I’ve truly lost my bearing… and my compass. Not to mention any remnants of a map. It might be time to burn this place down and live analog.

[image by jef safi]

As the organization I am working for goes through a number of serious and mysterious changes, my blogging volume might lessen for a while. Not knowing what I will be working on and what projects and initiatives will continue– basically not sure what my future looks like at all– throttles back my energy a bit.

In the meantime, I wanted to share a few items that have been swimming in circles in my “ToBlog” bookmark stream:

Room for PLEs?
As many of you will know, I’m particularly interested in the concept of Personal Learning Environments, particularly how to help people grow theirs and how the PLE does/doesn’t/can/can’t fit into the processes of institutional education. In this article, George Siemens takes a look at whether there is room in educational institutions for the PLE, particularly w/r/t the LMS. I’m going to ride the fence on this one. Given that the way institutions operate as a whole will always have perpetuation of their existence and relevance as their most important objective, and given that this leads to an oversized attachment to business as usual and an endemic resistance to change, then the idealized form of the PLE doesn’t really fit… inside the tent, at least. But in real practice I witness too many productive uses of PLEs, in partnership with institutional LMS systems or not, to maintain that they can’t work in tandem with existing educational structures. The Platonic form of the eternal PLE may be inimical to older models of teaching, and it certainly can engender some resentment of– and resistance to– those approaches by faculty. Perhaps it can only come to be with a drastically revolutionary reconception of the mechanisms of teaching and learning… but I’m not holding my breath.

Most Likely to Succeed
Malcolm Gladwell’s article on teachers and assessing teaching performance has been getting a lot of attention. I know Gladwell’s exposure of late has lead to a (ahem) tipping point in perception– the polarized groups of haters and defenders are in full force. Regardless, there’s some interesting thinking going on in this piece about the difficulty in evaluating good teachers:

Educational-reform efforts typically start with a push for higher standards for teachers—that is, for the academic and cognitive requirements for entering the profession to be as stiff as possible. But after you’ve watched Pianta’s tapes, and seen how complex the elements of effective teaching are, this emphasis on book smarts suddenly seems peculiar.

And the need for a different model for producing good teachers:

In teaching, the implications are even more profound. They suggest that we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession needs to start the equivalent of Ed Deutschlander’s training camp. It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated. Kane and Staiger have calculated that, given the enormous differences between the top and the bottom of the profession, you’d probably have to try out four candidates to find one good teacher. That means tenure can’t be routinely awarded, the way it is now. Currently, the salary structure of the teaching profession is highly rigid, and that would also have to change in a world where we want to rate teachers on their actual performance. An apprentice should get apprentice wages. But if we find eighty-fifth-percentile teachers who can teach a year and a half’s material in one year, we’re going to have to pay them a lot—both because we want them to stay and because the only way to get people to try out for what will suddenly be a high-risk profession is to offer those who survive the winnowing a healthy reward.

Epigenetic Education
D’Arcy’s back from vacation and giving his blog (welcome him back to Twitter, too) some love. This post caught my eye because I’m an absolute sucker for models– explanatory and predictive– of educational practice and institutions. The model of epigenetic factors is appealing because:

• It makes an intuitive sense for representing how those of us working at the edge– and even a bit outside of– institutions that are our homes operate, in ways that both enhance and limit our potential effect
• “Epigenetic” is just a great term. Scientific and epic, of the living organism– the kind of thing I might say to myself repeatedly if I were still a partaker of the wacky weed…. epigenetic, ep-i-ge-netic, epigenetic, etc. Repeat a dozen times then desperately eat any foodstuff no matter how abhorrent.

A Paean to Activists and the response: Activists
Dave Pollard’s post put a voice to many feelings I share, some of which are logically contradictory. I feel a strong need and desire to help effect change that sits atop a pretty solid foundation of hopelessness about the bigger picture. With that I alternate between trying anyway, sometimes with enthusiasm, and a lethargy that lends itself to despair. The activist anonymous approach– one day at a time, change what you can, it works if you work it– might help me survive, but it does little to help me thrive. Stephen Downes’ response is, for my money, one of his sharpest and most elegant posts ever, out of many great blog entries. Besides adding a book to my reading list (Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death), his post also just spoke to me:

Activism isn’t about guarantees of success. It isn’t bout knowing that, in the long run, your work will lead to a better future. Activism is about being alive, about there actually *being* a civilization to which we all belong, and about that civilization being worthy of a life, being worthy of a future.

Even were we to think that the current ills afflicting our society are terminal, we continue the struggle. For, of course, a great many of us do not, for we do not see the death of the current state of civilization as death, just change. And even those who feel we cannot survive continue to build a legacy, to build an achievement worthy of literature and song.

It is as though we activists believe that it is not enough merely to live well, it is also important – perhaps most important – to die well. To go out swinging, with our heads held high, believing to the last breath that there is something worth living for, something worth fighting for, that so long as there is a breath in our body the dream lives on and can be carried forward.

Program for the Future
Celebrating the 40th anniversary of Doug Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos and focusing on Engelbart’s vision of Collective Intelligence, I’d heard nothing about this conference before Gardner Campbell’s live Tweets started appearing (I look forward to the future blog posts this event will surely inspire from Gardner). Interesting thoughts and observations started coming in from others, such as Alan Levine and various tidbits you can find by browsing the PFTF Ning community. I don’t have a clear mental construct to understand Collective Intelligence, but intuitively I grok its relevance and importance in a world that is increasingly connected, and as rich in information as it is relatively poor in sense-making. Pierre Levys book Collective Intelligence was fascinating, but as such books do left me with more questions than answers. There are various slide sets and links available from the conference, but sadly I haven’t found any archive of video… as many have noted, this was a super high-power group including some of the greatest minds and most interesting innovators around: Engelbart, Alan Kay, Steve Wozniak, Peter Norvig, and others.

From the time we know nothing about and the oral tradition and storytelling, to the invention of writing. Including and leading to:

Performance based education, apprenticeships, guilds. Leading to:

Student-focused if not student-centered teaching, the Socratic method, teacher as expert guide and facilitator. Leading to:

Religious institutions taking control to contain the uncontrolled message. Scholasticism. Organizational dictated learning of a discrete core effected through the system of tutors and acolytes. Leading to:

The current age of the ironic institution, its core lost to politics and sometimes claims to secularity, its student-orientation lost to self-preservation and self-perpetuation. The worst possible combination.

Is it any surprise that so many of us hope, dream and strive to create a way to leap from this decaying orbit?

[photo by kateboydell]

I have a friend who recently, for the second time, decided to drop all the people she was following on Twitter and then add back a selection of people that talk to her as a base for “regrowing” her network. I thought this was a kind of flippant/cavalier activity (meaning, let me try to make as clear as possible, from my perspective, considering if I could/would do the same thing), even knowing that she was going to add some people back right away, because my thoughts weren’t about the people who get added back. Nor was I thinking about the people she never talked to and who never talked to her. I was considering the people in-between, the ones who weren’t silent but didn’t make the cut (theoretically anyway… for all I know she added back every person who ever uttered a single @msg to her).

One difference in perception of the exercise probably lies in how we see the act of unfollowing as a social signaler. I’ve noticed in Twitter that when I stop following someone they usually notice, thanks to tools like Twitter Karma and Qwitter. My experience is different with Facebook, where I’ve never received any indication that someone I’ve dropped from my friends list has noticed or cared, despite the term for the contact– friend, rather than follower– implying a deeper connection. Twitter is fascinating because it both puts the conversation front-and-center and exposes so much of the connective tissue between the conversationalists: not only can everyone see their own followers, but who others follow regardless of their connection to them. On top of this, the @reply convention creates a middle, semi-private conversation space that outsiders can, in effect, eavesdrop on. For these reasons, the acts of following and unfollowing are in and of themselves stronger social signals than in other platforms where they happen largely unnoticed. While Facebook updates and conversation, for instance, function similarly to Twitter, the Friend-of-a-Friend network in Facebook isn’t exposed without reciprocal exchange. In the Twitter environment, following someone and being followed are acts with more intrinsic value due to the visibility of the act itself and the visibility it engenders in the conversation stream.

For me, this ups the ante a bit when it comes to handling those connections. Other factors being equal, I’m unlikely to stop following anyone who talks to me because it not only sends a direct signal to that person regarding my personal connection; it also has a network effect by dropping them from my publicly accessible follow list, which is a primary point of exploration for others seeking the right conversation for themselves. When I put myself in the hypothetical (so far) position of being no longer important to someone in my network because I haven’t been engaging often enough, I get an unhappy feeling which is very hard to distinguish from being dropped for qualitative reasons.

And having a conversation is part of the criteria, but not a required one. I won’t drop people just because they don’t @msg me– I’m not immune to the one-way relationship of celebrity and many people I follow don’t know me and have no reason to engage with me of their own initiative– but if I attempt to engage them and receive no response, their Tweets better be incredibly engaging, funny or useful… otherwise they’re gone.

The bottom line: a social network that works isn’t a one-way situation or performance, but a co-created context and the value that I place on connections and my feeling that this value in part stems from their being a kind of relationship that potentially matters to– and affects– both parties means I break a tie only when I have a qualitative reason to do so and it is a personal matter. I don’t put the severing of connections in the realm of play because, for better or worse, I accept obligations within the network and shamelessly reap the benefits of participation (which is why I don’t protect my conversations either).

It’s not complicated. I recognize the value of following and being followed and then:

• I follow people whose conversation is valuable to me and who I, therefore, want to “promote” through my attention, and
• I drop people if their refusal to engage when prompted is more annoying and frustrating than the value I derive from their one-way stream.

It’s not the One True Twitter Way… it’s just the way that works for me!

[image by Ape Lad]

In a post that is meant to go in a different– and interesting– direction regarding PLEs, Dave Cormier writes:

“Why, you might ask, are we doing this course in a closed fashion? Well, I also happen to think that forcing people to work in the open without a clear sense of the implication of that action is also unfair. If people choose to blog and refer us to that work by using the course tag, and, maybe, referring to it in the blog posts… then that’s great. If they choose, for any number of reasons, that they prefer to keep all their work to themselves, that is also their choice. I don’t think its a good choice, I think that work shared is more valuable and more likely to come back to you better than when you started… I think that the best knowledge is created in an interaction… a ‘public PLE’ but that is not for me to decide for someone else.”

To which I have to ask: really? All work? All the time? Is this a common sentiment?

I guess this goes to show how out of touch I am, but I see an inherent contradiction in this position. Educators can talk about– and demonstrate with examples of– the “implication” of sharing and working in the open until they are blue in the face… but this is a perfect example where experiential learning is often a necessity.

Ideally a student will choose to share and work in the open on their own– I’m not advocating being an ogre and forcing all openness all the time– but it doesn’t always happen that way. Sometimes performances are necessarily command performances; that’s not a bad thing. In my experience, as many of the most reluctant come to find value in the process of sharing and working in an open environment– as evidenced both by what they say and their continued activity– as those who decide to do so on their own.

I see teaching and learning in an open environment as one in which teachers are akin to chartered wilderness guides. To the extent possible, productive and safe, a good guide will let their charges take the lead and facilitate the experiences they seek. But there are necessary and desired outcomes that lie at the end of hazy and sometimes unseen paths, and dangers that trump a client’s desire, inclination and instinct. At those times it is precisely our job as an educator to “decide for” our students. This includes taking part in an open environment– which isn’t just an educational condition, but increasingly a condition of being active in the world outside of the educational enterprise– just as it includes many other performances and engagements and approaches that learners would be unlikely to engage in if left wholly to their own devices.

Of course, not all courses have engagement outside the walls of the class as a required part of the process in terms of outcome or philosophy. It isn’t necessary, in my opinion, to have any open processes to have a fantastic learning experience. But the negative spin here– the implication that openness is somehow different from other required elements or activities and thus worthy of invoking the negative descriptions of forcing and deciding for– is to ignore the interplay between the reality of the world in which students desire and choose to operate and the larger context in which desire and choice are not the only– and sometimes not even the most important– characteristics they need to understand and be prepared for.