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Reimagining both learning & learning institutions

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

Over the course of the 2008-09 school year, colleagues and I at WSU were thinking about institution-based vs community-based learning models. A strong sample of that work is in our AAC&U presentation from April 2009. There are two charts that are important to our thinking, Learning Spectrum and Four Strategies. We think that changing to a community-based model will have an impact on how the university is organized.

This year we got involved with the MacArthur Foundation/HASTAC Digital Media and Learning Competition as a result of looking for colleagues interested in ideas that could transform the university (and the Land Grant mission) in line with the thinking above (see our DML entry).

Yesterday I ran into two related ideas that bring me back to thinking about these topics.

Chris Hughes (co-founder of Facebook) is launching Jumo, The site says:

“There are no magic solutions to the challenges our world faces. But there are millions of people around the globe who work each day to improve the lives of others. Unfortunately, there are millions more who don’t know how to meaningfully help [emphasis mine].

Jumo brings together everyday individuals and organizations to speed the pace of global change.”

Perhaps thinking along parallel lines, Jane McGonigal’s TED talk: “Gaming can make a better world“ explored the idea that some of the traits gamers exhibit, including collaboration and a passion for the quest, could be tapped to work on some of the world’s problems. She ended by pointing to a game called Evoke that is trying to explore that hypothesis.

Evoke encourages players to develop these skills: collaboration, courage, creativity, entrepreneurship, local insight, knowledge share, resourcefulness, sustainability and vision. Its a list that has more in common with ideas of Daniel Pink or the 21st century media literacies of Howard Rheingold than 20th century efforts like WSU’s Critical Thinking Rubric (not to fault it, but it comes from a Learning 1.0 context). Evoke’s list of skills is  I recognize in our thinking above about a transformed university.

Those ideas are even more interesting in light of Tom Vander Ark’s comments in November 2009 on How Social Networking Will Transform Learning:

“I’m betting on social learning platforms as a lever for improvement at scale in education. Instead of a classroom as the primary organizing principle, social networks will become the primary building block of learning communities (both formal and informal). Smart recommendation engines will queue personalized content. Tutoring, training, and collaboration tools will be applications that run on social networks. New schools will be formed around these capabilities. Teachers in existing schools will adopt free tools yielding viral, bureaucracy-cutting productivity improvement.”

Vander Ark was Executive Director at the Gates Foundation and now he’s a partner in a private equity fund focused on innovative learning tools and formats. At the Gates Foundation he undoubtedly had a role in funding Gates’ bets on improving education, including strategies he lists based on people, schools, policy and community. Now he says he’s betting on a different strategy,  one that seems to align with the projects and ideas outlined above.

For awhile I’ve been stuck thinking about how these community-based learning could advance without leadership, or at least cooperation, from the university. I thought the university was a key player because it holds the ability to credential higher learning. And that credentialing power seemed to lock it into a dominant place in the marketplace.

Recently, I came across an argument that some learners may not care about  earning university credentials. The example was a person who owns a business and wants some business training (accounting, management, etc). For this person, the knowledge may be valuable, but the credential inconsequential.

That opened me up to see other alternatives to credentialling. The Evoke game promises to identify top players, based on the skills they demonstrate. For this week Evoke says: “Your LEARN mission this week is to figure out: Who else is inventing creative, sustainable ways to power our everyday lives? Find someone working on a creative electricity project, or a sustainable energy project — and tell the network about their big idea.”

This is all building toward the 10th week when participants will submit an “Evocation” (think of this as a thesis proposal): “Based on the Evokation you submit, and your overall participation in the Evoke network missions, quests, and discussions, we will choose a number of you to continue the journey with us and change the world in unimaginable ways. Selection includes winning a $1000 investment in the project among other “credentialling.”

Evoke’s funding comes from the World Bank. Another funding model might be micro-lending. Kushal Chakrabarti, CEO, Vittana recently posted about Vittana’s new venture into micro-lending for student education loans.

Could these ideas be combined? Could they offer a different path to education for some learners, bypassing the university’s credentialing?


Posted in Community, Learning | No Comments »

Who is preparing us for the Grand Challenges

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

This post is in response to a post by Cathy Davidson on HASTAC 2010:  Grand Challenges and Global Innovations coming up April 15-17.  She says ‘David and I are thinking ahead to our address on “The Future of Thinking:  Learning Institutions in a Digital Age.”   We will have a bicoastal conversation, and then a live chat, still in the planning stages.   So we’d love you to send us questions that might form the basis of that conversation on any aspect of our educational futures.’

This is a long preamble that ends in a question for Cathy and David in the last paragraph:

On March 5, 2010 the US Dept of Education released the National Educational Technology Plan 2010 (NETP) which says on page 4:

What and How People Need to Learn

Whether the domain is English Language arts, mathematics, sciences, social studies, history, art, or music, 21st century competencies and expertise such as critical thinking, complex problem solving, collaboration, and multimedia communication (emphasis added) should be woven into all content areas. These competencies are necessary to become expert learners, which we all must be if we are to adapt to our rapidly changing world over the course of our lives…

This NETP plan is titled “Learning Powered by Technology” but this list of learning goals does not depend on technology (except perhaps the multimedia) and none of the list depends (or acknowledges) the growing hyperconnectivity of the Internet or the shift from an information scarcity economy to one of information abundance.

Nearly simultaneously, the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) opened to comment its proposal for K-12 standards. The CCSSI standards purport to be getting students ready for college and the workplace.

In the Writing Standards for History/Social Studies and Science grades 11-12, I find, “6.   Demonstrate command of technology, including the Internet, to produce, publish, and update work in response to ongoing feedback, including fresh arguments or new information.”  Which is interesting, especially when taken with this sidebar: “New technologies have broadened and expanded the role that speaking and listening play in acquiring and sharing knowledge and have tightened their link to other forms of communication. The Internet has accelerated the speed at which connections between speaking, listening, reading, and writing can be made, requiring that students be ready to use these modalities nearly simultaneously. (emphasis added) Technology itself is changing quickly, creating a new urgency for students to be adaptable in response to change.”

“Collaboration” is mentioned along with “comprehension,” in terms of social manners (good listening skills) but not in terms of skills in finding collaborators or learning communities on the Internet. “Social” is only mentioned in terms of “social studies,” and “community” does not appear in the document.

While its not surprising that CCSSI does not endorse learning using the Internet, except as mediated by public schools, it does not seem to recognize the wealth of resources, skills, and social capital that  learners potentially are bringing into the school setting.

Its interesting to contrast the NETP list, or the CCSSI with Howard Rhiengold’s 21’st century media literacy skills, or John Seely Brown’s thoughts on Learning 2.0 and communities of practice, or Cathy Davidson’s ideas of ‘collaboration by difference.’ Recently, David Gelernter, in Time to Start Taking the Internet Seriously said:

“Modern search engines combine the functions of libraries and business directories on a global scale, in a flash: a lightning bolt of brilliant engineering. These search engines are indispensable — just like word processors. But they solve an easy problem. It has always been harder to find the right person than the right fact. Human experience and expertise are the most valuable resources on the Internet — if we could find them. Using a search engine to find (or be found by) the right person is a harder, more subtle problem than ordinary Internet search

and

“The traditional web site is static, but the Internet specializes in flowing, changing information. The ‘velocity of information’ is important — not just the facts but their rate and direction of flow. Today’s typical website is like a stained glass window, many small panels leaded together. There is no good way to change stained glass, and no one expects it to change. So it’s not surprising that the Internet is now being overtaken by a different kind of cyberstructure.

and

“The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool.”

Under “search” CCSSI says: “[Students will be able to] tailor their searches online to acquire useful information efficiently, and they integrate what they learn
using technology with what they learn offline,” which is a far cry from Gelernter’s  “the Internet specializes in flowing, changing information. The ‘velocity of information’ is important — not just the facts but their rate and direction of flow.”

Contemporaneous with the publication of NETP 2010 and the CCSSI, EDGE.org posted responses to its Question 2010: “How Has The Internet Changed The Way You Think?”

David Dalrymple, MIT, says:

“Filtering, not remembering, is the most important skill for those who use the Internet.

“I see today’s Internet as having three primary, broad consequences: 1) information is no longer stored and retrieved by people, but is managed externally, by the Internet, 2) it is increasingly challenging and important for people to maintain their focus in a world where distractions are available anywhere, and 3) the Internet enables us to talk to and hear from people around the world effortlessly.”

What David does not say, that I think is also important, is 4) the self generation of online systems for managing personal knowledge.  As a blogger, wiki contributor, and social bookmarker. I am building a digital footprint and a personal exosomatic memory!  I sometimes refer to the traces I have left to see what I was personally up to. Rarely, now, but as our productivity and capacity expands, we must be becoming more dependent on this exosomatic system. (I keep saying that, exosomatic because I use my website as a auto or personal blog of notes to myself, my memory displaced from my body.)

There seems to be a large disconnect between the NETP & CCSSI and the latter conversations.

Who will lead the transformation from our current institutions, K-20, to institutions that would support 21st century learning implied by a highly networked, information rich and information producing society facing global problems on an unprecedented scale?

Posted in Community, Global Competency, Learning | No Comments »

Learning in a Community of Angels

Friday, October 30th, 2009
Prepared for presentation to the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Palouse
November 1, 2009

I want to start by thanking Jayme Jacobson and Eric Wegner for collaborating with me to create this service.

Today I’m going to share a personal reflection that weaves together two stories in my life. One story is the process to charter and open Palouse Prairie School. The other story is from the work I do at WSU, exploring how technology is impacting learning.

There is a place at the end of the program today for your response, but, in keeping with my WSU explorations, the text of my talk is also posted in my blog where you can comment. I’ll get back to why I blog.

The title today comes from a comment made by one of the Charter School Commissioners after Palouse Prairie’s first visit to the Idaho Public Charter School Commission, in April 2007. The Commission had sent us away to work on our facility and budget plans. This Commissioner took me aside at a break and said, “You need an angel.”

Driving back from Boise, I realized that I had failed to ask him what an angel was, and more importantly, how to get one.

I think I know now what he meant by angel, in the sense of a financial angel or venture capitalist. Someone who would sweep in and solve the school’s financial problems. Such a person may yet exist for Palouse Prairie School, but in 2007 I didn’t know how to find an angel and so I needed to solve the school’s problem another way. What I found is a community of angels.

The opposite of a community of angels is the story of the little red hen. Wikipedia summarizes the story as: Hen wants to make some bread and she asks the animals which of them will help sow the seed. At each stage, sowing, harvesting, threshing, grinding and baking the other animals decline to help Hen. In the end Hen does not share the bread with the farm animals.

The story is used to teach the virtues of the work ethic and personal initiative. As you will see, I don’t think Hen lives in a community as I value it.

The virtue I would teach children is that of a participatory gift economy, a community created of gift giving.

Wikipedia again. “A gift economy … is a society where valuable goods and services are regularly given without any explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards (i.e. no formal quid pro quo exists)….[R]ecurring giving serves to circulate and redistribute valuables within the community.”

Another aspect of the Hen story, that I’ve only recently considered, is that Hen knows how to solve her problem. Its a well-defined problem that just requires executing a series of steps.

Despite the three inch manual from the Idaho Department of Education, starting a Charter school is not just executing a series of steps.

Solving the School’s problem brings me to the other thread in this story. Solving a problem is the context for learning.

Teachers know this, which is why they set problems for students. Some problems have answers in the back of the book, other problems are more ill-defined and set in larger contexts. For example, we see university students working on class projects in our community: designing, analyzing, planning.

Expeditionary Learning would call these challenging problems an exploration into an unknown territory, where the challenge of traversing the territory becomes the teacher.

What I have come to appreciate is the role of community in giving gifts needed to help solve ill-defined problems. Some of these gifts are monetary, but importantly, many are not. Some are skills. Some are enthusiasm and joining into the collective doing. Some are gifts of teaching and learning.

I am calling the people who give these gifts the “small angels” who continue to help Palouse Prairie School.

My title today is “Learning in a Community of Angels” because my joy comes from discovering a personal understanding of a community willing to contribute to my learning (our learning) along the road to solving a problem. This goes beyond my previous experience with community, the joy that comes from communal effort toward a common task.  I’ve shared that joy with some of you at a barn raising.

Styer Barn Raising (mid-lift)

I now see Community is a learning resource. The angels (and there are many) are the people who make up the community.

They have gifts to share, if you can learn to frame or re-frame your problem in ways that they can contribute.

Rather than finding a big angel to solve the school’s problem, what I am learning is to value the gifts from small angels.

But working with small angels requires setting up contexts in which gifts can be given. It involves working on your problem in public, telling your story, and then listening for the (sometimes unexpected) gifts. The gifts often come as teaching. It may be the introduction to another person and some hidden talent they have, or an introduction to a idea and its application. The key is to be open, and to accept a variety of help — to participate in what Cathy Davidson calls Collaboration by Difference — and let the community find the answer. We (not I) started Palouse Prairie School, and we, a collaborative community, are learning to make it thrive.

I cited Wikipedia above. Wikipedia is an example of the work of many small angels. Jimmy Wales had the idea of getting an encyclopedia into the hands of every person on earth. To do so, he needed one that was very cheap. He needed volunteer experts to write it. Today Wikipedia has 1.74 billion words in 9.25 million articles in about 250 languages; 25 times the size of Britannica and growing. But size, or arguments about quality, are not my point here, rather, Wikipedia cleverly presents an invitation for small angels, with different purposes, knowledge, and goals, to collaborate toward a grand vision (even if they do not know or share the vision). Wikipedia is a Collaboration by Difference.

Above, I said that I have blogged this sermon. I blog because of what I learned from George Hotz, the teenager who hacked the Apple iPhone. Hotz had a problem that required he defeat the corporate goals of Apple and AT&T to use his iPhone on the Sprint network. He blogged daily his steps in the process. Not in a vain-glorious way, but to elicit help from angels around the world. And the angels came, and commented in his blog, and provided money and other resources. Hotz’s strategy to work in public and learn from a community enabled him to solve his chosen problem.

I welcome your comments today (or in my blog) in the same spirit, as gifts toward our shared learning.

The joy I am sharing with you is one of community. Community created by a gift economy.

Able to learn.  Able to take collective action.

In the opening words for today, by John Seely Brown, “We participate, therefore we are.” I want to encourage your giving, your learning, your collaboration, your making of our community.

Months ago, when I proposed the topic of this talk, I had no thought that it would land in the middle of the UUCP pledge process. But I am happy that it does.

I want to encourage you to join me in your willingness to give, monetary and otherwise, that creates this community of shared religious dialog. I want to encourage your giving that creates this community of Moscow.

I am sharing my joy of experiencing and coming to understand that community is built not of our co-location, but of our gifts to one another.

Gifts of sustenance or succor.

Gifts of cooperation.

Gifts of collective action and gifts of learning.

Posted in Community, Learning, Talks | No Comments »

Different conversations about what is important

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

In IJ-SoTL – A Method for Collaboratively Developing and Validating a Rubric Allen and Knight discuss their experience validating a rubric with two groups: faculty and industry professionals. They report:

Faculty weights differed markedly from the professionals’ results [see table 4 in the article]. Faculty considered category 2 (In the headline/lead combination, Is the message clear and compelling?) and category 4 (Does the news release use a convincing journalistic style?) the most important. Categories 1 and 5 received the lowest weighting.

We have seen similar results in a course where we asked a group of faculty and a group of industry professionals to rate student work and also to rate the assignment used to assess the student work.

In both examples, the faculty seem more focused on formalisms and the professionals on the aspects of the task that lead to practical success.

Posted in Assessment, Community | No Comments »

Building an advocacy action community

Monday, April 6th, 2009

This is an extension to my previous thinking on creating an online community/Center for Teaching and Learning. To think more about the issue of creating online community around a problem, I’m beginning a dialog with the Western Watersheds Project a non-profit group who’s mission is “to protect and restore western watersheds and wildlife through education, public policy initiatives and litigation.”

I just sent a note to HuffingtonPost.com to explore how to get WWP news into their site. This offers some potential for high profile exposure for news about WWP successes, such as the recent Federal Court Order requiring the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to complete a status review as to whether the Big Lost River Whitefish deserves Endangered Species Act protection.

Some of the news stories I read on HuffPost are ‘reprints’ that link back to the source’s website. What would be interesting to know is how to syndicate WWP news to HuffPost and bring readers back to the WWP site.

A number of sites I visit have links near stories inviting users to use Digg, or other services to highlight stories. This is a way to promote one of the “teach Google” strategies, and it has the potential to raise the profile of WWP news pieces so that it show up better in searches. I don’t know the exact mechanism for adding this to WWP’s site, but I expect its fairly straight-forward.

I use the social bookmarking tool Diigo, less popular that Delicious, but it has some group features that are more enhanced. If WWP were to adopt a social bookmarking tool it could be used to point at items across that web that were of interest to WWP members. Further, it would generate an RSS feed of those items that could be placed on the WWP site. The Diigo group mechanism would allow a collaborative effort in gathering these related links.

The reason to do this, and the focus for it, would be to help build the community around WWP issues. A previous strategy I proposed was to find high ground (e.g., Wikipedia) and announce where a community could be found. There are some pointers to WWP’s work in Wikipedia, so I’ve been thinking more about how distributed and disaggregated communities actually are (I suppose this is a comment on how long the long tail is). A person like Stephen Downes reads, comments on, and synthesizes parts of what is going on in the community, but he does not get me in touch with all I find important. So, I think another part of the strategy is to make your own site rich in pointers to other parts of the community. The challenge is to do this without spending the amount of energy that Downes spends, hence the idea for a bookmarking/commenting group. Our own CTLT & Friends is beginning to get a little of this traction.

Since there are several bloggers who write about WWP-related items, another part of the strategy should be to merge the RSS of their blogs (or some tags in their blogs) with the RSS from the bookmarking site to make a richer mix. Yahoo Pipes will do this with a fairly high degree of control.

Finally, in thinking about what to do with new eyeballs arriving at the WWP site, I looked on VolunteerMatch.org. I’m not very familiar with that site, but am considering how WWP might use and post opportunities for volunteer efforts. For example, here is a potential example for a group of voluneteers — a mapping party. They are mapping an urban landscape, but WWP could use a similar approach.

Do you have any insights that might help me sharpen this analysis?

Posted in Advocacy, Collaborative Tech, Community, Seeking Help | No Comments »

Extending the Ripple Effect

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

Recently WSU launched Ripple Effect a website that bills itself as “an easy and effective way to do enormous good with a single tangible gift for individuals, families and entire villages in developing countries.” The concept works like Heffer International, the WSU site allows visitors to buy various items (a goat, a beehive, a water pump) which are distributed by an NGO operating in Malawi, Africa.

Ripple Effect gathers financial capital
It could be extended to gather Intellectual Capital.

ThinkCycle (2001-02), as described in Nitin Shaway’s MIT doctoral thesis is an example for how to extend Ripple Effect into Intellectual Capital. The project asks “How can we create an environment that encourages distributed individuals and organizations to tackle engineering design challenges in critical problem domains? How should we design appropriate online collaboration platforms, support learning, social incentives and novel property rights to foster innovation in sustainable design? ” Cathy Davidson has coined the term “collaboration by difference” for this general idea.

A recent story in the Daily Evergreen describes WSU Engineers without Borders developing wind turbine for Africa. Their problem statement is “… to make a very cheap, reliable source of energy that won’t need a lot of maintenance.”

About five years ago, CTLT partnered to design a distance offering of Decision Science 470. The students brought problems from their lives and employment; students teams selected one problem of their peers problems to solve collectively. The results were impressive for the students and their employers.

Ripple Effect retains 19% of each donation for indirect costs. An Intellectual Capital version of Ripple Effect would also retain value for the WSU, but in a different way.

In Ripple Effect, capital is applied to problems that have already been identified and whose solution has already been chosen — the farmer without irrigation needs a pump to get water from the nearby stream. The Ripple Effect FAQ mentions that WSU students are involved, but its description is shallow. An Intellectual Capital Ripple Effect would gather problem statements, a la ThinkCycle or the Engineers without Borders, and invite a world audience to contribute expertise to developing solutions. As we learned in DecSc 470, the instructor, at the center would have visibility into problem statements, problem solutions, and other elements of the process. The instructor of DecSc 470 discovered that such access led to new ideas for his research — meta-ideas that arose from mentoring the process. These meta-ideas are equivalent to the indirect costs, a tangible benefit retained from participation in the problem-solving process.

The DecSc 470 process produced artifacts that were used to credential students in that course. Last year’s Engineers without Borders produced an electronic portfolio that could been a credentialing tool. DecSc 470 worked in a threaded discussion inside a course space. Now we might advocate the course use blogs (to recruit help a la ThinkCycle), and with that more public process, we could easily add a Harvesting Gradebook.

Posted in Community, Learning, Pedagogy | 2 Comments »

Web 2.0 and Textbooks

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

Trent Batson has a piece in Campus Technology where he is exploring howWeb 2.0 Finally Takes on Textbooks. It reminds me that back about 2005 Dave Cormier posted an idea he called “Feedbook” that imagined a course got its “texts” via RSS. The instructor would subscribe the feedbook to several sources (blogs, Del.icio.us, etc) and the aggregation would be fed into the course’ online space.

Fast forward. Yahoo Pipes is a very powerful aggregator that would would make Dave’s idea simple and Diigo is a social bookmark tool that supports highlighting web pages, groups, and discussion along side the page that is bookmarked. The combination would make a very rich feedbook. Students could be contributors to the feedbook via Diigo bookmarks.

Awhile back I went exploring in Amazon.com with the question, “could Amazon be an alternative to a Learning Management System?” What I wanted was a place for a learner to find community interested in a particular problem, build a portfolio of expertise and reputation, and engage in discussion. Amazon will do it and you don’t need to buy anything. Further, students would be in a position to critique traditional textbooks or to build collections of resources that could supplant a textbook with more primary sources. The only limitation I found on this idea was that the items had to be for sale by Amazon.

Posted in Collaborative Tech, Community, Diigo, Learning Portfolio, Pedagogy | No Comments »

After the Election – Solving the next problem

Friday, November 14th, 2008

Obama for America created a large grassroots network of volunteers and now its become a football, with a struggle for who should control it. The LA Times article points at the problem of converting this insurgency to a standing army. But that’s Web 1.0 thinking. I got the email mentioned in the article from campaign manager David Plouffe asking for donations to help the DNC retire its debt. It had the caché of the Obama brand. I deleted it. Web 1.0

It sounds like the Obama organization was more Web 2.0, more like a group of cells. Communities, organized, but loosely joined. They were working on local instances of a common problem (get the Obama word out, get voters to the polls)., but they were solving that problem in ways that recognized the local context.

Rather than turn the organization over to the DNC, I’d point the organization toward working on real problems. Turn that energy to making change. Camp Obama would become Problem Identification Coach Obama. It would coach the membership in the organization in problem identification. Is the local problem hunger? Unpack that. Is it supply of food or inability to cook from staples? Unpack that. Does the supply chain fail, or isn’t there enough in the chain?

Create mechanisms for the members in the organization to organize into new cells, this time organized around problems they have found in common. Begin sharing solutions and strategies. The eCitizenFoundation.org is working on BigDialog as a way to ask a question (or pose a problem) to Obama. There is a voting up/down mechanism, but it seems that a tagging system (where the tags are various problems) might add greater value than for organizing communities than just voting a question off the island. Change.org (not .gov) is another approach. It has some causes, and actions, and ways for people to join the causes or actions (and one assumes network into cells for action). Based on work at CTLT, I’ve suggest how to bring in formal education into the mix in ways that will make learning powerful and transform education itself.

Posted in Community, Global Competency, Learning, Net Gov | No Comments »

Building the Planet’s Center for Teaching and Learning

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

The following is an invitation to Centers of Teaching and Learning (CTL)

Preamble
We are looking at updating our website. Again.

The last revision used Oracle tools to make a site that was readily modified by the whole staff — an attempt at content management to eliminate the webmaster. It worked to an extent. We also moved some of our content into the university wiki — an invitation to the campus to contribute to our efforts. But our staff still say they can’t find the stuff they want to help our faculty.

More recently we have been thinking about Web 2.0 strategies for learning, summarized here. This has me thinking about how our CTL could be working differently. Further, I suspect that all CTLs are working on roughly the same problems — assessing learning outcomes, accreditation, large classes, integrating the newest technology, course evaluations, advancing our own professional development, etc — AND all are understaffed for the amount of one-on-one effort required.

We recently enjoyed the help of a post-doc with expertise in survey research who made a collection of public domain survey instruments, with annotations and some bibliographic references about each. We also have our own collection of course evaluation instruments and another collection of rubrics. Each is filed in its little cubby somewhere.

One of the requests for our site redesign was have fingertip access to these surveys. And make that collection available to faculty who might wish to write their own surveys using the survey tools we support.

A large amount of the work of our CTL has no need of secrecy. As a public institution none of it can really be kept secret, but discretion is often advisable around data associated with instructors and programs. Some materials we use have licenses that restrict our posting them on the web.

Sticking with the obviously public content, how do we (all the world’s CTLs) use Web 2.0 tools and Learning 2.0 strategies to collaborate on the common problems we are addressing? I recently wrote a letter of advice to a Web 2.0 Learner. It offers some clues.

The Invitation
Join us in creating the world’s CTL. You will need to work differently and think differently, but my hypothesis is that, by changing some habits, you can learn to work more effectively.

The Strategy
1. Use Google. Someone else might be working on your problem. There are multiple ways to search using Google, including Google Alerts that will run a search and email you when it finds new results (works very well for highly targeted searches). Google’s Blog search and Alerts each produce RSS. You can also get 3rd party RSS feeds of regular Google searches.

2. Teach Google. Google learns from us. (Thanks Michael) The strategies below are all about using and storing links to teach Google.

3. Use Wikipedia. Google privileges Wikipedia highly in its search results. Find your topic there. If Wikipedia knows less than you, “Be Bold.” Not everything can be in Wikipedia, use it to point to additional key resources and communities, this teaches Google and since Wikipedia is where a novice is likely to start, it invites people to your community and resources.

4. Find your community online. Join them, use their tools. Can’t find a community, create a community space. In any case, tell Wikipedia where the community is.

5. Empty everything that does not need to be private from your file cabinet, hard drive, and file server onto the web. Put everything at URLs where it will remain stable over time. If possible, put copies where your community can edit them. Tell Google by linking to these resources.

6. Bookmark online, not in your browser. Use the bookmarking tools and tags your community uses. Post information about which tags in these systems are useful in your community spaces and Wikipedia. This helps your community and it teaches Google.

7. Blog. When you have on a problem invite the world to think about it. Report your solutions, too. Make links in your blog posts to the resources you found. Keep a blog roll of resources that you find valuable. This helps you, your community and teaches Google.

8. Comment on other blogs. Provide both feedback and guidance. Add links in your comments, these teach Google.

9. Write reviews that synthesize and link several resources or your current solution. Post this review where your community can best find it, which might be your blog, your community’s space or Wikipedia.

10. Create custom Google searches. This can focus the search experience for your faculty and community. It also teaches Google.

Possible Objections
Wikipedia can’t be trusted. If the Wikipedia pages you need are wrong or are changing, garden them.

I don’t have time for this. Make this your work, not extra work

My stuff is not good enough to be online. Get over it. If you dare share it with anyone, put it online. Refine it as you go. Keep both versions, blog about what you learned and why the new version is better. This is your learning portfolio, it helps you earn credibility in your community.

I don’t have a web server. Where I can put my stuff? Use free online resources.

Proposal for our CTL Website
This discussion started from a need to revise our unit’s website. It proposed that we collectively create a planetary CTL web resource. Given the above, what should our campus CTL site contain?

As a starting hypothesis, and to be blunt, our website should contain only the things that keep our budget from being cut.

That means the site needs an Intranet where we can securely share with select members of our campus the data and reports related to our collaborations with them.

We may also need a public repository where we can dump our files online.

The site also should provide information about the problems that our unit is working on, and who the partners are in this work, and the value this work is providing to the University — what have we done for you lately? This might be a learning history or a showcase portfolio. This information should be rich in links and other clues to find more information. Some of the links should be fed into the site as RSS from the activities above.

The site should provide one-click access when that is politically valuable, but it should not strive to be an A-Z index, rather our site should have a custom Google search, and hints about what problems that search has been optimized to address.

Our site might have public resources if they are politically valuable to us, but we don’t want turn our site into a content silo, rather the preference should be to link to resources stored elsewhere. We should strive to collaborate with other units and host resources in the most appropriate places (For example, campus-centric technology help in the campus help resource. (And we should remember to make our custom Google search look there.)) We should also collaborate with our communities and put resources on off campus sites if that gives the resources more global value.

Objections
Faculty should find the resources they need by browsing our site.
Maintaining links and resources takes time. Unless having those links is protecting our budget, we should spend time on things that are more essential. Further, we are probably better off assuming (or helping) faculty use Google than being information architects. Social bookmarking is quick and has other payoffs. Feed the results of your social bookmarking to your website. Use search.

I don’t want to put our content in places we don’t control. Wikipedia is based on the hypothesis that “we are smarter than me.” Its seems to be working.

There won’t be much left on our site. So? See the hypothesis about protecting budget and political value.

Our technical and web staff won’t have jobs. Keep your staff focused on your intranet needs.

Posted in Collaborative Tech, Community, Global Competency, Learning Portfolio, Reflection-in-action | 8 Comments »

Advice to a Web 2.0 Learner

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

In If you have a problem, ask everyone (CORNELIA DEAN
NYTimes, July 22, 2008) says:

“John Davis, a chemist in Bloomington, Ill., knows about concrete. For example, he knows that if you keep concrete vibrating it won’t set up before you can use it. It will still pour like a liquid.

Now he has applied that knowledge to a seemingly unrelated problem thousands of miles away. He figured out that devices that keep concrete vibrating can be adapted to keep oil in Alaskan storage tanks from freezing.”

The idea in this article is that by gathering other perspectives, diverse ones, it is possible to solve problems that you could not solve yourself from your perspective. This is analogous to the story on 60 minutes about the inventor with a new approach to treating cancer.

Palouse Prairie School was awarded a charter to open in 2009 using the Expeditionary Learning (EL) model. Pupils will work on integrated problems (metaphorical expeditions into unknown territories to solve a real problem and perform a community service [the philosophy behind Expeditionary Learning, a trade name, has its origins in Outward Bound Expeditions]).

So where does “ask everyone” play in an EL elementary school? The pupils need to gather perspectives to work on their problems. Perspectives will enrich their learning. And enhance their problem solving.

The strategy for gathering perspective may be as simple as taking the problem home to the dinner table, “Mom, how can you help my class think about this problem?” or more sophisticated, by posting the problem on the Internet.

In the latter case, a Web 2.0 strategy is important. How can a school child hope to get help from some stranger somewhere in the world? 1. By linking to others (especially the way blogs do, called ‘trackback’), 2. by using key terms that Google will recognize, and 3. by having a ‘reputation’ to raise the rank of the student’s post in Google’s results.

Tracking back gains attention from a specific person. Its part of a process of saying ‘I read your stuff’ which is the kind of flattery that might get someone else to read you.

Reputation is earned, by being linked by others, which means, by doing or saying something worthwhile.

Tracking back takes thoughtful reading. Being linked takes saying something worthy of another’s mentioning. Both skills are, I think, desirable in a 21st century learner.

If a school had a blog, and it engaged the world thoughtfully with that blog, and friends of the school started linking to the blog posts because the ideas were worthwhile, the reputation of the blog would rise, and the potential of gaining help on a problem (ask everyone) would increase as well. (Not that you make a blog post and wait — you need to be active, finding a community that you think can help and engaging it.)

How does this work? I took the title of the NYTimes article and stuck it into Google and found that Cathy Davidson had responded to the NYTimes with a blog post on participatory learning. Having found Cathy and HASTAC blog, I had also found the term ‘participatory learning’ which has some interesting Google results but no Wikipedia entry.

Were children working on a problem, and found nothing in Wikipedia, that would be a prompt to create the page, even just a “stub page” in Wikipedia terms. A Wikipedia page serves as high ground (in a Google search sense) for the concept and from that page one hopes to find links to key resources and communities, perhaps even ones created by the students. Here are more ideas on how to think about wikis for learning.

The Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology at WSU has been thinking about how to use some of these ideas to transform University education. We are asking how to help students engage the world in authentic assessment of the student’s work. I can point to examples like 17 year-old George Hotz hacking the iPhone (for my purposes the hack is less important than the blog where he shared the blow-by-blow problem solving and got help) and Margo Tamez who, along with her Apache Nation in Texas, is taking on US homeland security over the idea of a border wall with Mexico. I think these ideas can be brought down to the level of the elementary school and challenge children to engage in authentic problems in a global context.

Posted in Community, Global Competency, Learning, Pedagogy, Reflection-in-action | 1 Comment »

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