Saturday, February 25, 2012

Connectivism

Different structures and pedagogies of online and distance learning.
connectivism and connective knowledge (CCK)
personal learning environments and networks and knowledge (PLENK)
Online learning for today and tomorrow (EduMOOC)
mobile learning (MobiMOOC)

In one of our weekly web sessions in Learning Analytics 2012 (LAK12), Dragan Gasevic described an interesting paper describing three generations of distance education: cognitive-behaviorist, social constructivist, and connectivist.
Anderson and Dron (2011) describe three generations of distance education (DE) pedagogy: cognitive-behaviorist, social constructivist, and connectivist. All models exist today, but have evolved before and with each other, and with the technologies. Some of these theories were developed before learning was truly impacted by technology. Learning theories should reflect their underlying social environments. Connectivism seems to contrast and integrate principles of learning theories, such as behaviorism, cognitism, and constructivist learning pedagogies.

MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are gaining popularity in recent years. Examples are CCK08, PLENK2010, MobiMOOC (2011), EduMOOC (2011), Change11, and LAK12.

In the article, Dialogue and connectivism: A new approach to understanding and promoting dialogue-rich networked learning | Ravenscroft | The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, the author considers: "how we can achieve these aims this article will review the principles of connectivism from a dialogue perspective; propose some social constructivist approaches based on dialectic and dialogic dimensions of dialogue, which can act as levers in realising connectivist learning dialogue; demonstrate how dialogue games can link the discussed theories to the design and performance of networked dialogue processes; and consider the broader implications of this work for designing and delivering sociotechnical learning."

One question: Is networked social media a new landscape for dialogue and connections for learning? It is becoming increasingly important to critically assess learning and the development of connections of people and resources. The web is truly now open, participative, and social, requiring the user to develop and practice higher order cognitive abilities and social competencies. Can we work to create technology platforms that reorient the traditional learning process to teach learners to think, analyze, and reason?


Siemens (2005) states the following principles of connectivism, which are also currently available through Siemens’ writings in Wikipedia.

Learning and knowledge rest in diversity of opinions.
Learning is a process of connecting specialised nodes or information sources.
Learning may reside in non-human appliances.
Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known.
Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning.
Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.
Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities.
Decision making is itself a learning process. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong tomorrow due to alterations in the information climate affecting the decision.
The author discusses the importance of dialogue in connectivism, defining various structures:
"Diverse opinions (1) will be typically expressed through discourses and clarified, contested, and refined through critical dialogue. The connection of specialised and contextualised information sources (2) will involve the assessment of discourses, reflections about them, and recognition of meaning and value. The principle that “Learning may reside in non-human appliances” (3) seems to play out in two ways from a dialogue perspective, although the word “reside” perhaps needs additional qualification. ... To realise a capacity to know more (4) will benefit from reflective and inquiry dialogue to maintain and evolve a community of inquiry and function critically within these spaces. Similarly, nurturing and maintaining connections (5) with people can correspond to opening up and maintaining what Wegerif (2007) calls “dialogic spaces” that emphasise “the interanimation of real voices” within learning relationships. These may then support learning through dialectical and knowledge-building dialogues of the type proposed by Scardamalia and Bereiter (2003). “Seeing connections” (6) is likely to involve dialogue processes such as reflection, clarification, and negotiation. And currency (7) will be realised through maintaining up-to-date and responsive dialogues, and we will often decide what to learn (8) through processes such as clarifying, reflective engagement, and negotiation. To realise a capacity to know more (4) will benefit from reflective and inquiry dialogue to maintain and evolve a community of inquiry and function critically within these spaces. Similarly, nurturing and maintaining connections (5) with people can correspond to opening up and maintaining what Wegerif (2007) calls “dialogic spaces” that emphasise “the interanimation of real voices” within learning relationships. These may then support learning through dialectical and knowledge-building dialogues of the type proposed by Scardamalia and Bereiter (2003). “Seeing connections” (6) is likely to involve dialogue processes such as reflection, clarification, and negotiation. And currency (7) will be realised through maintaining up-to-date and responsive dialogues, and we will often decide what to learn (8) through processes such as clarifying, reflective engagement, and negotiation." (Ravenscroft 2011)

Penetrating the Fog

in Siemens' and Long's Penetrating the Fog piece:
"Since we risk a return to behaviorism as a learning theory if we confine analytics to behavioral data, how can we account for more than behavioral data?"
These authors also point out that learning analytics can help us better understand student learning, motivation, and what factors make students drop out. The big piece I got from this is that we understand over and over again that the amount of information in our world today is too much to handle. We need to manage it in new ways, more effective ways. Learning analytics is on the cusp of creating new practices, using new tools, and getting student feedback on the systems now in place.

Summary of Behaviorism

Penetrating the Fog (Long & Siemens) described evidence-based medical analysis used for prediction, and then taking action on these predictions. The medical field seems to have advanced beyond education. We are constantly told that we have a plethora of data, but we haven't yet turned the data into refined evidence-based analytics about learning. Sharon Slade (from the OU Business School) blogs here, we need to think how we manage this data explosion for the benefit of our learners.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Project ideas, ELLI

Walled Garden vs. Open Community
In thinking about studying online behavior within SL, there are choices of using a walled garden or keeping the community open. The walled garden would control for the services, applications, content, that will be availabel to the comunity (communities) of study within SL. In a real walled garden, however, the user is unable to escape the walled garden to use other learning paths within SL. I'm not sure whether or not there is a need or a use for the walled garden.

Slideshare on Open vs. Walled Gardens

Mentoring
Would mentoring via available personnel or intelligent agent be easier within a walled garden? If the user is identified as part of the study and gives consent, can we simply follow their id within the open community without the need for walls?
Could the SL platform with the ELLI replace the human interface of mentors?
Can we formalize the number of recommendations based on what we expect the experts to do?

Regarding the mentoring of participants and the ELLI score, could I interview the group of mentors that have been trained in ELLI mentoring by Ruth? In my interviews, I would work to discover the kinds of comments and interventions the mentors will make, and the time elapsed before they will make them. Could I learn enough from the ELLI mentors to design an intelligent agent in SL that would mentor?

I served as a mentor teacher in Los Angeles Unified School District many years ago. I functioned as an intelligent agent would, albeit in the real instead of virtual world. I would visit teacher's and talk about what they were doing, what they wanted to do, what help, support, and skills they needed to reach their goals. I also was in a women's accountability group. All of us were in different places, but learned to trust each other to share our goals in life. We made suggestions, recommendations, and followed-up on the things that each of us had agreed we would accomplish over that month. We always had the option to change our mind and decide that the goal was not for us, but the group always kept us accountable and true to ourselves. We learned to ask for advice, share honestly if we had just failed to doit that month, and let ourselves be pushed toward the goals we alone had defined. The intelligent agent in SL has to be a compassionate, trustworthy, yet strong figure of accountability for the learner.

Human mentors should have time available, motivation to share experience and knowledge, willingness to learn, freedom to question and challenge, willingness to try new things, and patience. An intelligent agent should be programmed with the same functions to operate successfully with learners, especially at risk populations.
Human mentors can be role models, confidant, and nurterers of possibilities. What is possible for an agent we could create within SL?


About Intelligent Agents
Intelligent agents are computer programs within the system that act as autonomous entitites. An agent observes, and may learn or use knowledge to reach their predefined goals. they may be simple or complex.
Russell and Norvig define a rational agent.
ideal rational agent: "For each possible percept sequence, an ideal rational agent should do whatever action is expected to maximize its performance measure, on the basis of the evidence prvided by the percept sequence and whatever built-in knowledge the agent has."
To design the rational agent, the task environment must be specified.
Performance measure?
environment?
actuators?
sensors?

Other questions in designing a rational agent
Observable?
Deterministic?
Episodic?
Static?
Discrete?
Single-agent?

*Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, 1995, Prentice-Hall, Inc.

Nikola Kasabov defines intelligent agents as "a systems should exhibit the following characteristics:
•accomodate new problem solving rules incrementally
•adapt online and in real time
•be able to analyze itself in terms of behavior, error and success
•learn and imporve through interaction with the environment (embodiment)
•learn quickly from large amounts of data
•have memory-based exemplar storage and retrieval capacities
•have parameters to represent short and long term memory, age, forgetting, etc.
*N. Kasabov, Introduction: Hybrid intelligent adaptive systems. International Journal of Intelligent Systems, Vol.6, (1998) 453–454.

Russell & Norvig (2003) group agents into five classes based on their degree of perceived intelligence and capability:[7]

simple reflex agents
model-based reflex agents
goal-based agents
utility-based agents
learning agents
Russell, Stuart J.; Norvig, Peter (2003), Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (2nd ed.), Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-790395-2, chpt. 2

An intelligent agent to mentor learners learning dimensions would be an automated online assistant, that would function to perceive the needs of learners in situ to perform individualized mentoring (supplying suggestions of alternative actions, supplying resources, experts and peers to contact, etc.) I see this agent in SL as an avatar that appears as a friendly support to learners.

Monday, February 20, 2012

Project Ideas, ELLI in SL, Fusion Universal

Subjects
I had been thinking that I would use schools here or in soCal for my testbeds. However, logistical considerations, along with IRB regulations and hoops to jump through make me think that it would be better to create an online pool from the SL community.
By June 2012, SL will be open to the public and will have more visitors to pull from. There will be a critical mass of learners to study for my projects within SL. It's also possible to recruit after that time and have volunteers sign up to SL, specifically to whatever community I create for them within SL.
These subjects will be, by default 18+, circumventing IRB processes, and will be just one click away from wherever I am in the world as I complete these project pieces.
Questions
•What would it look like to map SL behaviors to the Learning Power Dimensions? (LP will be in SL as ELLI by the end of July--Ruth's grad student Shwfu)
•Could we complement ELLI with real time data streaming? Put ELLI and learning analytics at the intersection. (paper Simon BS and Ruth DC to be presented at LAK12 in Vancouver in April.
•Enquiry Blogger (Rebecca Ferguson paper) uses the blogger as a learning journal to document the phases of authentic inquiry.
•Could we supplement blogger structure within SL to document and provide analytics?
•Could we get visualizations/create visualizations for learners to document their inquiry pathway?
ELLI update
July 2012- ELLI in SL
ELLI recently migrated to a new platform: Fusion Universal.
Fusion Universal Tutorial (game) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUxZYCnnbQs
Fushion Universal Learning Styles http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fakvitg1Zqs&feature=related
we all learn in different ways
honey and describe four kinds of learners:
•activist
•theorist
•reflector
•pragmatist
We are all usually capable of being parts of all types and capable of using ANY technique.
How does understanding your learning style help you learn?
1. helps you create experiences that suit the way YOU LEARN.
(if an activist, ask for hands on experiences)
2. awareness of your strengths and weaknesses
(if an activist, try thinking about the problem before jumping in; if a reflector or pragmatist, think about putting your ideas into action first)
3. understanding your teams learning styles will help you create experiences that maximize their experiences and motivation--experiences that suit the way they learn
(if your team has lots of activists, you might let them learn by doing instead of giving them long presentations to sit through)
Impact of Fusion's Knowledge Solution http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUbIFClaC_8&feature=related
+44(0)20 3178 7933
Jack.beaman@fusion-universal.com
Fusion Universal's Virtual School http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HYYWK453g0&feature=related
Innovators
•Sugata Mitra in Africa-leaves the problem, gives tools, comes back
•Khan Academy in PA, CA put up math videos on a website
•Fusion Universal lessons learned from content developed and delivered
1.contextualization, use of local characters and stories, important for motivation and understanding
2.being able to localize and translate content is key for mas rollout
3.need for high quality education at little or no cost per student is key
4. innovation: smartboards keyed to learner types, high quality ICT learning
5. innovation in the production of the videos for the coursework-
KEY INNOVATION:
VISUALIZATION SERVICE

1. take a raw movie explanation
2. pass it to professional visual designers in India
3. keep the audio track, but enhance the visualization, creating greater engagement factor and increase motivation.
LOW COST, RAPID WAY TO ENHANCE THE QUALITY OF CONTENT
Jambock platform
world's first true social learning platform that can accomodate any number of learners
designed to look like you tube
search, and to learn and socialize with teachers and other students
Proposal
create high quality curriculum, delivered in Africa
provide tools and to create own locate curr, facilitated by FU
hosted on internet and
coded to PC and most mobile platforms
mobile bandwidth may be an issue
after first country creates massive curriculum--easy to map other countries curriculum

Who for?
children who have dropped out of school
the child who doesn't have an ed but wants one

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

My Research: Ideas for Communities of Practice

Possible communities of practice within SL:

Teachers of math and science
Math-refer to ViHart Fibonacci Example

Pre-service teachers of math and science and longitudinal follow-up
Bikram yoga-teacher training and longitudal follow-up
18+ learners of math and science OR math or science
Teacher education instructors

Communities of Practice:
http://www.ewenger.com/theory/
eprints.rclis.org/bitstream/10760/13399/1/CoP_JASIS_preprint.pdf
www.bronwyn.ws/publications/papers/sustaining.pdf

Big Data-- Data Scientist -- New repertoire of skills needed

The first company to really use big data was Google. Now it's spread to most companies, many educational institutions, and individuals. IT has used structural data in databases, but big data is different.

Big Data was fundamentally different in four ways:
It’s a rich data model, it contains both structured and unstructured data, so it could be things like video, or Twitter feeds, as well as structured data.
The size is big—no longer terabytes but petabytes of data. And it is multisource data.
It is real time. “If my Google search took me to Monday morning to do, I wouldn’t do very many of them.”
It is collaborative. Many people will be working on it at the same time.
(Pat Gelsinger, President and COO of EMC-http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2012/02/10/big-data-demands-new-skills/?mod=google_news_blog)

What are the skill sets for these new data scientists? How do we establish these
Data scientists- how to gather and use big data? We need to use the big data in ways that can show actual value.

This new field of data scientist will be a combination of math, computer science, and other interdisciplinary fields.

“We see this confluence of skills across math, across computer science, and across the interdisciplinary applications of these new tools. It is learning new tools combining them with existing statistics and math.” (Gelsinger)

Monday, February 6, 2012

Researcher Development Framework A3.1-3.5

An excellent researcher at doctoral or PhD level:
Inquiring Mind
Demonstrates a willingness and ability to learn and acquire knowledge.
Develops a style of questioning and questioning technique.
Intellectual insight
Absorbs and appropriates ideas; is intellectually sharp.
Creates ideas and opportunities by investigating/seeking information.
Innovation
Understands the role of innovation and creativity in research.
May engage in inter-disciplinary research.
Argument Construction
Constructively defends research outcomes.
Provides evidence in support of ideas.
Structures oral and written arguments concisely and intelligibly.
Intellectual risk
Tests the boundaries, is willing to expose ideas to critical audience and to critically appraise other research.
Looking ahead:
Challenges the status quo in thinking within own discipline/research area.

Friday, February 3, 2012

Researcher Development Framework A2,1-5 Critical Thinking

Researcher Development Framework Continued: (A2.1-2.5)
An excellent researcher at doctoral or PhD level:
SYNTHESIZING:Sees connections between sections of own information/data and previous studies. Benefits from guidance with synthesising information/data and ideas.
CRITICAL THINKING: Is able to understand argument (oral and textual) and articulate own assumptions; developing independent and critical thinking.
Has the ability to recognise and validate problems.
Recognises multiple ways of knowing.
EVALUATING: Summarises, documents, reports and reflects on progress.
Evaluates the impact and outcomes of own research activities.
Assesses the quality, integrity and authenticity of primary and secondary research information/data.
Receives and gives constructive criticism.
PROBLEM SOLVING: Isolates basic themes of own research; formulates basic research questions and hypotheses.

Critical thinking is a process that is constantly evolving and always evaluated for its effectiveness in each given situation. Critical thinking includes knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation.
Critical thinking Foundation
Critical Thinking tutorial

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Researcher Development Framework A1-7

I'm working through the Researcher Development Framework posted by Rebecca Ferguson in SocialLearn.
So far, I'm completing and in progress A1-7 skills:
An excellent researcher at doctoral or PhD level:

• Designs and executes systems for the acquisition and collation of information using information technology (e.g. word processing, spreadsheets, simulation systems, databases) appropriately.
use word, excel, sim systems, and databases
• Develops awareness of information/data security and longevity issues.
use systems to back up information and to secure confidential information. use time capsule and the cloud to save data (redundancy)
• Knows where to obtain expert advice i.e. information/data managers, archivists and librarians.

• Has, at least, core knowledge and basic understanding of key concepts, issues and history of thought.
core knowledge, in progress extending knowledge--papers, books, recommendations
• Knows of recent advances within own research area and in related areas.
in progress
• Is working towards making an original contribution to knowledge.
difficult concept--working towards original and significant contribution
• Is developing awareness of international and non-academic dimensions of knowledge creation.
US and UK. Through OU, learning more about EU work and further international.
• Understands relevant research methodologies and techniques and their appropriate application within own research area.
looking at using mixed methods and applying qualitative and quantitative methods to studies
• Justifies the principles and experimental techniques used in own research.

• Skillfully uses a range of research methods linked to study area; documents own activity.
this is the beginning of documentation, will continue
• Shows growing competence in own subject area and is developing awareness of alternative methods/techniques.
• Acquires and develops search and discovery skills and techniques.yes
• Identifies and accesses appropriate bibliographical resources, archives and other sources of relevant information including web based resources, primary sources and repositories.yes

• Makes best use of a range of current tools and techniques.
learning new current tools, some through LAK12 MOOC. Working on using VUE now, diigo,
• Assesses the reliability, reputation and relevance of sources.
yes
• Seeks feedback from relevant groups to access other insights.yes. working on extending my groups, belonging to MOOC course, extending own personal and professional self in conferences
• Designs and executes systems for the acquisition and collation of information using information technology (e.g. word processing, spreadsheets, simulation systems, databases) appropriately. yes
• Develops awareness of information/data security and longevity issues.yes
• Knows where to obtain expert advice i.e. information/data managers, archivists and librarians.extending reach--not yet in libraries offered through OU affiliation
• Has excellent knowledge of language(s) (including technical) appropriate for research.good now, working on extending language concepts including technical
• Prepares grammatically and syntactically correct text for written or oral presentation.yes
• Writes clearly and in a style appropriate to purpose and context for specialist and non-specialist audiences.yes, working on becoming excellent in writing
• Is mathematically competent to undertake research in own discipline/research area; understands and applies any statistics that may be used in the discipline/research area; analyses data and uses appropriate computer packages.yes, has had statistics, has used SPSS, has SPSS, and is learning new software for visualization
Is IT literate and digitally competent, uses virtual networks for research.yes