One small step for man

In Half an Hour: Open Source Assessment Stephen Downes wrote:

What we can expect in an open system of assessment is that achievement will be in some way ‘recognized’ by a community. This removes assessment from the hands of ‘experts’ who continue to ‘measure’ achievement. And it places assessment into the hands of the wider community. Individuals will be accorded credentials as they are recognized, by the community, to deserve them.

We have been talking quite a bit the last few days about George Hotz and his iPhone blog.

The important piece in our conversations is that its easy to ‘recognize’ Hotz’ achievement (and a wide community has), and in the way he structured his blog, its easy to ‘recognize’ that he is a thoughtful and collaborative worker, these last two skills being important traits for employers, and his portfolio an interesting example of how students might demonstrate these global competencies in authentic project-based learning.

Recently John Gardner posted some thoughts on Entre/Intrapreneurs, and what roles especially they play in a university. This sent me to looking for the blog of Clayton Christensen author of Innovator’s Dilemma. What I found was not specifically Christensen’s blog, but an interesting group blog from his consulting organization. I added that to my blog roll because I’ve found ideas in the book shape my thinking about trends around me at Washington State University.

For example, I’ve been thinking about Innovator’s Dilemma in the context of BlackBoard Course Management System and alternatives that may exist to that (increasingly expensive) tool. Alex Slawsby’s post gives me some further insights in applying the ideas of “interdependency” and “modularity” that I think play well with my own Web 2.0 and ePortfolio thinking.

BlackBoard is an “interdependent” system (if I understand Slawsby), with many tightly linked modules. This produces an internally efficient product, but at a cost to the customer. We (WSU) the customer are looking for alternatives that are “good enough” and at lower price points. SharePoint 2007 looks to meet that goal. It also is an interdependent system, but less specialized, it is a collaboration tool used in many business settings. As a course management system, it does not have all the features of BlackBoard, but many faculty don’t use most of the features, so SharePoint may be “good enough.” And for the University, which can amortize the cost of SharePoint over many other collaborative uses, it might be at a lower price point as well. Ehrmann calls tools like SharePoint, developed for other markets and applied to education, Worldware, and argues that they deserve special consideration for being both valuable and viable.

In a previous post, Slawsby discussed a potentially more disruptive, and more modular approach than even SharePoint to challenge BlackBoard’s CMS — online services offering free storage or other free resources (eg Google Docs). These ideas begin to beg the question, what part of the instructional IT should be outsourced completely?

I would have previously said that the University can’t outsource its instructional applications, because the University needs to manage the identity (the login ID) of its students — because it has scores and grades tied to those student identities. I would have said, “You can’t have a student just using Blogger, how would you know who they were or that the work was authentically theirs?”

Enter the student, who is increasingly “swirling” (taking courses from two or more educational institutions concurrently). The student is treating the university programs as modules (Slawsby’s term), mixing and matching courses to make independently concocted programs. The student may use one institution as a home base, bringing in credits toward a degree, or may be jumping around, ultimately looking for someone to credential the melange.

I recently wrote about an electronic portfolio as the core learning platform. In that thinking, the portfolio serves as the place to present to a specific audience the collection of learning experiences and the value and meaning that come from those experiences. Those experiences are probably not test scores or even a transcript, but more authentic products of learning, work, and avocational activities. Such a portfolio should not be a broadcast, but more like a blog, be open to comment, a place for the learner to present her current state of thinking and seek input to evolve understanding.

Which brings me back to my interest in Dr. Gardner’s post on Entre/Intrapeneurship in the University. He says, “It [entre/ intrapreneurship] must be embedded in our WSU culture and our curriculum.” Given that swirling students are already acting like educational entrepreneurs, and Google continues to move in directions that allow those students the potential outsourcing of elements of our instructional IT, I think the time for Dr Gardner’s conversation has already arrived.

Much of this thinking springs from Stephen Downes’ review article, eLearning 2.0. Experiments like ELGG and Dave Cormier’s FeedBook have implemented some of these ideas and added to our (Center for Teaching Learning and Technology at WSU) thinking.

Portfolio thinking/working includes these elements

• Collect your work
• Select from your work important examples, annotate what is important (add metadata)
• Reflect on your work, are you meeting your goals, how do you know
• Connect your work to that of others (may provide context, support, evidence of success)
• Project your work into the community to solve problems (provides context and authentic evaluation)

Following these ideas springs our conviction that platform and tools for creating ePortfolios should be Worldware, rather than custom tools purpose built for education.

Bloggers have foreshadowed our ideas about electronic portfolios, where they are collecting their original writings and synthesizing/ reflecting about their readings.

In thinking about Pandemic Flu planning , we have looked at the multiple points of failure and proposed a loosely coupled teach-in, based on an ad-hoc set of tools.

Our 2007 ePortfolio Contest challenged contestants to document their learning growth — we wanted to explore how to gain insight into the learning that is often masked in a ’showcase’ portfolio.

The more sophisticated blogger uses a blog roll to provide context about what influences them. And that blogger understands they are a “central node” (Resnick) of a (self-assembled) learning community — and the blogger/learner seeks critical input from others via comment and trackback. The blogger is engaged in dialog for the purpose of learning within a community of practice.

We understand the well developed blog to be a portfolio, but find its chronological structure can limit its utility to a would-be portfolio reader. Well developed “review” posts, that link to other posts (supporting evidence) in the blog can serve this synthetic, and demonstrative, role.

Using a portfolio platform allows the blog to continue in the mode where it is strongest, Collection and Reflection, while the portfolio provides a place to make a presentation to a specific audience for a specific purpose. Ideally the portfolio has its own file storage and Authentication/ Authorization structures to supplement the other systems from which it is aggregating.

In our thinking a portfolio (see Pandemic Flu), is a hub that can aggregate (but may not need to contain) artifacts (it might be important to bring the artifacts into the portfolio if issues of AuthZ might keep the portfolio reader from seeing the artifact, or if the artifacts are in locations where they are subject to destruction (an example of the latter might be a page in Wikipedia). Typically, the artifacts lie in native environments most suitable to them (Flickr, Blogger, del.icio.us, etc) and are arranged into the portfolio by tagging and a syndication mechanism (such as RSS).

The piece we are adding with our 2007-08 portfolio contest is the idea to engage with a community (local, national, international) on a problem and its solution. This requires the learner to learn in a multi-disciplinary way in an authentic context.

The portfolio, in this application, likely becomes a “collaba-folio” where the author is collaborating with a community in the work and documenting learning growth. It is not a showcase portfolio of a finished work. In fact, following BioQUEST, we think that authentic learning work is seldom “finished,” rather it is abandoned in favor of new, more important learning pursuits.

The teacher in this model is taking actions symmetric to the learner. The teacher is a more sophisticated learner, providing feedback to novices within a web of teaching-learning relationships. The teacher also understands that, through past reputation, he may have social capital to extend to a learner, and that extension can be done publicly via the teacher’s blog roll or by a blog post that synthesizes some aspect of the work of the learner with other members of the community (who may then provide the learner with feedback or resources). The teacher should be conscious in using social capital, and perhaps earned credentials, to advance the thinking of more novice learners into the communities of practice.

Mike Caulfield writes a nice reality check on vendor ePortfolio packages:

So enough of letting assessment vendors tell us what facilities we will be forced to use in their walled garden, and expecting us to be excited about it. Enough with assessment vendors selling us “environments”. What we should be doing is describing the the environment that might exist – students using Wordpress, Blogger, S3, GDrive, email, messaging, etc. And then we should ask if they have a tool that can evaluate that. How will their tool interface with the learning environment we’ve constructed?

Put it up against The Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies Top 100 list of tools favored by e-learning professionals. Looks like a list of Worldware to me, which is as it should be.

I’ve been thinking that my blog is an ePortfolio (I collect, select, reflect and project in this space). My categories filter for different audiences. But this is also a working space, I’m not always good at telling a single story to one audience, so I can see a case for a more formal presentation. But ideally, such a presentation would be built with open tools, and using the identity I chose, not a drop-box closed tool branded with the identity of an institution.

As for what I’d want to put into my portfolio, it would look more like the products and activities that Stephen Downes suggests in Open Source Assessment than a resume or the product of a typical university course.

David Wiley posts an invitation to join and/or help refine his course offering for Fall: Intro to Open Education, and it was with interest that I went to look. What I found did not match my expectations from the title.

Recently, Stephen Downes posted on Open Source Assessment, and I was imagining Downes’ thinking being applied in Wiley’s course:

The conversation comes up in the context of open educational resources (OERs). When posed the question in Winnipeg regarding what I thought the ideal open online course would look like, my eventual response was that it would not look like a course at all, just the assessment.

The reasoning was this: were students given the opportunity to attempt the assessment, without the requirement that they sit through lectures or otherwise proprietary forms of learning, then they would create their own learning resources.

Applying this notion to the course, I would expect that there would be a handful of introductory readings, to get the group rolling, and that the next task would be left to the students: find readings that contribute to this course, post them in the class wiki, justify why they are meritorious readings and explain how they contribute to your understanding.

The assessment would not be based on David’s judgment, but on some criteria more openly agreed and widely valuable to the group.

And rather than a read and respond course design, the course would challenge students to set a problem for themselves, perhaps form teams, and develop a solution to be argued to the community. In the John Seeley Brown notion of repair technicians always having their radios on and thereby becoming a community of practice, the course could be a hub for a community, where students would bring their resources and observations as they worked on their chosen problems. The course could be scaffolded with some open activities (e.g., interview a member of the community who has expertise in your problem but who’s perspective differs from yours.) Given that the students are blogging, they could be tasked to take their problem (definition, solution, etc) to the community(ies) that is addresses and seek feedback from those sources.

The student product from this work would not be a set of blog posts responding to Wiley’s weekly reading prompts, but a portfolio including evidence of resources, alternative perspectives examined, and solutions developed around a problem authentic to the student’s own situation.

In the current issue of Watersheds Messenger, a publication of the Western Watersheds Project, Brian Ertz describes how conservationists have used the Internet to organize and share information. He goes on with a vision “Western Watershed’s Project is well known for its vital contribution to public-oversight…. What if we could wield the cohesion and organization we already practice online more directly toward that end?

Now imagine for a moment a nearly empty public hearing in Wells, Nevada; a couple of cowboys are sitting up front as some college kid walks through the door, pulls out a camera, a laptop, and a cord. Within ten minutes the agency personnel are sitting back in their chairs watching a live projected image of Jon Marvel warning against an ill-advised chaining of hundreds/thousands of acres of Pinyon Pines – all for the almighty cow. A few minutes later John Carter is in real-time giving one of his acclaimed power-point presentations citing real science. Whereas before agency folk might have been able to close up shop early, now they will be forced to burn every last minute watching and listening to a sophisticated demonstration of conservationists who care.”

Ertz has recognized the increasing bandwidth of the Internet and is extending the reach of the web to bring people to places in ad hoc ways. I’d understood Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs in terms of organizing social action, but had not seen projecting the social action into a remote location.

I also note in this edition of the Watersheds Messenger that one of the donors this quarter is my alma matter, Whitman College. I can only hope that Whitman is giving to WWP because they understand that the work of WWP can provide students with authentic experiences and global literacies in both science and public advocacy.

Washington State University’s new Vice President for Economic Development and WSU Extension, John Gardner writes,

“My sense at reading the expectations of Washingtonians, the Regents, and our students is an amazing amount of consensus. They want a state university that gives them a leg up in the new economy, knows the new rules, and will assist WA and the Pacific Northwest to be among the innovation leaders globally.”

and

“A common theme in them all is the clear responsibility we have to build our capacity for creativity and research. And – importantly – an obligation to couple that research with application in adding value to our students, businesses, the environment, government and the economy as a whole.”

Several of Gardner’s posts indicate that he is trying to re-think “Extension” in a land-grant university and connect its historic mission with the Web 2.0 realities. This is a very interesting direction.

Regarding the last quote, its worth looking at ThinkCycle which seems to be engaged in an Extension-like coupling of universities with creative capacity to people with real problems. They say:

“At the heart of the community is an evolving database of reasonably well-posed problems and ongoing design solutions contributed by universities, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), companies and the general public. The system is primarily aimed at, but in no way limited to, using the design and engineering skills of the students and researchers in universities worldwide. One scenario is for professors to assign challenges to their students, assist them in working collaboratively with communities and organizations in developing countries while encouraging peer review from domain experts of evolving design solutions archived on ThinkCycle. Motivated teams of students may also work on critical design challenges as independent study projects with their departments. The objective is to document all evolving design solutions, rationale, processes, peer reviews and contributions within a searchable and cross-referenced system.“

What strikes me about this approach is the global literacies that ThinkCycle is promoting which I marked in bold in the quotation above. Not only are students gaining experience on problems, they are building evidence of their competencies in what might be called a portfolio within the ThinkCycle system. Since the system is open for searching, one could imagine members of one team seeking out people in the system who have demonstrated expertise in a related area and enlisting their help.

What is important about this form of global university education is that it is authentic and open. Its not a closed couse in WebCT and the problems are not toys with right answers set by the instructor.

Elsewhere, Gardner says of Extension “Our faculty located in county offices across the state provide a network of local contacts, invaluable to knowing and responding to the needs of Washingtonians.” This knowing and responding could well involve students, as extension faculty bring problems into focus in the same way ThinkCycle does.

Our Morning Reading Group is reading a Stephen Downes’ piece eLearning 2.0 on Wednesday (7/18/07). It got me thinking about our ePortfolio work and the discussions about our upcoming ePortfolio contest.

As usual, I landed in Theron’s office and we got to talking about the long tail and Amazon.com and drawing an analogy to education. The analogy went like this. Barnes & Noble sells only the current big sellers and clears lower volume titles out of its inventory. Amazon makes many of its sales from the “long tail” of books that are small volume sellers. The classic university offers high volumes of instruction across a small inventory of topics. The Web 2.0 university is a long tail organization, it exploits global resources (each of whom contribute a small amount) to provide a very wide inventory of topics. The classic university uses BlackBoard as its LMS, the long tail university uses “worldware,” and in particular, Web 2.0 tools and techniques.

This point in the conversation jogged my memory about exploring TouchGraph (which makes cool web diagrams of what sites like to other sites, using Google data). The graph I tried was using the term “Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.”

What struck me is the lack of connection between the clusters, there are several isolated islands among what should be (seems to me) a small linked community of practice. Based on the TouchGraph, the SoTL folks are not practicing long tail education and this is a lot of what the current university and the university alumni look like — little islands not webs.

Recently I commented on the goal of the new president of Washington State University to be a “global” campus. This long tail analysis helps me further understand what it would mean to be “global.”

First, it would involve using global tools, and not Blackboard. Global tools would be both Worldware and Web 2.0 Global tools would also be tools that students would use again in the workplace in ways that are similar to the ways they were used in the university. For collaboration, global tools would look like MediaWiki, SharePoint, Drupal, etc.

Second, it would use global assessment — things like portfolios, Downes’ “Open Source Assessment” and my response.

Third, it would use global resources, both to contextualize the learning in authentic problems and as informational resources. The Web 2.0 university would understand and cultivate networks among its alumni and would be active in managing its links to make networks of expertise that its students and the world could exploit.

In Cheating on online exams I speculated that students might use any of many synchronous communication channels to cheat during a synchronously delivered online exam (I am assuming the typical multiple choice timed exams.) Then today I found It’s not plagiarism it’s an easy essay where the Custom Writing folks purport to offer essays that will not be detected by TurnItIn.com.

So, there are two aspects to this cheating arms race. One is recognizing that interactions among technologies lead to new unexpected exploits, the other is the more traditional development of a better offense to overcome a better defense.

Rather than dispair, perhaps we need to turn to ideas of open source assessment where the activity and the assessment are both more authentic. The wrinkle to this thought is Custom Writing is offering to create Theses and Dissertations which ought to be more authentic tasks than the typical college essay assignment.

I’ve heard various reference to remote access to scientific tools, but don’t know much about the topic. I bumped into a commercial telescope access site (SLOOH) which might be a model of the idea. (Readers with more examples, please comment.)

One of the problems that I ran into in my recommendations for a web 2.0 solution to continuing the university during a flu pandemic was courses that require special tools. I tried to think about music performance class, but didn’t try to tackle a hard science that uses equipment. SLOOH suggests the potential for an astronomy class that would have access to an observatory. Cost $99 for a year is not out of line with some textbooks. Perhaps the university should close its observatory and switch to an online tool on a permanent basis.