VI International Seminar of the UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning

Connectivism: Socializing Open Learning. George Siemens, Associate Director of the Learning Technologies Center. Manitoba University. Canada.

Notes from the Open Social Learning, organized by UOC UNESCO Chair in E-Learning and held in Barcelona, Spain, on November 30^th and December 1^st 2009.

The irrelevance of structured learning: most of the times we are ignoring the student. We must pursue meaningful learning. The school today promotes people reproducing content and passing tests.

Sense making, not learning: actively involved in the process. The ability of acquire and participate in a meaningful learning process connected to others. What is sense making to you?

Connections, not networks; networks is an expression of connectedness, a pattern. But we are interested in connections: how are they created, maintained, etc. Research should adopt a view of understanding the connections in a learning scenario.

As educators, what connections do we permit? Active experimentation is a process of validating connections.

The “social”, it’s not like ether (Latour), it’s shaped by every actor; it’s more like a fluid.

More is different. Abundance changes everything. It’s also valid for information; abundance is anti-pre-packaging but allowing new connections. Pre-packaged courses are terrible sub-assembly units of information transfer.

When we design and deliver learning we need to promote connections. Open, social learning is responsive to the needs of individual, adaptive and fluid, varied and contextual. Each learner has different needs.

Personal learning environments and networks are not yet fully developed. We must adopt socially-driven networks and technologically enabled networks.

Q&A

How do you manage with traditional disciplines, hard sciences?

Researchers are sharing information 24h a day. It’s crucial for lifelong learning, i.e. imagine a doctor not updating his or her knowledge.

As students gain access to tools, they can create irrelevant connections.

Yes, absolutely. But the educational process can take advantage of the ability of networks to be readjusted.

What about job descriptions for faculty members?

“A teacher as a network administrator”. Sense making, way finding roles, but also research, actively engaging in emerging phenomena. We are in a transitory stage, we will see this role evolve.

What about the workload for teachers under abundance of information?

You cannot read everything or stay on top of everything. You cannot package everything. You need to rely on other people.

Is not educational something intentional? What about evaluation?

Evaluation is intended to serve the educational system, not the learner. You can provide comments on students’ activity.

What do we do with academy? They are not experts in this kind of educational setting.

Planning without a planner, is it possible? Humanity is a self-organizing entity, but we cannot burn down the educational system. The way we approach learning will need to rethink university as a new system of learning. How should we design the future university? It’s an open question? Shall we reproduce our current schemes?

Is really origin of science finding connections? Or is it about finding the essence of things? With respect to the understanding of things, shall we find essences or connections?

The discovery of theories shapes the future technologies that will exploit the advantages of such theory. It’s not one thing (essences) versus the other (connections). For example, Einstein didn’t work in a vacuum; he connected previous knowledge while discovering the essence of a new theory.

Are we using the right tools for doing research in education with respect to connectivism?

We don’t have the right language, we imported terminology from math, technology, etc. For example, what is a network? There are several possible answers.

What about “massive education”? How does it relate to “more is different” and “changes do not scale”?

Mass delivery of education is not moving in the right direction. Education should follow what happens in other fields that have adopted this fast changes in information abundance. Technology generates new affordances that generate new pedagogical options. Socializing Open Learning slide

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Notes from the the Working Session on Open Social Learning, organized by UOC UNESCO Chair in E-Learning and held in Barcelona, Spain, on June 30th, 2009. More notes on this event: uocunescoosl.

Open Social Learning in Spain. Clarifying Concepts
Dolors Reig

Traditional e-Learning: everything preset, all paths settled. The evolution has then been, from the web to the social web, and from the social web to the personal web (Nova Spivack).

New ideas that shape the social web:

• Intercreativity
• Collective intelligence
• Smart mobs
• Wisdom of the crowds
• Architecture of participation
• Sharism

Open Social Learning

• Digital natives: It’s problable, though, that the so-called digital natives they actually are “hanging out” online (danah boyd). Thus, the digital knowledge might not be that high within digital natives as we should expect.
• Connectivism: the Internet is so shaped to learning because it works as we do, we learn as networks, learning happens when connections are created, the ability to learn is more important than knowing, etc.
• Social learning: if markets are conversations (Cluetrain Manifesto), education and learning are also conversations, the prosumers and active students being the main characters of this era and peer-to-peer being the best way to acquire information and knowledge. From the “I think therefore I am” to the “we participate, therefore we are” (Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0).
• Informal Learning: Jay Cross states that 70-90% of corporate learning is informal. We have to enable this informal learning so that it can happen.
• e-Learning 2.0
• Generative Learning
• Communities of Learning
• Constructivism
• Edupunk

Creativity: We should be focusing in what motivates people (à la Maslow): that’s why social networking sites are so successful.

Autonomous learning: what really drives knowledge is the process, not the output.

Universal, free and democratic learning (Soumitra Dutta).

Minimally invasive education, taking the example of Sugata Mitra.

Lifelong learning, immersive learning, non-stop learning, ubiquitous learning.

An active role that is required to remix. At its turn, remixing asks for multiliteracies.

Metaverses: Augmented reality, lifelogging, etc.

Changes of roles: the student is not passive, but a participant. The teacher is a facilitator, a curator. And the information becomes a perpetual beta.

Technology becomes too a very important part of the equation: open APIs or all technologies that enable sindication (XML/RSS, Atom, etc.) are true drivers of this change.

Main conclusions

• A web simple to use
• People, collectives, interests, tags, twines, groups
• Real time web
• “If we know the exact cost, the exact agenda of a project, it is probable that it is based on an obsolete technology” (Joseph Gavin, Jr.)

In all this landscape, the e-Portfolio is very relevant, as it perfectly fits with and represents the digital persona. And, complementing to this, e-competences are the necessary tools to get on with digital life.

Q&A

Begoña Gros: We have to make an effort to link the newest technologies and applications with learning or education, and not separating them as if they belonged to different spheres. A: Agreed. Indeed, as we increasingly happen to know more and more uses of the Internet, people shift from “bad” practices (online gambling, porn, etc.) towards “good” practices (learning, communicating with peers, etc.).

Jesús Martínez: Teachers need to learn so that they keep being up-to-date and can keep on teaching. We should accelerate the process of change, of adaptation, or re-learning. A: One of the direst problems is not only that people don’t know, but that people (e.g. teachers) do not know that they do not know.

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Notes from the the Working Session on Open Social Learning, organized by UOC UNESCO Chair in E-Learning and held in Barcelona, Spain, on June 30th, 2009. More notes on this event: uocunescoosl.

Open Social Learning en España: Diagnosis and Perspective
Rubén Díaz

Expanded education: Search for new ways of education that embed and adapt social and communicational processes that the Internet made possible.

Education can take place at every moment, in every place. Inside and outside the walls of the academic institution.

We can virtually access all the information that the whole World generates (and has generated), but: Will we have the need for that much information? (Nam June Paik, 1977). And we need to take control over the technologies that make possible the access to all that information and apply them to, for instance, Education (Noam Chomsky, 1998). Education is not, is being (Paulo Freire). Nobody knows it all, everyone knows something, all the knowledge lays on the whole humankind (Pierre Lévy). Today, the voice you speak with could not be your own voice (DJ Spooky).

Margaret Meads (Culture and Compromise) stresses the fact of the non-linearity of knowledge and how we are stuck to the books. Jesús Martín Barbero states the importance of oral and visual culture nowadays (i.e. cyberculture) in opposition with the traditional written culture of education during the last centuries.

Knowledge is delocalized. Everyone’s interested in education, and everyone’s capable of learning.

Learning takes place when solving problems by going through them using creativity. But how and why are people creative? And how can the environment negatively affect the learning environment? Is the actual educational system a learning environment that fosters creativity?

The learning environment is the source of knowledge. Active and collaborative learning environments enable learning by doing. We need to disclose communication channels so that motivation happens. We need to develop a pedagogy of the question. We are used to a pedagogy of the answer, where the teacher answers questions that the students never put (Paulo Freire).

We have to move towards the educommunication, avoiding the education of silence. Oriented self-education, expanded education. Expanded education is the communicative link between memory and remix to build the self from the world we speak from.

An adult assimilates:

• 20% of information heard
• 30% of observed
• 50% of observed and listened
• 70% of expressed by oneself
• 90% of elaborated by oneself

Experience: Platoniq’s Bank of Common Knowledge in the 3000 viviendas de Sevilla.

Q&A

Enric Senabre: What about expanded assessment? A: The problem is not only assessment, but the whole system. And we should begin with youngsters and schools, and later on with the University.

Q: what about beyond formal education? A: At Zemos98 we schedule a yearly Festival, where different people can meet different kinds of knowledge.

Silvia Bravo: If all these approaches and technologies are so evidently good, why aren’t they more pervasive? Where are we failing? A: The blame is maybe on the moral majority of the mainstream, the socioeconomic system where education is business. A second aspect is contextualization: how to use technology to work locally.

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Notes from the the Working Session on Open Social Learning, organized by UOC UNESCO Chair in E-Learning and held in Barcelona, Spain, on June 30th, 2009. More notes on this event: uocunescoosl.

Open Social Learning?
Marc Alier

Open Learning: We use to define problems so that some structured learning outcomes happen, but problems do not usually have unique solutions, as life. If we open education, we have to be aware that problems and solutions have to be open too.

Social Learning: If we do not do nothing as a society, we do not learn as a group. The interesting thing is to participate and be engaged within the community. Social Learning is learning as a group. But it is also about learning how to be social, is about education training people to socialize and, at the same time, to define the society as is: education shapes society.

Learn in Community: Moodle as the flagship of community learning. Related with hacker ethics: passion for what you do; freedom; value and social recognition; information and knowledge accessibility; activism; social commitment.

Open, social and hacker ethics lead us to Learning in community by doing and sharing openly.

When students are given control begin to feel confident on what they do. And things happen. People self-organize; new “solutions” or “answers” to pre-established problems/questions arise; and new knowledge emerges.

Some examples:

• Work on specific subjects but without constraints, being the output a collaborative text on a wiki + a presentation. Students take divergent directions from what one would expect, but with high quality output and high engagement.
• Collaborative (massive: circa 30 students) project management subject where the whole classroom defines a single project. Rules? Only traceability of work. Students would use all kind of web 2.0 applications to distribute roles and tasks, to schedule milestones, to distribute workload, etc. The teacher then becomes a mentor whose “sole” work is to monitor and guide the autonomous work of the students.

To be able to perform such a monitoring activity, the software needs to be prepared to do that monitoring. Tracing is a must and interoperability between applications another need so that different tools can be integrated and used during the learning (and teaching) process.

Q&A

Ismael Peña-López: what competences need teachers to become “open social learning monitors or mentors”? A: First step is accepting that the outcomes of open collaborative work is an open and unexpected outcome. And this is not a competence but an attitude. Once the teacher gives control away, they will bring in technology: the teacher does not need the technology to give it to the students, but to follow (and catch up with) them. The attitude is the key: what outcomes are you renouncing to in exchange of implication and satisfaction?

Dolors Reig: How to monitor? How to evaluate? How to make quantify performance? A: The important thing in technology is how you are going to evaluate, and then design the software. If the evaluation model is clear, technology should not be an issue… provided it is free software and you can edit its code and add new features.

Ismael Peña-López: Can we really always renounce to part of our syllabus, of our planned content? A: Are exams a real way to assess learning? Or are we teaching students to pass exams? If we want to transform the society we don’t need knowledge, we need abilities and competences. We need not to teach knowledge but to teach how to acquire new knowledge and to have a critical attitude towards the knowledge we reach.

Jesús Martínez: How do we cope with competition (in education and in society at large)? With inertias? A: The educational system is at stake, so inertias can be broken down in pieces if this is the general will or the general trend.

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