Living, Learning, and Researching in a Networked Era

Athabasca Grad Students Research ConferenceEdmonton, Sept. 2012

Terry Anderson (with lots of help from Jon Dron)

• Learning– Pedagogies– Connectivism– MOOCs

• Living– PLEs– Social Networks– Athabasca Landing

• Researching– Open Access Press, Journals and Citations– Julie’s Blog

Learning in a Networked Era

• Three Generations of Education Pedagogy (Anderson & Dron, 2011)

• Cognitive –Behaviousim• Constructivism• Connectivism

Behaviourist/Cognitive Knowledge Is:

• Logically coherent, existing independent of perspective

• Largely context free• Capable of being transmitted• Assumes closed systems with discoverable

relationships between inputs and outputs• Readily defined through learning objectives

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Constructivist Group model

• Membership and exclusion, closed • Hierarchies of control• Focus on collaboration and shared purpose• teachers: guides

group

Connectivist Learning PrinciplesGeorge Siemens, 2004

• Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources.

• Learning may reside in non-human appliances. • Capacity to know 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.

Connectivist Learning is Emergent

• the very uncertainty and lack of predictability of learning outcomes will be the key factor that adds value to a learning community

• emergent systems will provide the necessary triggers to enhance knowledge and understanding

• emergent learning will be one of the critical triggers to unleash individual creativity (Kays & Sims, 2006, p. 411)

MOOCs by Dave Cormier

Two Genre’s of MoocscMOOC

• Origional Seimen’s – Downes -Cormier– Connectivist pedagogy “knowledge is actuated through

the process of a learner connecting to and feeding information into a learning community” Kop & Hill 2008

– Aggregates distributed posts, no centre– Large enrollment, many ‘lurkers’ no formal assessment– Heavy involvement and communication with

‘teacher/facilitator”– Ex. Change12, CCK08, EduMoo

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

Coursera Hits 1 Million Students, With Udacity Close Behind (Aug. 2012)

Follow Madelaine Befus’ Landing Blog at https://landing.athabascau.ca/blog/owner/madelainebe

MITx - Stanford xMOOC• Structured learning activities, instructivist cognitive behaviourist

pedagogy• Heavy content interaction, little to no teacher-student interaction• Centralized admin via LMS/analytics engines• 2011 Stanford AI course 160,000 registered, 25,000 completed all

exercises, -85% drop out?• some accreditation by institutions – not Stanford• Udacity, Coursera, venture capital, spin offs• MITx – adds assessment and certificate of completion from

MIT/UCLA/Harvard• Machine Marking and Questions of authenticity?• Colorado State first to offer credit after challenge exam- Athabasca to

follow??

Connectivist Mooc

Gordon Lockhart http://gbl55.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/mooc3.png

Your opportunity to enroll in an Athabasca MOOC

• CDE courses MDDE 622: Openness in Education– pay for credit, enroll for free– Starts next week– Teachers George Siemens and Rory McGreal

• AU removing MOOC barrier by offering credit for undergrad courses through PLAR and Challenge exams

• Don’t miss Inge de Ward’s session on MOOCs in this conference

Join an ATHABASCA MOOC

• MOOC on Openness in Education: http://open.mooc.ca/about.htm

The Modes of Interaction by Anderson and Garrison (1998)

(Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000)

Distance Teaching & Learning Conference 2011, Madison, Wisconsin 16

The COI model

The Interaction Equivalency Theorem by Anderson (2003)

• Thesis 1. Deep and meaningful formal learning is supported as long as one of the three forms of interaction (student–teacher; student–student; student–content) is at a high level. The other two may be offered at minimal levels, or even eliminated, without degrading the educational experience.

• Thesis 2. High levels of more than one of these three modes will likely provide a more satisfying educational experience, although these experiences may not be as cost- or time effective as less interactive learning sequences.

　　　　　　Distance Teaching & Learning Conference 2011, Madison, Wisconsin

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Open Scholars Use and Contribute Open Educational Resources

Because it saves time!!!

You are a Learner and a Teacher

Promising Signs of Change

• Ubiquity and multi-functionality of web 2.0

• Growth of openness and online resources, OERs

• Increasingly effective pedagogical models and learning activities

• Real educational alternatives – including private sector

• Death and retirement

Learning Summary

• Lifelong Learning options and quality are expanding very quickly.

• Is your day expanding as well???

Living in Networked Era

• Creating Your Personal Learning Environment

http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.ca/2010/07/physiology-of-ple.html

• The Trick is to blend appropriate amounts of social, tech, learning, earning and living.

Your Online Networks

Networks add diversity to learning

“People who live in the intersection of social worlds are at higher risk of having good ideas” Burt, 2005, p. 90

Networks Celebrate and Stimulate Cognitive Diversity

Arises when from:• different types of information and knowledge perspectives• different ways of viewing the world or a specific problem

interpretations• different ways of categorizing a problem or partitioning

perspectives • heuristics yielding different ways of generating solutions to

problems• predictive models - different ways of inferring causes and

effects (Fisher, L. (2009)

•Some people are sharing too much.

•Some don't use privacy controls. Almost 13 million users said they had never set, or didn’t know about, Facebook’s privacy tools. And 28 percent shared all, or almost all, of their wall posts with an audience wider than just their friends.

•Facebook collects more data than you may imagine.

•Your data is shared more widely than you may wish.

•Legal protections are spotty

•Problems are on the rise.

Consumer Reports surveyed 2,002 online households, including 1,340 that are active on Facebook, for their annual State of the Net report.

Athabasca’s Social Network

What is the Landing?

• Walled Garden with Windows• A Private space for AU• A user controlled creative space• Boutique social system• Networking, blogging, photos,

microblogging, polls, calendars, groups and more

• Differentiating and merging work, from school, from fun

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Multiple rationales

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setnet

group

collective

CoursesCommitteesResearch groupsStudy groupsCentres and departments

Sustaining tiesMaking tiesAd hoc networksKnowledge diffusionSocial capitalSocial presence

CooperationSharingSerendipityInterest -orientationSense-makingCollective intelligenceIntentional discovery

Where to look first

setnetgroup

Popular activities

Blog posts (4135)

Files (4023)

Wire posts (2335)

bookmarks

Discussion topics

wikiphoto

Wiki sub-page

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A soft space

Hard spaces

Filling gaps with people

Stretching tools

Filling gaps the Landing way

The Landing Platform

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1,424 plugins available, our installation using about 90Fairly strong development team, plotted roadmap

Usage Data 2011-present

4,176 users and 313 groups as of Sept. 2012

Landing Groups

• 313 Groups• Average of 10.79 members each

UNDEGRAD COURSES (UC) 16%

GRAD COURSES (GC) 29%

ADMIN (AD) 24%

BEYOND COURSE (BC) 12%

SOCIAL (SO) 4%

STUDENT GOVERNMENT (SG) 5%

RESEARCH (R) 7%LANDING ADMIN (LA) 3%

Type of Landing Groups

UNDEGRAD COURSES (UC)GRAD COURSES (GC)ADMIN (AD)BEYOND COURSE (BC)SOCIAL (SO)STUDENT GOVERNMENT (SG)RESEARCH (R)LANDING ADMIN (LA)

Weekly Blog Posts

What Type of Networked Academic Persona Have you Created?

Barbour, K., & Marshall, D. (2012). The academic online: Constructing persona through the World Wide Web. First Monday, 17(9). http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3969/3292.

Diagram by Peter Sloep

SummaryYou are Living on the Net

• Need to customize your Net experience for your needs and personality

• Networks add diversity to our lifes• The landing offers a safe way to expand your

networking within an Athabasca context

3. Researching in Networked World

Open Scholar

• “the Open Scholar is someone who makes their intellectual projects and processes digitally visible and who invites and encourages ongoing criticism of their work and secondary uses of any or all parts of it--at any stage of its development”. – Gideon Burton Academic Evolution

Blog

Open Scholars Create:

• A new type of education work maximizing:– Social learning– Media richness– Participatory and connectivist pedagogies– Ubiquity and persistence– Open data collection and research process– Creating connections

Open Scholars Self Archive

Quality scholarship is peer and public reviewed, accessible, persistent syndicated, commented and transparent.

Open Scholars Apply their research

Open Scholars do Open Research

• Open Notebook: a laboratory notebook that is freely available and indexed on common search engines. …it is essential that all of the information available to the researchers to make their conclusions is equally available to the rest of the world.

• —Jean-Claude Bradley

Open Scholars License, Use (and re-use ) Open Data

http://www.concede.cc/index.php/products/open-data-set-on-ugc-in-higher-education/ EU Project

Open Scholars Filter and Share With Others

Using Twitter for research projects

Open Scholars Know How to License Their Work for Maximum Impact

A Tale of 3 Books

Open Access

100,000 + downloads &

Individual chapters

Over 1500 hardcopies sold

@ $40 Translated Chinese

Commercial publisher

934 copies sold at $52.00

Buy at Amazon!!

E-Learning for the 21st CenturyCommercial Pub.1200 sold @ $135.002,000 copies in Arabic Translation @ $8.

aupress.cawww.irrodl.org

Open Scholars Write and Read Open Access Books

Open Scholars Publish in Open Access Journals

• Open Access Journals have increased citation ratings:– Zawacki-Richter, O., Anderson, T., & Tuncay, N. (2010).

The growing impact of open access distance education journals – a bibliometric analysis. Journal of Distance Education, 24(3)

– Analysis of Google citations for 12 Distance Education Journals (using Harzing’s Publish or Perish tool)

– 6 open access, 6 commercially published– Early results show roughly equal citations/paper, but

recent gains in citations by open access journals

Are you Ready to Take the Pledge??

• I pledge that:– “ I will no longer submit my

work to closed publications, nor participate in review or editorial functions for closed publications.”

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Multiple Rationales and Means: Learning, Living, Researching

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setnet

group

collective

CoursesCommitteesResearch groupsStudy groupsCentres and departments

Sustaining tiesMaking tiesAd hoc networksKnowledge diffusionSocial capitalSocial presence

CooperationSharingSerendipityInterest -orientationSense-makingCollective intelligenceIntentional discovery

Dron and Anderson, 2012

Summing Up – Landing Poster StarJulie Shattuck

• EdD Candidate• Documenting her mixed method’s

research process• Started a group on Design-Based

research• Posting personal reflections and stories

Contributing to Athabasca’s by Learning, Living and Researching in a Networked era

Follow her on the Landing!!

Terry Anderson terrya@athabascau.ca

Blog: terrya.edublogs.org

Your comments and questions most welcomed!

CU on the Landing !!