The copyright idea means paying people for their publicly-distributed intellectual property. In the U.S., this is as basic as the idea of a patent — you made it, you monopolize it for a determined period. There are people trying to make a living creating things, and if society doesn’t pay them they can’t afford to do that.

The “copyleft“  seems to consist of a range of views, including that all information should be free, that the copyright laws are unfair or trap things for too long or don’t pay the creators anyway, or aren’t flexible enough for education (the latter is where I’ve stood for many years).

I watched Rip! A Remix Manifesto 2008 (or if you like commercials and Hulu’s new business model, you can watch it here) My first response was horror because I was clearly hearing a Brian May guitar riff while being told it wasn’t Queen but something a mashup artist created. In the film, they show very small bits and pieces going into a mashup, tens of songs with little bits pulled out, but if I could recognize the guitarist and the riff (and I am neither a music expert nor a Queen nut), then the issue is not creating content in a way that truly changes the sources.

So I started looking at those kind of mashups, where people are combining recognizable things (audio, video, not just notes) in order to make a different point from the ones intended by the original creators.

I came to the conclusion that since copyright law protects usage for the purpose of criticism, we can define criticism fairly broadly, even to the point of simply combining other people’s work in order to make a different argument.

But there are value judgements here, and we shouldn’t pretend they aren’t there. Perhaps there is good use and not so good use in a mashup?

A good use of other people’s material might be something illustrative of a concept, such as the videos Blooms Taxonomy According to Pirates of the Caribean or Origins of the Moonwalk. They illustrate an idea, regardless of their quality.

A good use might also mean good attribution. At the end of the Origins of the Moonwalk video, the dancers who appear in the video are listed at the end (though not the composers and cinematographers, etc). This seems good, giving attribution to those doing the hoofing. But in the Top 25 songs of 2009 mashup, the artists were just listed in notes under the video on the YouTube page, which didn’t seem the same. Should attribution be part of the work?

A couple of week’s ago, Ola was inquiring in Twitter about some sources. Alec’s advice was to be sure to attribute items if they were “copyleft”:

This implies that using copyrighted stuff was not OK, and using open stuff still required a citation.

I went looking into Alec’s view on copyright, and found a reply to Minhaaj on his blog in Feb 2009:

“I was pretty much a copyright abolitionist. However, two things changed my mind. 1) I feel that I need to be more understanding of those who create content as their career. At my institution, as a professor, I am paid for research, scholarship, and community service. I am paid whether or not I create or sell content. I can give my content away, and do not have to rely on making my living that way. I personally publish everything under copyleft licenses (NC/ATT/SA), but I do not believe I have the right to enforce this upon others. Licensing content should be a choice. 2) Copyleft is a reaction to too much ownership of content in society. However, copyleft does not work as a legal mechanism without the existence copyright law. In other words, without copyright, there is no copyleft. Sure, another system may come around to replace copyright, but it does not yet exist. This is actually why there are many critiques of copyleft as well.”

The first point is one I have come to as well, not just from reading Jaron Lanier (I’ve linked him enough, I think), though that started it. But how would I feel if someone took my voice from one of my lectures and made a mashup promoting anti-Semitism or violence against women or Middle Eastern wars? Does it matter how I’d feel? And even if it does, will copyright law actually prevent this sort of thing? Nope. That’s why the second point, that it’s all based on copyright enforcement anyway, makes me sad.

All in all, I was unable to draw any lines anywhere.  Copyright is a good idea, because it allows the creator of a work to be paid for their work. That’s capitalism, but even in a non-capitalist system someone would be paying these creators for creating.

But then we come to the nitty-gritty: my own use of copyrighted resources for teaching.

I am an educator at a public institution, paid for by public funds. When I use copyrighted material, I am supposedly covered by and responsible for the rules of the US Copyright Law’s Fair Use provisions .  To make it work for online, one has to consider an online class as a “similar place devoted to instruction”, but I have no issue with that.

We also have the TEACH Act of 2002 , which was supposed to lighten things up in a digital environment by amending the Copyright Code. Although I lauded it at the time, I now see it as more restrictive than the original code, in the sense that it demands that the copyrighted work distribution must be technologically limited to enrolled students, providing a boon for proprietary learning management systems and a restriction on open education.

SO….am I engaging in civil disobedience or passive resistance in the interest of educating my students? Have I been for years? Or was I “protected” (at least since 2002) by my LMS? or perhaps I always have been in line with original law. I didn’t think teaching required a lawyer, but I could be wrong.

I made my first mashup a little while ago, and it wasn’t really a mashup at all. I had a scene from a modern movie that I wanted students to see because the actors were wearing very accurate historical costumes. I didn’t want the modern soundtrack, so I replaced it with music, taken from a CD I own, that was right for the period. When I uploaded to YouTube, I got:

So, arrrgh, I have joined ye pirate ranks by putting the right music with the right clothes for teaching purposes at a public institution and posting it in a public place where someone else might learn from it too.

So here goes, my (very uncertain) conclusions:

• Artists and authors in our society should be paid for their work.
• My role as a teacher is not as a consumer of such work, but as a user of it in the interests of education.
• Sources should be attributed, period, even if it’s 1,000 of them.
• The issue of wanting to educate everyone everywhere will always come up against the issue of copyright, because everyone on the web could be considered a teacher, even people who make very bad mashups.

And all I can really promise is to never play a Brian May riff for my students and pass it off as my own work. 

1. I am at the center of my learning.
This is good for me — I like it. I want my PLN and my instant information, my Google maps and my blog. But I already went to school, and know how to learn and what might be worth investigating. Is it good for my students, who want to spend all day playing video games? whose idea of the future is after class? Does such an approach encourage narcissism and narrowness? I’m starting to think so.

2. If I can’t find it, it isn’t there, because everything is on the web.
Everything is not on the web. Most of the sources I used for my thesis are not on the web, nor are they likely to be. And it’s not just a lack of sources. One of my top students, now at university, asked me recently, “what do we need older people for, when we can look up all the knowledge on Wikipedia?” I explained the difference between data or information, a lot of which you can find on the web, and wisdom, the meaning that is developed using information. He understood. Many of my younger students don’t.

3. My interests are of high importance in my ability to learn.
We keep assuming that engagement is crucial to learning. I haven’t seen evidence of this. The fact that everyone gets so excited about a study implying that a group of students had higher grades because they used Twitter indicates that there isn’t much research yet. So now we study attention. People pay more attention to things they’re interested in, so they must learn more. It’s easy to see the common sense of this. But there are many things I learned that I was not interested in, but I needed them later and was able to use them. And I have several students who engage in class, they are so into what’s happening, but forget the whole subject the moment they leave the room. (I know it’s anecdotal, but I deliberately tested for this by formulating an essay question around an exciting class discussion we had about which movies expressed the same values in Homeric poetry — no joy.)

4. My teachers are there to understand my needs and meet them.
The popularity of learning styles, the idea that we have different kinds of intelligences, led to a craze (I’ll date it 1991-2010) of catering to these preferences. I did it too, surveying my students to see what kind of learning they liked according to their own stated “needs”. The theory is being discredited now, right after I’d already come to the conclusion that I want my students working against type, so they could learn how to learn in other ways too.

5. My contributions are appreciated, regardless of their quality.
This is a hold-over from the whole self-esteem, I’m OK- You’re OK, thing. It’s not that we aren’t all OK. We are. But our work isn’t. It varies in quality. Sometimes it’s bad (this blog post ain’t so hot). Sometimes it’s good. There are gentle ways to suggest improvement, and not confuse the work with the person, but we don’t do this. We call someone a “C student”. We also make allowances. I’ve had a student tell me they couldn’t do an assignment because they’re a visual learner (see #4). Appreciate the person. Critically evaluate the work.

6. My ideas are always worth of respect.
They aren’t. Morally reprehensible ideas aren’t.

7. Learning should be pleasant.
Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) blames television in general, and Sesame Street in particular, for the idea that we should always be entertained and amused as we learn. TV, and now the internet, makes concentrated learning (especially of long texts, mathematical equations, or focused study) even more dull than they were before. Learning my multiplication tables was dull. But I still know them.

8. If I am bored, it is because my classes are boring.
There’s an old reply to a child saying, “this is boring”: you may be bored, but this is not boring. We say people should learn how to learn. I think it’s good if they also learn how to learn things that don’t interest them. You’re 8 years old (or 12, or 25, or 46) — how can you know what will interest you later? (see #1)

So do we try to reform the whole educational system in a way that encourages these extremes? Do we hold up the student in the New York Times article “Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction” as what we want? a young man who cannot get through a book and thinks that you can get the “whole story” of a novel in a 6-minute YouTube video?

We need to look at what we’re accepting and encouraging here. I do not agree with the quotation by Jeff Jarvis, presented by Will Richardson in our class last Tuesday: “Maybe the issue isn’t that we’re too distracted to read but that reading can finally catch up with how our brains really work.” He says the assumption is that we think “that the way we used to do it is the right way”. He says change brings “fear and retrenchment”. But looking at what we had before doesn’t need to imply traditionalism. It can be an effort to select what is worth saving.

What most people agree on, even the apologists, is that our print culture is moving toward web culture, and that we are moving from a world of lengthy printed texts to web-based scannable snippets. Even in my somewhat traditional field of History, we now have “new forms of his­tor­i­cal writ­ing, shorter forms with less schol­arly appa­ra­tus“.  The question is whether that is OK, and what kind of society results if we do. Do we want to save the ability to develop a sustained argument? To triumph over the difficulty of learning something hard? To pay the respect owed to teachers? to study ideas and ideals that transcend the interests of the day? Then we should keep those in mind as we move forward.

I am intrigued by the perspective indicated in Shelley Wright’s post Daring, a response to Danielle. Teachers want to change the world — why would we be teachers otherwise? And to network with like-minded people is great. But the idea that together we can reject standardization and accountability, march in a different direction, make a new world, rebuild education….

I just don’t think it will happen like this.

Partly this is because I was politically active at a young age. I was doing cold calls to get people to vote against a nuclear reactor in my home county when I was 11. I worked political campaigns at 13. In high school, I edited the school newspaper and attacked the truancy laws that were rounding up anyone caught off-campus and detaining them. As an adult, I marched against both the invasion of Kuwait and Iraq. I was just one of many, carrying a sign and singing songs we didn’t remember because we hadn’t marched in 1968.

The power plant was not built, thank goodness, but my candidate did not get elected, the truancy laws didn’t change, and we haven’t ended these wars. Change does happen, but often in small ways, or steps forward and back, often over many years. (Or it happens half-way: I once paid a lab to do soil samples at our local playground to show the arsenic in the sand from the play structure’s pressure-treated lumber, and put the results on everyone’s doorstep. The Homeowner’s Association denied the results, but the play structure got replaced because it was falling apart. But they left the sand there, of course.)

Most change happens incrementally, and often through undermining the system from within. I can’t do that with arsenic-laden sand, but I can with teaching. I am considered something of a campus leader in technology at my college, although I have no official position of any kind, not even heading a committee. This is because I continually subverted the system, then requested support for my subversion, or began teaching workshops on what I was doing and asking others to do the same. I created a whole professional development program beholden to no one because I rejected the role of campus technology leader, refused positions where I might have been paid for it, because it would have then been controlled by people who wanted to systematize it.

So we look at something like the “Top 20 Most Influential People in Online Learning” list, posted by Alec Couros last Thursday in Twitter, where he commented:

Where indeed? I couldn’t help but notice the dominance of company-employed people on the list, people who are part of the new system. I’m not sure I like the new system any better than the old one.

Luckily for the prospects of change, the group changing things is still fairly small. We are all part of it, but I don’t want it to become a cult. I don’t want to be a believer. As soon as we start that kind of thinking, we construct alternate realities that don’t dovetail with enough ordinary objectives to earn widespread acceptance.

Instead, let’s just do it, and when people ask, let’s justify it using the accepted norms, as I suggested on Shelley Wright’s blog. We can share ideas on how to do these things successfully, but the best way to get an idea to spread is to just show it working. That’s why I’m not too interested in educational theory and research, nor forming the First Techno-Utopian Church of the Web. I’ll just use a blog here and a wiki there as if it were the obvious thing to do for the pedagogical objective I have in mind, being as open as possible about it so anyone who wishes can see what I’m doing.

Maybe it’s off the beaten path, but I think it will be more effective.

[Snow monkey photo by Trent McBride]

The idea of a Personal Learning Environment is also simple: it’s the place/way one organizes the input from the PLN. This would include tools, including social networking tools, RSS aggregation, and even things I write in a notebook.

The first major reference I can find to a PLN is dated 1998, from Dan Tobin in a business context: Building Your Personal Learning Network. Now we have articles (like this one by Miguel Guhlin Build Your PLN) and blogs and even an entire class (PLENK) based on the idea.

It begins to sound like a product, something everyone should get or have. Or a structure that we should build. And within the context of this class, many students are doing that, building a PLN using the tools that are suggested, especially Twitter.

I see PLNs as more organic, not only because they are ever-changing but because they grow over time. And sometimes a very long time. Longer than this class will last, for sure.

Vanessa writes, “developing a PLN takes time and that I have already completed a number of the necessary tasks that will help me on my way to establishing connections on Twitter such as creating an account, learning to follow, watching and listening, retweeting, tagging tweets, etc”.

Time is crucial. You can start growing your own, but throwing one together could end in disappointment and disillusionment.

This is where you get comments like “I just don’t see the point of Twitter” and Jud’s wonderfully honest and insightful post that includes “I don’t understand the appeal of using a blog, twitter or other forms of social media for much of anything”.

It isn’t about the tools, but where the people are with whom you want to connect. Many people join Facebook, not because they want to be in Facebook, but because their family or friends are already there and they want to interact. I’m in Twitter because that’s where the ed tech people are, and I enjoy the challenge of writing in 140 character spurts because I’m perverse. I read blogs because that’s where the emergent thinking is published, and books because that’s where the polished, extended thinking is published. I belong to a listserv because they have one for community college history instructors, and I want to interact with them. I use Google Reader because I prefer to scan multiple blog posts instead of going to each blog.

I’m really glad I started doing this first, before everyone started calling it a PLN. The name itself sounds technical, and therefore difficult. The fact that people are writing research articles and holding classes about it makes it seem even harder and more distant from ordinary, daily activity.

That’s a shame. Because really, it’s pretty simple.

I have been looking at Dr Couros’ “sherpa model” (developed here and revisited here) as a metaphor.

The larger issue, of course, is the role of the teacher in this “new world” of web technologies and widely available information. For history (my discipline), the information is considered to be the facts of what happened in the past. At the professional level, that means very little – even the information itself is subject to question because of calendar shifts, interpretations of the events by eyewitnesses, etc. But at the undergraduate level, we can consider the events, people and dates to be “facts”.

However, doing history at the college level has never been about learning the facts themselves. It isn’t that the facts aren’t important — they are often considered to be the building blocks on which we construct interpretations and analysis. This is the level where the past becomes significant to the present, when one recognizes the patterns of historical development and interprets ones own world based on those perceived patterns. Along the way, there are methods to be learned, methods regarding source verification, breadth of information, critical analysis — skills we need for other disciplines and to lead an examined life in general.

So when it’s said that I know the terrain here, I do, in terms of both the facts (rocks, trees, ravines) and the methods (insert venomous snakes here). I can easily guide students through the historical events terrain, using storytelling and exploration of factual content. The question is whether, in allowing them their own explorations, they will encounter enough of the skills necessary to interpret the facts.

I would need to let them fall in some holes, step in some quicksand. But when they return, will they interpret these experiences as historians? It’s fine if I only care that they be learners, but I want them to be able to do history. That is when my job is important — I’m supposed to provide the structure that helps that happen. Doesn’t that mean I’m more than a sherpa?

Thus far I think I have been working, in my online classes at least, as more of a “curator” . This is a role discussed by George Siemens. As a curator, I am the one who collects the “content” — the course materials (books, websites, documents) I want the students to work with.

I don’t just do that, though. Each week I have students bring in primary sources (usually visual, video, some textual) that they find on their own, but which were created during the era we’re studying that week. They create the collection, then I guide them (skills only here) toward making their own historical theses. I don’t know what the metaphor is for this. Geologist? Collect your own rocks and put them all together and tell me what they say? It’s more sherpa-like than curator, but I am deciding where we go look and what kinds of things we look for. Primary sources only, please. No picture of women dressed as flappers at this week’s Halloween party — we need images from the 1920s!

To be a true sherpa, would I have to construct my classes in a form similar to Michael Wesch’s anthropology class, with pages of RSS feeds and students collecting items related to the class and putting it together themselves, collaboratively? I confess to nervousness about doing this, for several reasons. First, I have too many students to make it work, at least for the first time while I’m experimenting (that may be solved when my honors class gets offered – then I’ll have 25 instead of 40).

Next, what happens to historical chronology? The order itself is important to the discipline. We might be able to collect thousands of items from all over, but how can we have any historical knowledge at all if we skip right to mashing them up without understanding their context in their own timeframes?

So the question is this: can I still be a sherpa if I care about the structures inherent in using the content?

[Image credits: Alec Couros (Sherpa Image), Martin LaBar (rocks)]

I first watched the RSA Animation of his talk at YouTube. I recognized the animator’s style (I’m still trying to figure out what artist that arm represents) from a previous RSA Animation, Philip Zimbardo’s The Secret Power of Time. This time, I looked away from the screen as I took notes.

When I watched Zimbardo, I had to do it twice. I found the cartooning at first fascinating, then annoying, and ultimately distracting. The cartoonist has his/her own take on the presentation, and draws very appropriate animations, but they have their own interpretation. So this time, watching Sr Ken, I focused on my own notes, creating my own interpretation of the talk instead.

Then it stopped. At first I thought YouTube had stopped streaming, but no, it was over. I looked at my notes, and sensed something wrong. It seemed to have been cut off. So I went looking to see if I could find the whole presentation, assuming there was in fact a whole one somewhere. I found it at about the same time Dr Couros responded to my tweet.

The whole speech is here. When I viewed it, I learned a number of things:

• The context for Mr Robinson’s remarks was a global crisis in human resources that he sees as reflecting the ecological crisis. I learned about idea of the Anthropocene age, as a new geological era dominated by manmade systems. I heard him connect the teen suicide rates to this crisis. I was able to begin to connect some dots about teen suicide, the internet, and a larger context of global change.
• I learned that he lived in California, and sees Las Vegas as a place of pure imagination, because it has no geographic or economic reason to exist, which gave me a different perspective on cities in general.
• At the start of his talk, he told me what the RSA was. The organization goes way back to the Enlightement and was not only the Royal Society of Arts, but of Manufacturing and Commerce as well. Manufacturing and commerce are two of my historical interests. I went to the RSA website, and discovered that they are a wonderful island of rationalism in an increasingly irrational world.
• He mentioned Chris Woodhead, so I looked him up on Wikipedia and discovered that he was the Chief Inspector of Schools and a believer in traditional education.
• In my (and his) generation, we used to remove people’s tonsils unnecessarily, because it was the medical fad at the time. Most people my age (and his) are tonsil-less. He connected this fact to the current trend for medicating ADHD, which has been a concern of mine for some time. I have long felt that most children given the medication should be allowed to go play instead of sit still.

The point is, I would have learned none of this if I had only watched the animation, which had excerpted certain parts of this talk. Did someone edit his talk to the parts they thought would create a good animation? was the goal to create the animation, or to create a shorter version for those with shorter attention spans? Robinson’s points were easy to follow, yet the drawing seemed designed to make it easy for us to follow them. Kind of fed into his ADHD argument, I thought.

The content of his talk was more complete within its context than excerpted from it. The animation was essentially a mashup, not a presentation by Sir Ken. It left out much of his humor, his personal environment, the global motive for challenging educational paradigms, his books, and the observation that teenagers don’t wear wristwatches. These were replaced with delightful, if distracting, cartooning.

The experience reminded me of the argument in music about dissecting albums, where some bands don’t want their albums, which are constructed so that songs are heard in a particular order, dismantled by people downloading individual songs. I see the value in both the individual song (in this case, the animation) and the whole album (his entire talk), but I don’t want them to be confused. If you’d like to see his whole talk, enjoy!

I’m an OED girl, and it’s pretty clear that the word derived from competency with letters. In fact, the terms “illiterate” was used in the 16th century, long before anyone used the word “literate”, in the 19th. This suits my idea of historical flow for sure.

I am willing to accept the part of the definition that indicates it can be extended to mean “learned”, but it meant that in a time when learning meant formal learning, and formal learning meant letters.

In trying to determine what people mean by Digital Literacy, however, I looked at:

• National Council of Teachers of English: A Definition of 21st Century Literacies
• Douglas Rushkoff’s Why Johnny Can’t Program: A New Medium Requires a New Literacy
• Elizabeth Daley: Expanding the Concept of Literacy (EDUCAUSE Forum for Higher Education 2002)

What was interesting to me was not just the focus on proficiency with computer media (which I might see as the logical expansion of the word “literacy” as proficiency with letters), but also the critical thinking focus and moral direction being implied.

Rushkopf is downright apocalyptic in his insistence that we either learn programming or computers will be running us (cue sci-fi whistling spooky music). But programming is not a literacy by any definition – it’s a skill. The premise of his argument is sound: people (he says “kids” or “digital natives” but it’s really everybody) do not understand what the programs they are using actually do, or why they exist. His example is Facebook, which people don’t realize is mining them for advertising data. He also bemoans the lack of programmers being trained in our country as compared to Russia, China and Iran. I am not sure what he expects in a country that insists that everyone has a right to an academic university education, but that’s another post…

He’s saying that we can’t understand what the tools are doing to us without being able to program the tools themselves. I disagree. As I’ve said before, I don’t need to live in the 12th century to do know its impact. And I can know that Facebook is mining me (or that Google tracks my internet use, or that nothing I put on the web is private) without being a programmer. I can, as he says, “recognize the biases” of the technologies I use without creating them — I do it all the time.

On the utopian side is the NCTE. Nothing here about programming, except that they think we must be able to “create” multi-media “texts” (I know few people who can do this, and again, I don’t think they should have to if they understand how they’re created). I support up to a point their objective to “develop proficiency with the tools of technology” (to me that could also mean a book or paper and pencil). But further on we see the confusion between the term literacy (originally about the interpretation of symbols into cogent speech) and critical thinking, in the insistence that being able to critique is part of literacy. Perhaps it should be when dealing with print too, but to do that we must extend our idea of print literacy.

What the heck, we can do that. Let’s extend the term “literacy” to include critical assessment of what we read, and even what we experience. But then we get the moral, utopian dream in the NCTE’s definition: that building relationships, working globally, designing and sharing information are literacies. Worthy goals, yes, but not literacies. The implication is that society isn’t literate enough to work on such laudable goals with print media, although we have been doing just that for centuries. The NCTE’s definition constitutes a digital agenda. That’s fine, but let’s not call it a “definition” of “21st century literacies”.

Elizabeth Daley doesn’t like the way print continues to dominate our concept of literacy, and argues for expanding it into the visual medium. But certainly this isn’t new – her arguments could relate to Gothic paintings (“capable of constructing complex meanings independent of text”) or television (“methods of publication and teaching that are essentially different from those of text”). She claims there are a number of skills, most taught in her field of cinema studies, that are needed to be able to “read or write the language of media”, including editing, sound-image relationships, and typography. We are now getting awfully detailed and far away from the idea of a literacy that might be obtainable by ordinary folk.

Let’s say for a minute we buy the whole Literacy Package. We must all be programmers, create media in many formats (after studying technique and meaning, of course), develop proficiency in today’s technology, critically analyze all forms of media, and work collaboratively and globally. This will make it possible for people to understand the intellectual production of humanity through its visuals, and the electronic productions of the last century. It will also provide skills for such production in this century.

But go back before this century, or apart from historical images, and the fact is this: most information, disclosure, conceptual relationships, and techniques are textual. We have over 500 years of humanity’s knowledge represented in text, and a great need to understand it. People still believe what they read (even when it’s wrong), and write more poorly every year. It’s hardly the case that we have mastered print literacy, so we must be ready to move on to other media.

My conclusion is that understanding media (apologies to Marshall McLuhan), and even understanding its motives and effects, is a very desirable goal. But calling it “literacy” seems to open the door to fuzzy thinking. Words are still terribly important, even if you believe text is no longer king. And we should assess them critically as we move into the post-text world.

Guess I’ll go look up “contrarian” in the OED….

I am not a believer in standardized testing, No Child Left Behind, or assessments of teachers that rely on student evaluations or student test scores.

I am a fan of John Holt, unschooling, experiential learning. And reading. Books. Lots of them.

We have a cultural premise going, promoted by a lot of hype, that student engagement is poor, at all levels. Students tune out things because they aren’t relevant. The vision of students today is that they are bored, and see no relevance in their schooling to their own lives.

I was recently subjected to a video by the Cal State system called “Why Are We Doing This?” featuring undergraduates who have no clue why they’re taking General Education courses. Presumably its point is to argue that our GE system needs reform, toward a Learn-to-Balance-Your-Checkbook “Life Skills” sort of curriculum (at least, that’s how it was used at the curriculum meeting I was in).

Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach writes: “Studies show that by their senior year, barely one-fourth of today’s students agree that school is meaningful or their courses are interesting—and less than half believe what they learn in school will have any bearing on their success in life.”

Well, I didn’t either. I didn’t find courses interesting that taught subjects I didn’t like. I didn’t care for teachers who were not performers. If I could have gotten out of math (beyond algebra) and Spanish and earth science, I would have. What did I learn from these subjects?

Actually, I learned a lot, just not trig or Spanish or science. I learned how to think effectively in subjects I dislike. How to manage life in situations I don’t care for. How to take stupid assignments in subjects I abhor and make them mean something to me.

Is the trend now away from the boring and toward the exciting? It seems there’s also a trend away from what we used to call “academics” and “general education”, toward a New Way of Thinking about education. (It’s not new, of course – I seem to recall something about a guy named Dewey…) Do we let how students feel about school determine the curriculum?

Now enter the social media argument, that use of social media will engage our students. They will become enthusiastic in their classes, eager to learn new material, and then…..

Then what? That’s where most of the research seems to stop. In Rita Kop‘s Chapter 14 of Emerging Technologies in Distance Education (indeed, in the whole book by implication), the argument is again made that engagement is the point. We must engage our students. The big problem is that we are not engaging our students.

I think the issue needs reframing.

When I asked my Personal Learning Network (Twitter) about studies showing that engagement leads to academic success, the only response I got was an article showing it didn’t, but that was only about the use of clickers. (I have no idea whether students find clickers engaging – as with everything, it would be in how you use it.)

I am not dystopian. I don’t look at examples of children teaching themselves to use computers in India (see Sugata Mitra’s TED talk) and students engaged in simulations that really teach anthropology and social responsibility (Michael Wesch) and go, “Oh, no, that will never do.” It’s wonderful and exciting. In Nussbaum-Beach’s article, she writes that a teacher’s students “use their creativity and voice to send a message of hope to the rest of the world”. That’s totally cool.

I just wonder about whether the students are learning the subjects, or whether they are only learning to learn about things they like, and what the implications might be if it’s the latter. We are using social media to teach to a particular learning style, which prefers snippets, multimedia mashups and short-form text. Let’s say, just for a moment, that the negative studies about learning styles are correct, and that catering to learning styles doesn’t actually improve learning. (See, for example, Learning Styles; Concepts and Evidence from 2008). Let’s say that the dystopians (Nicholas Carr, Jason Lanier) are right, and that the mental habits produced in today’s distracted culture are poor for deep thinking. What if we are encouraging students to use methods that are personally satisfying but intellectually vacuous? what if we are creating a new system where no one learns subjects they don’t already care about?

The payoff for catering to students’ preferred learning modes is enormous. “If we want to remain relevant in the lives of students, then we must use strategies and materials—such as global networking—that fit the learning styles of the digital native,” writes Nussbaum-Beach. I noted the language: “if we want to remain relevant”. Maybe that’s what it is. Not only affective satisfaction for our students, but afffective satisfaction for us. Students who like and admire us. No more teachers hated for teaching boring classes. Chili peppers and 5.0 for all at RateMyProfessors.com.

We say we want to create learners for the issues of today. Without studying subjects they’ve never heard of, or don’t care for? Without the pressure cooker that encourages some students (not all) to do their best academically? Without a curriculum that has traditional content? Rick Schwier put it best in his slide for our presentation: “How do we take advantage of informal learning, without screwing up the stuff we want to accomplish?” I have things I want to accomplish in my discipline that are quickly being considered irrelevant, such as historical context and cultural literacy.

A similar discussion took place a generation ago. Students were protesting the traditional subjects, and it changed curriculum. What we got out of that had both good and bad qualities. We got scholars who were able to research minority cultures and trends. But we also got fragmentation of traditional disciplines, where the same people we were trying to include went off somewhere else. One example in history was the creation of women’s history. It brought to light the extraordinary, and ordinary, contributions of women. But it also fragmented history, breaking it off into histories of men and histories of women. Even now, if I teach anything about women (which I do in an integrated way as an element of social history), I always have a few students who call me interesting names, some of which are as mild as “feminist” but others which aren’t.

We are already living in a narcissistic culture via social media, though certainly social media can also bring people together to do great things. We must be aware of the risk we are running. Almost all of the hype so far has been created by people who had traditional schooling, people who see the connections to Socrates, Gutenberg, and McLuhan. I find it interesting that the biggest hype-sters were traditionally trained.

So, if we continue on this path of enthusiasm, the question is: Will the next generation know anything? Or will they just be engaged?

I would like to track the class’s blogs so I can see everything, without having to go to each individual blog and click on each comments link for each post. I also want to track my own comments.

No one could accuse me of having a Pollyanna-ish idea of progress, but it seems we are still in 2004 with the RSS readers and aggregation technologies available to us.

I can, and do, use Google Reader. I can subscribe to the feeds from everyone’s blogs and put them there. I can put them all in a folder, which I have done (later Dr Couros got us the bundle), so I can read all the posts and scroll.

But the feeds are of two types: Posts and Comments. These are separate feeds for each blog. I spent this morning going through and pasting the feeds for everyone’s Comments into a separate folder. If I put them in the same folder with the posts, it made a mess, since you can only organize by newest, oldest, or “magic” (I hate it when they get cute – where’s my wand?).

[Some blogs didn’t have a comments feed visible, so I had to figure out to put “comments/feed” or “feed/comments” to adapt their post feed.

I used to be the type of person to put everything in files and clear my desktop (you know, a real desktop, the kind with old-fashioned papers and pens on it). Since getting hooked into the internet (think Borg) I now think laterally, and have papers spread out all over my desk, and a zillion “files” (objects) scattered on my virtual desktop (think Nicholas Carr). I have to search now to find particular emails in Gmail, and particular files on my computer because my personal filing system has failed. I need Desktop Computer 3.0 to happen NOW.

So why are the aggregators so behind?

For keeping track of my own comments (so I can have some record of what the heck I’m thinking), I had tried Co.mments (which I used, badly, for CCK08), but I went back to it and it’s gone. I’m trying Cocomment, but its Firefox extension causes crashes and it’s horrible slow.

Please, tell me I’m the one behind and I’m missing an easier way to have everyone’s posts, followed by the comments they received, all nicely open and nested on one scrollable screen?

The publicness that the Internet now allows people to have is mistakenly believed to mean trying to get the broadest possible audience. But in effect people are trying to reach like-minded people, in order to belong to a community. There has been a tremendous increase in the amount of material that is available to the public, not really intended for the public, but instead for the emerging communities.

Online communication has challenged our ideas of what a community can be. Social media allow people to relate to groups of people who live beyond the borders of location and time in the very same way that print once allowed information to be free from the constraints of location.

Social media thus redefine what local interaction is and remove the constraints we earlier had on community building.

The view of online as a separate space, a “virtual” space or “cyberspace” is an unfortunate example of a misleading metaphor that makes it hard to understand what is going on today. Our social media tools are no more alternatives to real life than books; they are very much part of it – making life more meaningful.

The web was not created as a whole entity, but as little communities trying to form and talk to each other. This class is one of those, what Rick Schwier called a formal learning community.

One of the things our community is discussing is why we blog, why we participate in this. I responded to Daniel’s comment [really, that's so cool] on Shawna’s post about this (in itself a community act), agreeing that some blog more for reflection, others more for feedback. For those who blog in order to receive feedback, they’re likely looking for feedback from a particular community, or type of person.

If we persist in looking at the web as a space (and that’s my internal metaphor) we need to see the villages as being somewhat isolated from each other, with footpaths connecting them rather than highways. These communities form of similar people with similar interests — all the online discussion boards I was part of in the 1990s were focused on a topic (organic gardening, for example). We were hyperlinked then. We could connect to any other community, object, or item on the web. But we didn’t. That’s not why we were there.

The community we have in this class is created by our instructor, whose own vast connections have been formed by years of hooking up smaller connections. We have been handed wholesale big chunks of Dr Couros’ community, in the form of big bundles in Reader and Twitter. We’ll belong to this community for this class. Will it persist? should it?

In a previous online class I took, the CCK 2008 massive open online class in 2008 (that’s about 10 years ago in internet years), a community was created of hundreds of people. The object at the center was connectivist learning theory. From those connections, I added only three people to my Personal Learning Network, and one was the instructor. Likely that says more about me than those hundreds of people! But many I think would agree that it’s easier to participate in a meaningful way in a smaller community.

I have been blogging since January 2007, yet few of the people in my “real world” community at the college know I blog, care that I blog, or would ever read my blog. It wasn’t about opening my ideas to the whole web, but rather making them available for any who were interested. I prefer connecting with individuals, not groups, and I can only get my head around a certain number of individuals at one time (just ask my students, whose sheer number – 200 per semester – I find difficult to grasp as a collection of individuals).

Perhaps true community, like true democracy (many have argued), rests in smaller groups of people, even on the web.