There is a 2 week extension to the Special Issue of the ALT Journal on The Transformational Impact of Learning Technology, so it’s not too late to make a submission. There is a range of topics - see Call for Papers (link now corrected), and including pedagogical, organisational and philosophical aspects.
We have a prestigious and infuential team of guest editors:
John Bourne (Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, Professor of Technology Entrepreneurship at Babson College, and Executive Director of the Sloan Consortium, USA)
Martin Hall (Vice Chancellor of the University of Salford, UK)
Mike Keppell (Professor of Higher Education and Director of the Flexible Learning Institute, at Charles Sturt University, Australia).
The closing date for submissions *has been extended by 14 days* and is now 14/2/2010.
We’d welcome your submission ad/or your efforts in disseminating this important Call.
What I took from George’s post was a plea for ideology rather than pragmatism, so that the vision may be be preserved for longer. Reaching for my dictionary (and ignoring the reluctance to pin down terms), I judged that George’s view of ideology leant more to “speculation that is imaginary or visionary” rather than “body of ideas that reflects the beliefs of a nation, political system, class, etc.” I can see that the visionary is an important landmark when pragmatism may be watering down the flavour of the change. However, the term ideal (also mentioned by David Wiley) “pattern or model, esp. of ethical behaviour” seems to me to be a productive and unifying concept for this discussion. Patterns of behaviour are a productive topic for discussion about education which is about what we do as well as what we share as reifications in texts, web sites, etc.
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Technology-enabled change can/will happen in societies where education is more and less available. In the former, I would like to see any change preserve the quality of educational experiences whilst extending its reach; and in the latter, I would like to see new models explored where developing countries can influence technology, the means of publication and contribute to knowledge from their unique perspective of growing their education systems in a new socio-technical environment e.g. massive use of mobile phone access to Internet in Africa and using OER to support teachers not necessarily replace them
So what does this mean for the discussion about openness?
Ideology can help to spice up the discussion about openness - the Stallmans and the Downes’s make us think and keep us on our toes as long as we don’t rely on them for life prescriptions
Ideals can provide a common ground for dialogue and change - although we may not share underlying religious/ moral frameworks, we can share more general aspirations such as universal education
The table for discussion about openness and change should remain available for long as possible, and we shouldn’t try to close down discussion whilst the most significant beneficiaries haven’t even seen the table. We need to hear what they have to say - how do those deprived of education lend their voice to a dialogue of change? Let them open their mouths whilst others open their minds.
To me, ideology may be provocative but is too sure of itself - where’s the room for manoeuvre?
Let’s think about modes of expression (including definitions perhaps) that promote inclusive dialogue and allow us to nudge change as it happens, since we are unlikely to get it right ahead of time.
I realised that I haven’t even mentioned commerce but I’ll have to leave that for another post, or you could read my Edupunk post to get a flavour of my views here
“I do think we need hard-nosed critique of commercialism around all areas of educational technology not just monopolistic providers of Virtual Learning Environments like Blackboard. What Tom Woodward called Client Enslavement is also called Supplier lock-in, and that sacrifice of power can happen wherever monopolies prevail - with proprietary VLEs, with ‘free’ Web 2.0 services that are bought out in the game of Googlopoly, and even possibly with Open Source software.”
So to summarise, when we decide how to conduct the dialogue about openness, let’s think about how open our approach is:
Professors John Bourne, Martin Hall (@VCSalford on Twitter) and Mike Keppell are guest editing a Special Issue of ALT-J, entitled The Transformational Impact of Learning Technology more details of Call for Papers here.
This is such an important topic, and we are hoping for a wide range of excellent papers. As an antidote to too much turkey and mince pies, you can get your thinking caps on and get writing.
Abstracts are accepted until 15 December (for feedback) and full papers until 31 January 2010.
I am posting my embarrassingly long comment on Dave Cormier’s excellent post so that I can easily find it in future - blog as filing cabinet!
In a recent post http://francesbell.com/2009/11/23/what-is-that-groups-and-networks-argument-all-about/ I looked at openness (and other attributes) as something to which we might aspire but not necessarily an absolute. The example I used was privacy of communication and the role of (semi-) private communication in moving towards more open discourse. Your article has made me a thinkabout a paradox that OERs (and traditional publishing) raises. We (or at least I) want knowledge to be interpreted, provisional, flexible and yet the act of ‘publication’ freezes knowledge in a frame. Much has been written about authority and power and how these are created and exercised in traditional scholarly domains (perhaps what you call 20th century knowledge.
So what is 21st Century knowledge, and perhaps more importantly, what can it be? Is it fragmented snippets of ideas expressed in blog posts and comments, linked by read counts and recognition systems. Or is it more like a dialogue where participants enter a process willing to change their minds in response to what others say? So is it better that I express my ideas here as a comment to your blog that you can easily find? or as my own blog post that appears as a pingback? (In fact I often repost longer comments I have made on my own blog so I can find them later).
We all have to filter information that bombards us through RSS, email, Twitter, and all the other channels we add to our information sources. The really interesting questions are around why we filter and to whom we listen. Questions of power, gender, culture haven’t gone away - the network has not completely democratised communication. There is a natural tendency in OER to focus on technologies and provider-centric models. It’s difficult to show RoI if you don’t have frozen clunky resources for which read counts and accesses make sense. How would you count the development and spread of an idea, morphing as it flows? My plea is for rich qualitative research (with numbers thrown in as appropriate) that helps us understand how people do and could contribute to and use knowledge that emerges from networked communication and interaction. Cultural change (even when it seems radical) is bound to be incremental. Let’s try to understand it and shape it, and don’t let’s throw too many babies out with bathwaters. Sometimes, beneath the glove of bold, radical change is the cold, hard, hand of domination by commerce, elites or other entrenched power bases.
‘When _I_ use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master - - that’s all.’
In other words, Stephen Downes was playing Humpty Dumpty with the terminology but what was to be master?
Having been through CCK08 and CCK09, I am pulling out another issue that has been vaguely troubling me. Working on this xtranormal video has helped me puzzle out the issue as I re-read what other participants had to say about networks and groups in order to include their words in the script.
It seems to me that ascribing the attributes of autonomy, diversity, openness and emergent knowledge to networks and suggesting that groups foster the opposites of these is adopting a normative stance, assuming we always want total autonomy, etc. and that networks are a ‘good’ organizational form because they will deliver this. As an educator, I would definitely aspire to all of those attributes for myself and the students, but can see circumstances when learning activities that compromised on these could be helpful for learners.
Autonomy
“What this means in practice is that there ought not be an identifiable dependence (that is, an explainable correlation) between what someone else says or does, and what you say or do” http://www.downes.ca/post/38545
When a teacher is working with students to help wean themselves off a dependence on particular sources or people, this may take some time, identification of the dependence, and helping them leave it behind (e.g. by giving ‘permission’ to disagree with the teacher) in ways that may be more directive than modeling behaviours in a network.
Diversity
The example of women-only networks show the value of reducing diversity in one setting as a means of achieving more diversity in the longer term.
Openness
With openness of dialogue and resources, I am inclined to paraphrase Einstein’s maxim on simplicity “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.” Hence we can make things as open as possible but without surrendering the expressed desire for privacy of the individual.
Emergent knowledge
I can see that knowledge is much more likely to emerge in networks with diverse and autonomous nodes connecting on open conditions. However such absolutes may not be achievable for all sorts of reasons. An example that I have thought of in CCK08 and CCK09 is that in providing only open resources (ones that have been published on open web site) the study of connectivism is restricted to only ideas expressed on the open web. We have seen actor-network theory brought up on Moodle forums on CCK08 and CCK09 as a network theory that uses symmetric analysis of human and non-human nodes in networks. However, it has been addressed little by the main protagonists of connectivism.
My own view expressed in the video above is that pragmatic teachers will adopt group and network organizational forms at will to suit the circumstances in which they and their learners find themselves.
