e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Shot Heard 'Round the 'Net

    Stephen Downes (who is almost always an interesting read), has issued a call to arms for academics and academic institutions to stop relying on proprietary content. To me, this has the ring of the inevitable to it. Universities are, among other things, content factories. With the Internet available to dramatically lower production and distribution costs, why should they pay the textbook companies anymore? Why not lower the cost of education and increase access?

    Of course, there’s a flip side to this. If universities are distributing free content, then professors will no longer be able to supplement their income by writing or editing textbooks, etc. I have a few friends in academia who are already feeling threatened by online learning. It’s the usual fear that the administration will see their value in their content; once that content is pried from their hands (for no cost), they become expendable. There is some truth to this fear, too; once you have good content, why not use a standardized curriculum and pay (at lower wages) teachers to cover the content?

    If you follow this train of thought to its conclusion, universities will have to develop separate and distinct compensation (and tenure credit) plans for production of research, production of pedagogical content, and teaching of classes. Somebody has to compensate professors for the time that they put into creating new teaching content. This is not to say that I think Downes is wrong or is somehow suggesting something unethical; to the contrary. I’m simply suggesting that a necessary consequence of the change that he is calling for (and perhaps predicting) is a fundamental change in faculty compensation schemes.

    By the way, this article is published in a fascinating new journal/experiment called Pitch. I highly recommend checking it out.

  • Interface challenge: Webster's Dictionary (Online) from 1913

    While I confess that I’m partly motivated to blog this simply because it’s fun, there’s an interesting design thought experiment here too. Check out the online version of the 1913 edition of Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary. The play value is obvious; see how language has changed since then. (Here’s an easy one: try entering “car.”) The problem is that I found myself scratching my head trying to come up with good words to try. It invites sporatic poking around but not sustained exploration.

    Ask yourself this: What kind of interface would make it easier for you to spend more productive time exploring the dictionary? What uses would you have for this resource, either for personal entertainment or for a class? What interfaces would support those uses?

  • Teaching Hands-On Classes Online

    From the Sloan Consortium, whose web site is turning out to be a gold mine of solid higher ed distance learning research, come articles on teaching electronics and Chemistry through distance learning. They used multimedia simulations of electronics in the former case while resorting to kitchen chemistry assignments in the latter case. For both courses, distance learning students tested as well or better than their classroom counterparts.

    Here’s a particularly delicious nugget:

    Of particular interest is the fact that, as evidenced by the results of the procedural evaluation, distance learning students were at least as competent as their traditional counterparts in utilizing laboratory equipment such as beakers, graduated cylinders and electronic balances, despite the fact that this type of equipment was not available to them in their kitchens. It appears that in the case of the first semester introductory chemistry course, the laboratory goals can be achieved equally well by the distance learners doing the Kitchen Chemistry Laboratories at home as they can by students in traditional laboratories.

    In some ways, this shouldn’t be surprising; K-12 science teachers do this kind of thing all the time because the schools can’t afford real equipment. I myself (in a prior life) had great success teaching middle school science using what was essentially a kitchen chemistry curriculum out of the University of Hawaii called FAST [PDF]. Likewise, high school teachers having been using virtual frogs in bio labs for years and years. Applying the same principles on a post-secondary level is not a huge leap, especially for 101-level courses. What’s interesting is that the methods, i.e., substituting real-world items in the student’s immediate environment when that’s possible and creating online simulations when it’s not, marry so well together in an e-learning environment as strategies for dealing with what is fundamentally an environment of low situational control for instructional designers.

  • Sloan-C – Resources

    This article [PDF], though two years old now, has some still eye-opening figures on distance learning adoption in higher ed.

    Among the more interesting findings:

    • Nearly one third of all higher ed institutions and one half of all public higher ed institutions now offer complete degree programs online.
    • On average, in institutions that had distance learning programs in 2002, 13% of students took courses online.
    • In 2003, academic leaders anticipated a 20% growth in online learning. (I’d be grateful if somebody could send me actual figures for 2003 or anticipated figures for 2004.)
    • A majority of academic officers believe that the quality of distance learning courses will equal or exceed classroom courses within three years.

    Impressive.

  • Why Apple May Beat Microsoft to Workflow Learning

    The evolution of workflow learning follows the evolution of workflow automation. The reason is that, in order for workflow learning to…er…work, there has to be a way to look into the software system and find out what events are happening in the context of a pre-defined workflow. These are exactly the same things that you need for workflow automation to work as well, and while I suppose that in principle software could evolve to support learning before it supports automation, the truth is that there is bigger money in automation and therefore automation leads. (Teaching somebody how to perform a task in real-time is a great money saver, but making that person unnecessary to perform the task is an even bigger money saver.)

    So. Apple and Microsoft both have automation scripting technologies. For Apple it’s Applescript. For Microsoft the choice isn’t as obvious. The clearest contender would be VBA, and Microsoft now has a new technology due out in its forthcoming Longhorn OS called “Monad.” (For a long and geeky explanation of Monad, check out this MSDN video show and fast forward to about 45 minutes into the program.) The existence of these technologies means that each OS is exposing ways for users (or, at least, developers) to find out what is going on in a process and manipulate it.

    The thing is, in order for the vision of workflow learning to come to full fruition, you need for individual knowledge workers (ugh, I hate that term) to be able to access that information and influence the workflow (or at least comment on it) peer-to-peer. Remember, the goal we’re after is some magical emergent moment when we’re all flying the plane together in real-time. So having information about ongoing workflows exposed to the geeks isn’t good enough; we need workflow access “For the Rest of Us”.

    Enter Mac OS X 10.4, the upcoming version to be released in the first half of next year. It’s visual scripting of workflows. And it’s simple and beautiful. Basically, Apple has exposed workflow events for just about anyone to understand and use. To see a demo of this technology, go to http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/wwdc04/ and fast-forward to about an hour and twenty-five minutes into the show. It’s a fairly small step from this demo to the notion of triggering peer-to-peer contextual commenting and support systems.

  • Blogging as Parallel Play

    This post is an illustration of why Denham Gray is right in his position that the blog is not the be-all and end-all to online purposeful conversation (e.g., learning communities, communities of practice, etc.). There are lots of great points in this post, but he gets to the heart of the matter near the end:

    A cursory look shows little sustained turntaking, blog writers seldom reply directly to comments in their own blogs and themes ‘die’ quickly as individual writers move on to the next big item. Bloggers offer opinions rather than ask questions – inquiry and exploration are essential ingredients in knowledge formation.

    One of the reasons is the very nature of the format. (more…)

  • Nice Tool: INSTRUCTIONAL ARCHITECT

    This is a simple little tool that underscores the straitjacket that the corporate world has put itself in vis-a-vis learning objects. For a variety of reasons, I have recently been catching up on what the higher ed world has been thinking about learning objects these days. Of course, they have a lot more freedom off the bat than their corporate counterparts because they don’t have to rely on a totally self-paced course paradigm and the lame, page-turner authoring tools that most LCMS’s provide these days. They can have an instructor provide the context that knits the content together. But Instructional Architect, out of Utah State University, shows that you don’t need a live facilitator or a fancy LCMS to put together a rich course. Be sure to check out the examples and browse the user-created projects.

    The key, of course, is having a rich repository of content to which you can link. But hey, it’s the web. How hard can that be?