Mooc-ing About, or I’ve joined an Educational Flash Mob

I have registered, and have been attempting to make sense of a new educational class offering called a "MOOC," which stands for Massive Open On-Line Course (or Massive On-Line Open Course…not sure which order the 'O'S go).

The details are relatively easy to recount:

• There are over 500 people in the course, from all over the planet
  
• The course is free
  
• The subject of the course is educational analytics (more in the next post)
  
• The syllabus is somewhat vague, as befits a class that seems to define itself thru the interests of its students
  
• The course is conducted on-line, using discussion lists, Moodle and recorded sessions (among others).
  

Beyond this, it is not quite as easy to document, and I am trying to make sense of the experience. As someone who has spent an inordinate amount of his life in formal educational settings, I am not quite sure what to make of this, whether in terms of syllabus (and the definitions given there) or how I should structure the content in my own head. I know the theory of constructivism, and I have monitored myself constructing various knowledges in the past, but I find it somewhat tiresome.

(I am looking at that last word and feel I should explain a bit. I find constructing knowledge literally tiring – the mental exercise of trying to simultaneously learn the limits of a subject while at the same time ordering it in a way I can remember and remembering the details of the content hurts my head. As a learner I want to get the core knowledge of a subject organized by an expert in that subject, and then, after I have the basics, I can then expand it on my own and along my own pathways. This is a learning style I have come to recognize and enjoy. I also realize that I am not prone to enjoy the alternative, going all the way back to high school. The first time I got to experience the alternative was in a language class when I was forced to suffer through tapes of someone babbling in a Russian while the teacher told us that eventually we would come to understand the language just by listening to it – yeah right. That worked for "where's the bathroom," and other caveman utterances, but was less effective for topics subtle or philosophic)

So, at the moment I am struggling to order the experience. I am still following the old paths – I got the readings and I read them all, now I am in search of a group to discuss them with. This post is one attempt to connect with those who might be in the same boat as me (or at least in the same learning style), which may be one way of connecting with other people and getting to the core of the content.

I suspect that there will be much more over the next few weeks.

R

Images – Part 1

Over the past few days I have been involved in a series of events that have caused me to think a great deal about images and how we use them. The first was a visit from an old friend (considerations that flow from that visit will become part 1 of this), and the second was the detailing of images needed for a course I have been working on (which will be part 2).

Since my thoughts on the subject started here, let me start with my old friend.

Tony and I lived across the street from each other in a neighborhood in Brooklyn called Park Slope. At about the same time in our childhoods we got into photography. We got cameras, built darkrooms, got better cameras, got more stuff, and in general were part of (or were trying to be part of) a craft that supported enough stores that 32^nd street became known as the center of the "photo district," and which was supported aesthetically by galleries and museums all across Manhattan. We would go and spend our Saturdays wandering up and down the streets looking at the gear, and learning about the mechanics and the aesthetics of the art by taking lots and lots of pictures, and by looking at lots and lots of pictures. Pictures were some kind of magic, a way in which one could isolate and freeze a small view of the world, one based on personal aesthetics, composition and timing. Each picture had a decisive moment, which a photographer needed to recognize in order to push the button at the correct time.

One of the things that became second nature was being immersed in how photography had become part of the culture. At the time one of our jokes involved a cultural oddity that I suspect people under 30 have never seen – the slide show. It involved 35mm slides in a Kodak Carousel projector, thrown up on a wall with little if any editing on the part of the photographer. That was the joke – "I went to Italy and took these 3,000 photographs. I hope you're comfortable."

It seems as though the joke is now on us. There are images everywhere, both still and moving. And watching someone's home movies, once a source of dread and depression, are now shared by the millions on youtube (and the important point here is that they are not only shared, but watched).

The tools we use seem to have separated us a bit from the magic – what matter if there is a decisive moment – just shoot 25 frames in front of and behind it, and you'll probably capture it. At one point in my research I crossed paths with a field called visual studies – a self-defined "serious topic," easily recognized because it dealt with images that were, as far as I could tell, uniformly out of focus, poorly composed and uncentered, sort of what you would get if you set a camera to trip the shutter every 15 minutes, then tucked it under your arm and went for a walk. As I write this the thought occurs that there are those who would disagree with me, and argue for randomness and against focus.

Tony stayed with it, and became quite good. He is what was once described as a craftsman – creating carefully crafted images of technical excellence, balanced composition, and thoughtful purpose. I moved in a different direction that has led me to consider how we use images to learn, and that will become the "part 2" of this meditation.

 

A New View of Hyper-Hyperlinks

Of late I have been looking at web pages with new eyes. The cause of this is the new device I am using to view those pages, the iPad. My new view is that like most of our current communication media, the web is filled with noise, and the noise level is rising.

This is nothing new on the macro level – a search of almost any weird, irrelevant or inconsequential term will return hundreds, if not thousands or hundreds of thousands of results. "Pumpkin Chunking" returns 84,500 results, including video, pictures and Wikipedia entries. A search of "useless information" returns an amazing 23,100,000 results in 0.21 seconds. This noise is nothing new and has been commented on more than once.

However, the noise I am referring to is on a micro level, and exists on, as far as I can tell, each and every page on the web. When viewing those pages on a PC with a mouse, the noise level is only mildly annoying – a popup that appears as you hover your mouse over nothing in particular while reading, an intrusion of an ad that suddenly grows larger for no discernable reason, and which has some hidden mechanism for dismissal.

This noise escalates to a din when trying to read a web page on the iPad, due primarily to two actions that seem inherent on the iPad.

The first is the simple fact that after a time the damn thing gets heavy, and you shift it in your hand to get a better grip. Should any part of your hand hit a hyperlink on the screen you will suddenly find yourself in a new place, and on a new page. If you looked up while you shifted the device from hand to hand you might not even notice the reload, just a curious disconnect as you wonder "was this what I was reading?"

The other is related to one of the best features of the iPad, the ability to zoom by pinching your fingers on the screen and expanding. It seems there is a down side to this ability, which is the tendency I have to linger too long after the zoom. My finger is now interpreted as another mouse click, and off I go to another page I didn't really want.

The sequence (and it is now solid enough to be a sequence) is this: find something to read, load the page, see the font is too small to see, enlarge, wait for the margins to readjust to see if I need to re or un-zoom, inadvertently linger on a hyperlink, see the reload in progress, wait, go to a new and unwanted page, press back arrow, wait some more, finally read what I wanted, but now with a heightened sense of tactile caution.

I am not sure what to do about this. I realize that hyper linking is the foundation of the web, but it seems to have gotten out of control. While I have not noticed this in the courses I am developing for web delivery, it is creeping into the LMS's that are used to launch those courses. Pages that are littered with links may now become a liability rather than just something convenient. Whatever else they are, they do raise the noise level, annoying on my PC, but a serious detriment to reading web pages on the iPad.

 

 

 

Swimming in the shallows

Several years ago I conducted an experiment upon myself. The conditions were relatively simple – because I worked for the phone company and because there was the possibility of a strike, I needed to prepare for strike duty by taking about 40 hours of web based training on topics deemed necessary by the strike task force. What would that training look like, how would it feel, and how would I incorporate it within the rest of my workday.

Taking the training was actually not an unwelcome task. At the time I had just finished my dissertation on subjects relative to electronic learning and was fascinated by how they worked to effect learning. I had been involved in various stages of many of the courses that formed the core of the curriculum I would be required to take, but had never progressed through it completely. But the real motivation for the research was something else. I had also been noting that something relative to WBT was, for lack of a better description, "not right."

I had noted in my dissertation that one of the changes that had occurred in the move from CBT to WBT was the introduction of a large number of internal exits from the courseware, that is, links to the great web elsewhere. Training was simply one of many applications that ran on the desktop and I was curious to see what that actually meant.

It was not good.

As part of a virtual team I needed to have an instant messaging application open at all times, as well as regularly check my email, run or attend a variety of meetings, answer my phone, in other words, to create digitally the same access someone would provide in a large open office layout.

The first thing I noticed was that with everything going on, it was only possible to steal time in 10-15 minute increments during the day(if that long). Any training that needed to be done would be best done in the evening after the day was done, or early before it started. Then a more subtle, and much more disturbing trend, emerged. If I did try to take the training during these quiet times, I created my own disturbances, as if there were something pulling at my attention, dividing it and scattering the resulting pieces.

Over the past years I have followed a number of discussions about learning on the web that suggest that something is happening to students, a fracturing of attention that might be laid at the feet of the digital delivery systems that were becoming ever more commonplace.

Into this idea space comes Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains." I heartily recommend it. I may discuss it in greater depth at a later date, but one of the things that is fascinating me about the book, and the thing I am really focused on at the moment, is that I chose to read it via audible.com. That is, I downloaded the book to my iPod and listened to (that is "read") it in the car, when my consciousness was immune from any distractions other than what I will call the trivial details of traffic and direction.

There is a section in the book that details how we moved from oral to written traditions and the changes that occurred because of it. I find it curious that I am reversing this trend and moving back to a variant oral tradition in order to regain that moment of focused, undistracted attention. A check with audible reports that I have 187 books that I have listened to this way, and more and more I find I distinguish between books. There are some I categorize as requiring a text to hold (sometimes to be able to mark the pages with yellow highlighters and pencil notes), others that are light and easy to listen to, but still others that I would just prefer to listen to in an undisturbed, uninterrupted manner. Although I have an iPad, I have not yet created a category for books to read digitally.

Of note for those interested in e-learning: I intend to assign The Shallows to my classes, both because I find it fascinating, and because I am interested in seeing if the observations contained therein have any traction among educators. I am not sure what the alternative might be, but I am curious to discuss the topic. In the meantime, I will continue to consider it.

R

More on the iPad

First, some housekeeping.

I have toiled here without much comment, believing that my comments were either so far "out there" that no one could be bothered to comment on what I was saying either to agree or disagree with it, or that my comments were so trivial as to not bother noting. I have just found out that it may be a more pedestrian problem of the blog site not allowing comments to be posted. As soon as I find out the actual problem I will have more to say on this (probably something that notes the implications for people who were trying to learn something). In the interim, if you read something here and wish to comment prior to the repair of the site please email me at Kordel@verizon.net.

What brought this to my attention was a comment from a former colleague who wanted to know what it was that I was doing on the iPad that was so different from what I was doing on the PC. The answer is short, but I believe interesting.

Nothing much.

I have been thinking about development on a course that is targeted for dual delivery on PC's and on tablets (the iPad being the first such device). While the content is interesting it is not bleeding edge, earth shaking or something completely different. It will involve blending some video, some text, and some graphics, hopefully so that the content can be viewed, learned and shared.

So, with that relatively plain setting in mind, what have I noticed? What's the big deal?

There is not "big" deal, but rather, just a collection of small deals. If the content were to be placed on a PC, and only on a PC, there would be no concern about what happened when the screen was turned sideways. Instead we need to work on content to be viewed in a 4:3 format, and the same content converted to 3:4 content. In addition to the plain old formatting issues, the latest issue of Wired on the iPad makes some interesting use of the conversion, with ad copy that changes as the screen is turned (there may be more, I continue to explore).

The more I work without a mouse, the more I like it, but (for me at least) it places the iPad in a very specific niche. The lack of a keyboard means I will probably never use the thing to create much content, (I may answer a short email, but will not create something like this blog entry) but that is OK – I want to use it to consume content. The other thing I have noted is that I sit differently when I use the iPad. PC's (or since Apple Macs also qualify -we now need a word for keyboard/mouse equipped devices ;-) require you to sit up at a desk in order to use them. I notice that I sit back and read it more like a book. I will need to explore aspects of kinesthetic learning and see if anyone else has noted anything here. I also hold the iPad most often like a book, in the vertical format. When I wanted to read on my netbook, I got a screen rotate program. It is not comfortable, although I have used it that way. It allowed me to use the screen as if it were the right side page of a book. Close, but still different.

None of these things by themselves mean much, but as I use the device, other things that keep bubbling up. Taken together, they seem to move the thing into a new class of device.

I hope this answers the question. If you have any follow-ups hopefully I will have the problem with the blog site fixed in the next day or so.

R

iPad First Impressions: A New Medium?

A career or so in the past one of my teachers at film school said that he saw Hollywood movies change when editing equipment moved from the Moviola to the Steenbeck. The Moviola was built vertically, that is, the device had an upper reel and a lower reel, and the film moved between those two locations during viewing. The Steenbeck was a flatbed device, and the film moved from left to right across the table. For reasons that were not quite clear when this mechanical move was made, the pace of cuts, the construction of shots, and the overall feel of the movie changed.

After not touching an Apple device since 1992, I have spent the last week getting acquainted with the iPad. It has been an interesting few days. At first I thought of it as a netbook without keyboard or mouse, but I am coming to the conclusion that it is something new, something that makes me think of Moviolas and Steenbecks. I think that what is new is the conception of space that is implicit in the way the thing works.

First generation PC's showed a page. They were single tasking, text driven devices that allowed you to do some task, usually business related. The archetypical application was WordPerfect. It presented the user with a spare, blank screen that was ready for words. As I recall, as you typed it paged down, and after you had several pages you could page up to review what you had done. There were some applications that fudged this a bit. Spreadsheets existed in a potentially wide space, but even large spreadsheets seemed to assume a page by page format, as if the screen data conformed to how people needed to conceive of it. Space was two dimensional, with up and down the best options.

With the introduction of windowing systems and mice, and more specifically hypertext browsers, the screen added a new, third dimension of depth. Clicking took you into the screen. Underlined blue text implied another page waiting to be accessed (or deeper content waiting to hover over your page). Text boxes floated above the screen, links opened new browser windows that stacked on the existing screen, and unwelcome advertisements covered the screen. Tabbed browsing implied that there was something else, but more often than not, the link would open a new window, which would then add tabs.

As I have explored the iPad what I am starting to grasp is that inherent in the device is a conception of space that is less three dimensional, a la browser based windowing systems, and more two dimensional. It starts with the simple arrangement of icons on the screen, which are accessed by swiping left or right, but it is reinforced with applications like the Wall Street Journal (which appears to be generating a bit of buzz). It is not two dimensional in the old DOS/WordPerfect sense. Rather, it feels like a huge two dimensional space that can be scanned, read, reviewed up or down, right or left, as it passes under the window, in much the same way that a glass bottomed boat allows a window into the large space underneath the boat.

I am not sure what effect this will have on using the device for training - my original motivation was to look at the device for a potential training project. McLuhan said that each new medium starts with the content of an old medium, but then changes it to fit the needs of the new medium. Intel and Microsoft have announced pad projects. If this is indeed the start a new medium, the sooner we appreciate that, and begin to look at how it might be used for training, what will change, what will get better, and what will no longer work, the better off we will be.

R

 

 

When Life Changing Technology Fails

If I had to describe two bits of technology that have truly changed the way we live, the first would be the VCR/DVR and the second would be the GPS. One changed the way we look at time, the other the way we conceive of space.

Before the widespread adoption of time shifting tools the schedule of prime time television marked the passage of the week with much the same regularity as a medieval church bell sounding for evening vespers. The passage of the workweek/school week was marked by the progression from the Monday shows to the Thursday shows. (The passage of the years was marked by new shows becoming favorites, then reruns, then cancellations.) A curious side effect was the disorientation people felt as they visited across time zones and found their favorite show were on either an hour earlier or an hour later.

With the convenience of a DVR, time can be stopped, rewound or fast forwarded. If you would like to experience how pervasive this is, first get the technology, then get used to it, then check into a hotel that does not have it. The concentration that was no longer necessary now needs to be relearned. If anything at home seems interesting, and missed, just press the rewind button. 8 seconds back is one click. Two or more takes us backwards in increments of 8. One click forward skips 30 seconds. If anything is interesting enough to be watched live, the commercials are interminable.

Space was defined by driving through it, using local gas station or visitor center maps, or Rand McNally atlases (which showed multiple states and countries). Traveling any distance meant finding your starting and ending points, and then finding the best route between them, based on your particular criteria that day. Did you want to make time or take in the scenery? Arguments broke out based on different routes, and people gained status based on their knowledge of the best shortcuts. Before you started it was clear where you were, where you wanted to be, and how you would cover the distance between the two.

Then technology intervened.

My smart phone (an Android) has a GPS app that allows me to enter the starting point ("my destination" – wherever that might be, and I don't even need to know where I am to make it work), then enter my destination. A route will appear, small enough to only allow viewing the next few miles of a hundred mile journey. A voice will instruct me to turn in ¼ mile on the next leg of the journey. As this technology was tested, passed, and became part of my technology suite, a curious thing happened. I stopped conceiving of space as something I needed to know how to navigate through. Then an even more curious thing happened. The technology failed.

I had occasion to visit someone in an unknown location. No problem, I had the address and I had my GPS. A quarter mile away from the end point I lost the connection to the navigational satellite. That last ¼ mile took an hour to navigate as one initial wrong turn compounded itself. When leaving for the next leg of the journey, the GPS plotted a route that took us over 275 miles of streets, back roads, and small two-lane highways (and yes, there was a large road alternative, and no, I had not selected "avoid highways.")

We bought an atlas, then used it to take major roads. We turned on the GPS only after we had put sufficient distance between us and the last tiny-road turn-off. It was both amusing and sad. And it did illustrate just how fragile some of the technology we take for granted can be.