debate over the issue of learning styles see:

 Coffield, F., Moseley, D., Hall, E., & Eccleston, K. (2004). Learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning. Learning and Skills Research Center. Retrieved from https://crm.lsnlearning.org.uk/user/order.aspx?code=041543 and

Jay Cross, one of the architects of the learning model used by the University of Phoenix reviewed Coffield et al. (2004) and has this to say about Learning Styles Theory. Cross, J. (n.d.). Learning Styles, ha, ha, ha, ha. Time. Retrieved from http://www.internettime.com/2013/04/learning-styles-ha-ha-ha-ha/comment-page-1/#comment-43513

 Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Roher, D., & Bjork, R. (2009). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(3). Retrieved from http://personal.crocodoc.com/xw1pugQ

Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has be working to test and verify learning styles theory.

Willingham, D. (2005). Do Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic Learners Need Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic Instruction? Ask the Cognitive Scientist, Summer. Retrieved from http://www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/ae/summer2005/willingham.cfm

 Willingham also has a short YouTube video which presents his position on the matter.

 Incidentally this is a good model for the scholarly use of web based multimedia. Willingham, D. (2008). YouTube - Learning Styles Don’t Exist. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIv9rz2NTUk&feature=related

Learners must take ownership of their learning

This seems to be a bit of a buzz phrase and I hear it mentioned a lot with respect to 21st C learning skills and elearning. To often it means holding learners responsible for their failure to learn or more often blaming them for their failure to learn. I agree that taking ownership learning is essential but as educators how do we enable learners to actually accomplish this? One of the most important ways to actualize taking ownership of learning is to allow learners to use their own devices, in their own preferred online learning environments. This means BYOD instead of institutional computer labs and it means the learners using their own blog, wiki, or interactive web-page instead of an institutional content management system. It is no good to insist that learners take ownership of their learning and then force them to use technology owned by the institution. What is worse is to insist that people do their work inside a learning management system where all their effort will be filed away after the course is done and the tuition has ended. Most institutions keep digital archives for a legislated period but then just scrap them without anyone ever looking at them after the final grade has been recorded. Let people BYOD and let them decide where they want to do their learning and connecting.

A Tommy Douglas Tale

One the true heroes of Canadian Politics was Tommy Douglas. This is one of the stories he would tell to educate people about the imbalance in the capitalist economic system.


"THE CREAM SEPARATOR

I used to visit in farm homes, particularly around meal time, and if I got in around dinner time of course, everybody in the family was busy. They were unhitching the horses. They were pumping thewater. They were milking the cows. They were pitching down the hay and the oat sheaves. Somebody else was out gathering the eggs.Somebody else was feeding the pigs and the chickens. Everybody had something to do. Even the youngsters were given a job doing something, for instance gathering the eggs or feeding the chickens.

And here I was, right off the city streets. I didn't know what to do, and I said "give me something to do." Well, nobody was going to trust this city boy with milking a good cow. They gave me the one job thatanybody could do. They gave me the job of turning the handle of the cream separator. Any of you ever turned the handle on the cream separator? Well it's quite an experience. I got to be quite good at it. I got to the place where I could tell you how many verses of "Onward Christian Soldiers" it takes to put a pan of milk through this thing. And as I was turning the handle and they were pouring in the milk, and I could see the cream come out the one spout and the skim milk coming out of the other spout, one day it finally penetrated my thick Scotch head that this cream separator is exactly like our economic system.

Here are the primary producers, the farmers and the fishermen and the loggers. They are pouring in the milk. And here are the workers, whether they work on the railroad or go down to the mines or sail ships or work in a store or a bank, or teach school, clerk in the store, work in a hospital. They are the people whose services make the economy go round, and they're turning the handle. So here you have it: primary producer puts in the milk; people who work with hand and brain turn the handle. And then I thought, but there's another fellow here somewhere. There's a fellow who owns this cream separator. And he's sitting on a stool with the cream spout in his mouth. And the primary producer and the worker take turns on the skim milk spout. And they don't like skim milk. Nobody likes skim milk.

And they blame it on each other And the worker says, "If those farmers and fishermen, you know, would work a little harder, well I wouldn't be drinking this skim milk." And the fishermen and the farmers say, "If those workers didn't demand a forty hour week, didn't want such high wages, I wouldn't have to live on this blue milk." But you know, they're both wrong.

The farmers and the fishermen have produced so much we don't know what to do with it _ we've got surpluses of foodstuffs. And the workers, they've produced so well that today nearly a million of them are unemployed. The fault is not with the worker. It is not with the primary producer. The fault is with this machine. This machine was built to give skim milk to the worker and the primary producer, and to give cream to the corporate elite.

As a matter of fact, it doesn't always do that because every once in a while this little fellow sitting on the stool with the cream spout in his mouth gets indigestion. And he says, "Boys, stop this machine. We got a recession!" He says to the worker, "You're laid off, you can go on unemployment insurance. and after that on welfare." And he says to the farmers and the fishermen, "You know, we don't need your stuff. Take it back home." And then he sits for a while,

indigestion gets better, burps a couple of times, says, " Alright, boys, start the machine. Happy days are here again. Cream for me and skim milk for both of you."

Now what the, what the democratic socialist party has been saying to Canadians for a long time is that the time has come in this land of ours for the worker and the primary producer to get their hands on the regulator of the machine so that it begins to produce homogenized milk in which everybody'll get a little cream."

The other famous Tommy Douglas lesson was Mouseland

Keeping Your Distance with Social Media

How social media allows you to control your interactions and Keep Your Distance. We all want and need to interact with other people and most of the time those interactions are healthy, beneficial and rich with information. However, many times the richness of the communication environment can be a distraction or impediment to the hoped for outcome of the interaction.
A recent commercial survey for a web meeting platform suggested that people and women in particular prefer online meetings to face-to-face meetings for a number of interesting reasons. Most of those reasons involve some desire for people to keep their distance from annoying, ineffective, irritating and offensive elements of meat space interactions. The environment is too rich for the purpose and the extraneous elements are actually an impediment to communication.
Same thing applies in a high school classroom where you pile in a bunch of hormonally inflamed adolescents and expect them to control their biology long enough to enjoy some sort of cognitive and intellectual development. Yes social development is important but the two should not necessarily be combined at all times.

In circumstances like these using social media to control or "keep your distance" is an adaptive response and one that planners and organizers should bear in mind when redesigning work or educational environments.

Gatin, G. (2009). Keeping your distance: A basic social process (Dissertation). Fielding Graduate University.

Steinmetz, K. F. (2012). Message received: Virtual ethnography in online message boards. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 11(1), 26 – 39. Retrieved from http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/IJQM/article/view/9041

Social and emotional intelligence and social media- How important is presence?

Social media has become a fact of life for many. More and more, the business and education sectors are mandating the use of online tools. Email has been a standard mode of communication and new forms of social media are rapidly expanding digital communications. A persistent concern respecting the use of web based applications is the perceived lack of social and emotional cues that are evident in face-to-face communications. Communications using digital media covers a broad spectrum from telephone, email, VOIP, microblogging, weblogs, wikis, webinar applications, and multiuser virtual environments.

What is the connection between emotional intelligence and online communication? Hanson, Grange, and Prosser (2010)studied the emotional intelligence of people in the context of their use of social media.

The results also suggest those individuals who pay attention to their own and others emotional states are less likely to have online messages misinterpreted, are less likely to experience stress in the workplace and are more confident in their ability to communicate effectively. Furthermore the study suggests individuals who believe they have a more balanced approach to problem solving (incorporating some consideration of one’s own emotions and the emotions of others in the decision-making process) and who use emotions for the successful engagement of others, will be more consistent in effectively communicating online than those that are less likely to incorporate emotion in the decision making process.

Dabbagh,(2007) has articulated some of the characteristics of successful online learners.

The emerging online learner can be described as someone who has a strong academic self-concept; is competent in the use of online learning technologies, particularly communication and collaborative technologies;
understands, values, and engages in social interaction and collaborative learning;
possesses strong interpersonal and communication skills; and is self-directed.

Many of the personal characteristics are indicative of persons with high levels of social and emotional intelligence.

In the field of online education the sense of presence has been of interest. Moore (1997) proposed a theory of transactional distance that mapped the various levels of presence available between teachers and students and between students. The theory of transactional distance has been most operationalized in efforts to reduce the distance in online communication for the purpose of teaching and learning. Gatin,(2009) proposed that people are not so much interested in narrowing the distance they feel in online learning as they are interested in controlling their distance from others using online learning as one of a array of strategies.


The effect of the sense of presence in online virtual environments has interested educational theorists (McBrien, Cheng, & Jones 2009; Warburton, 2009; Dreher, Reiners, Dreher & Dreher, 2009). How does the use of an avatar effect the sense of presence?

Real worlds and virtual worlds are becoming increasingly interconnected (Davis, Murphy, Owens, Khazanchi, &Zigurs, 2009). For example, the growth of the virtual economy has accelerated rapidly. More and more goods are being developed produced and purchased without any exchange of a tangible product. People are living more and more in virtual or digitally enhanced environments.

What special forms of social and emotional intelligence are used in virtual environments? How are social skills evolving? Can education prepare people to cope and thrive in an increasingly digital reality, the metaverse?

References:

Dabbagh, N. (2007). The online learner: Characteristics and pedagogical implications. Contemporary Issues in Technology & Teacher Education, 7(3), 217–226.

Davis, A., Murphy, J., Owens, D., Khazanchi, D., & Zigurs, I. (2009). Avatars, people and virtual worlds: Foundations for research in metaverses. Journal of the Association of Information Systems, 10(2), 90–117. Retrieved from http://www.isqa.unomaha.edu/dkhazanchi/vita/Research%20Papers/JAIS_Metaverse_Paper%202009.pdf


Dreher, C., Reiners, T., Dreher, N., & Dreher, H. (2009). Virtual worlds as a context suited for information systems education: Discussion of pedagogical experience and curriculum design with reference to Second Life. Journal of Information Systems Education, 20(2), 211–224. Retrieved from http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/detail?accno=EJ844222

Gatin, G. (2009). Keeping your distance: A basic social process (Dissertation). Fielding Graduate University.

Hansen, K., Grange, L., & Prosser, C. (2010). An investigation of emotional intelligence and the use of online social media tools in organizations. Swingurn University of Technology.

Moore, M. (1997). Theory of Transactional Distance. Theoretical Principles of Distance Education (pp. 22–38). Routledge. Retrieved from http://www.aged.tamu.edu/research/readings/Distance/1997MooreTransDistance.pdf

Hansen, K., Grange, L., & Prosser, C. (2010). An investigation of emotional intelligence and the use of online social media tools in organizations. Swinburn University of Technology.

Steam Age IT re revisited.

In 2010 I was was reading the article “Is IT Becoming Extinct” by Miguel Guhlin

http://www.edsupport.cc/mguhlin/archives/2008/03/entry_6863.htm

The topic of In-house IT systems and the development of utility computing has been interesting. I like to chime in from my personal experience and reading of various sources, one being a book by Eric Larsen, in “Devil in the White City”. He describes a time when electrical service was new. There was a big debate about AC or DC electricity.

Many of the institutions in the early days of electricity had their own power generating plants. They employed many people who saw the switch to utility electricity as a great threat and passed around a lot of scare stories about how horrible it was and all the hazards.

Of course, the switch happened and not many institutions employ big groups of technical specialists to generate a private source of electricity. The naysayers lost all credibility and the whole specialization evolved.

Same thing with IT, utility computing is here. In spite of all the horror stories and manipulations of the tech elite, there is less and less reason to have a big group of specialists to operate expensive and clunky private networks.

As a teacher using a computer mediated approach over the last 10 years, I found myself “working around” IT a lot of the time. Many of the tech folks didn’t believe that computers should be used for the purpose of education even though they worked for educational institutions.

Nor did they think that teachers were capable of using technology and they reinforced that opinion by constantly undermining any effort teachers made to develop the necessary skills.

The cultural clashes between corporate IT and administration didn’t help either. Lots of energy was spent on those epic battles and teachers and students were a very minor consideration for all the espoused values of “Students are #1″ in every educational institutions mission and vision statement. The struggle for control and authority have resulted in most of the failures of education related technology innovation.

In-house, corporate IT is like the steam powered DC generating plants of 100 ago. Pretty much done. It is going to take a little while for the change but probably not as long as it took to switch to AC electricity. One of the benefits is that education is being transformed. Technology will accommodate education rather than the other way around.

I know lots of teachers who just gave up on computers and the web and felt that they would never be able to develop the necessary skills. It was just so draining always having to get IT to open a port or set up file system or authorize access to a resource. So they stuck to Outlook, MS Word, Internet Explorer, the “approved tools”.

Happy to say that web based tools and cloud computing has made it incredibly easy for teachers to support learning in the digital era. All the alarmist rhetoric about identity theft, cyber-bullying, online predators etc. is being recognized as the last gasps of a system in transition, a struggle for control and authority. I would encourage all teachers to take another look.

Dec, 2011: I just keep updating this post and watching the trend.
Today reading an article about utility computing see how attitudes have changed in just 3 years.

And for startup companies, the decision to not build is a no brainer. Connectivity to the cloud is the real issue for these companies. “If I was starting a greenfield company, the data center would be the size of my bathroom; there wouldn’t necessarily even be a server, maybe a series of switches and all my backoffice apps, my sales force automation, my storage would be handled in the cloud,” said Dave Nichols, CIO Services Leader for Ernst & Young, the global IT consultancy

In the last year I have been teaching IT courses for pre-service teachers and instead of having them buy a couple of $100 textbooks I have them buy $250 netbooks. The class proceeds with a combination of wireless routers and everybody learns how to use ICT and social media on their own devices. The not only learn how to use the netbook but they start constructing their own personal learning networks from amongst their class mates. The idea is that when they are finished their training and are out on the job, they will have a group to communicate with, on a channel the are familiar with using their own device that they know how to operate. As we approach a state of ubiquitous connection and persistent proximity, BYOD is more important and storage in the cloud is just another part of that sort of independence.

Keynote address at the University of Guadalajara

Narration and paper to follow.

Sweet Blogger iPhone app

With lake pics

Never rains, pours

Had to turn down an invitation to address the International Leadership Association because I am presenting at APRENDRED-IV

Two excellent looking conferences, each on topics of great interest to me. If only one, or both, was actually in SL.

MOOCs in Virtual Worlds

Getting set up for a couple of MOOCs this fall.  Change.MOOC.ca and CMC11
I'm on the roster for week 8 of CMC11.

I've been participating in these fabulous learning experiences for a few years now starting with the earliest instances but mostly with Connectivism08. Each one has been an excellent learning experience no matter what level of attention I was able to pay.  It is an amazing way to get to meet with people with similar interests and to participate in all sorts of activities.

In many past MOOC's  a group would meet in Second Life. Some participants were experienced in SL but many took the opportunity to learn and explore a virtual environment and evaluate it as a part of their personal learning environment and as one that they would like to investigate for use for various education related purposes.

I am offering the use of my space in SL as a meeting place to discuss the weekly topics and as a starting point for further exploration of SL, networking, maybe a little dancing etc.

If you are familiar with SL, the meeting space is at

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Madhupak/11/25/65

If you are not familiar with SL you can start here to get set up and there are usually many welcoming avatars to help you get oriented.

VOICE IT

Much has happened but I haven't been recording adventures here so much. Recently got involved with a major research project in MB. The project is sponsored by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, in one of their divisions called Communities and Universities Research Alliance. The project title is Vital Outcome Indicators for Community Engagement for Children and Youth. So SSHRC-CURA VOICE. The project is a long term project to try to determine the indicators for success for northern youth. It is a participatory action research project with contributors from a number of communities and sectors throughout MB.

My participation so far is to work with the Knowledge Mobilization group to set up and organize a broad spectrum of social media. Such as Twitter and Facebook. We are starting out using a Wikispaces wiki to coordinate information, one of the long term requirements of the project specifications is that Knowledge mobilization occur through the use of a wiki. Right up my alley!

We have had a launch meeting via the new Cisco systems tele-presence suite located at Brandon University, University College of the North in Thompson and The Pas, U of W and U of M in Winnipeg.

Prior to the launch meeting the KM group met under the direction of Dr. Robin Enns and Dr. Karen Rempel to begin the process of setting up a web based communications system. Applications used include Skype, Mindmeister, Zotero and Ushahiti.

One of the over-riding concerns for this project is to be respectful of the Ownership, Control, Access and Possession (OCAP)

of information generated by First Nations people. The basic precepts of participatory action research require that all participants be equivalent and that the distinctions between the researcher and the subjects be eliminated.

The bones of the VOICE-IT wiki are emerging. This wiki is to support the work of the KM group but may also serve as a model that could be used to coordinate activities and to aggregate information through out the project.

A workshop is scheduled for June 28-28 at Elkhorn Resort to provide background information about the PAR approach.

Getting pwned by 3rd party, peer-reviewed resources.

Someone passed along a link to an interesting article about the new approach to scholarly publishing. Reading the article turned out to be an interesting exercise in critical thinking about the veracity, validity and reliability of web based scholarly resources.

The article Research intelligence - Rip it up and start again was published in the Times Higher Education newsletter. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=414579

I was reading right along and nodding my head until the part about Elsevier publishing being an exemplar of the new approach. I recalled that last year Elsevier got caught publishing at least 6 fake journals, mostly in support of pharmaceutical companies and their fraudulent process. http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55679/

Then I started trying to figure out who publishes the Times Higher Education so I looked at their ownership which is Charterhouse. I wanted to figure out if there was a connection between Charterhouse and Elsevier and sure enough. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/charterhouse-swots-up-on-reeds-business-820727.html

So this article is actually marketing or at least an attempt to repair the tattered reputation of Elsevier.

The web makes it easy to manufacture and disseminate crap, but it also makes it easy for individuals to get down a few layers and check the veracity of stories themselves. Unfortunately, the money grubbing publishers realized that few people will go to this minimal amount of effort to check things out.

Are people Keeping Their Distance from a Creepy Treehouse? #PLENK

Suifaijohnmak Weblog asks the question "Why are people staying away from the forum?" This is the #PLENK Moodle forum that is being used to support a MOOC, a massively online open course. John details some possible reasons in his post and a number of commenters add excellent insights.

I find this quite interesting as well and it seems that somehow this particular MOOC has triggered the creepy treehouse effect.
Stein offers a number of definitions for this phenomena but this one seems apt.

n. Any institutionally-created, operated, or controlled environment in which participants are lured in either by mimicking pre-existing open or naturally formed environments, or by force, through a system of punishments or rewards.

Such institutional environments are often seen as more artificial in their construction and usage, and typically compete with pre-existing systems, environments, or applications. creepy treehouses also have an aspect of closed-ness, where activity within is hidden from the outside world, and may not be easily transferred from the environment by the participants.

Other courses of in this series had a spirit of co-learning with the course moderators. This time around it seems as though it is part of their day job and the whole process has become institutionalized. I get the sense that participants are regarded as subjects of an experiment rather than connected individuals.
It is not that the course originators were not straight forward with their intentions, they stated their intentions from the start and had everyone agree to the letter of consent. This is part of NRC research and a number of people, including myself have expressed their intention of conducting research into various aspects of the experience.

My specific research interest is to test a theory that I developed as part of my dissertation research.
http://gradworks.umi.com/33/71/3371263.html

The abstract is below.

This analysis began with inquiries into the substantive area of distance education using the classic grounded theory method. Analysis revealed a pattern of problem-solving behavior, from which the theory "Keeping Your Distance " emerged.

The theory is an integrated set of concepts referring to the conscious and unconscious strategies that people use to regulate distance , physical and representative, in their everyday lives. Strategies are used to control physical, emotional, and psychological realities and to conserve personal energy in interactions with individuals and/or institutions.

Keeping Your Distance is presented in terms of a conditions/consequences/covariance theoretical model adapted from Glaser's (1978) Theoretical Sensitivity . Conditions evoke a system of strategic response patterns which result in consequences. Responses and their consequences change conditions and result in additional adjustments, made on an ongoing basis. For all social interactions, people use a personalized algorithm of engagement that mitigates conditions and consequences and preserves optimal distance.

Keeping Your Distance provides a theoretical starting point for considerations of the changing notions of distance. In part, these changes have been brought about by developments in the fields of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and online social networking.

This emerging, multivariate, conceptual theory may be of interest to scholar-practitioners examining distance education, psycho-social processes, and critical pedagogy. Elements of this theory may be of use to higher education policymakers charged with instructional design, institutional advancement, and marketing.

Keywords: "Keeping your distance," Distance Education, Grounded Theory method, Critical Pedagogy

I find a bit of irony in the understanding that this is an institutionalized MOOC about Personal Learning Environments, something that struck me as contradiction in terms. It seems as though an effort is being made to deconstruct the personal in PLE and figure out a way to put it in a bottle for marketing purposes.

I understand that organizing a massive online course like this will require institutional supports and infrastructure but it will be valuable to determine the breaking point, the point where many experienced users of PLE's got the sense that this was no longer personal and they were not really participants but were having their bar presses counted.