Our 2010 TLT Faculty Fellows have been announced! Please join me in welcoming Sam Richards, Ann Clements, Laura Guertin, and Richard Devon. In the coming days project descriptions and introductions will appear. It is going to be a great summer!
I would like some help in understanding the nature of knowledge in a web based knowledge culture. I sometimes get into faculty discussions about web based plagiarism and how we have to do something about it. My sardonic response is that the work of the students has improved a lot and we should be grateful. Behind this wisecrack is an acute awareness that what I knew, or could know, when growing up was dependent on the few with whom I talked, what few books I had access to and actually read, and a few things on the radio and TV. Now I, and anyone on line, can answer almost any question in an instant. I think this subject is of great importance in education, and focusing on plagiarism just trivializes it.
There is more knowledge on the web that is more available, and instantly available, to more people than ever before in history. The web is the primary, and often only, resource for knowledge for many people. The need is to teach good usage of the web in both the assimilation and the production of knowledge. How do we do this? How is it the same, and how is it different, than earlier treatments of knowledge?
With a Google Reader assignment (that I have just created), I am concerned with the abilities to search, choose, organize, synthesize, and reference web-based knowledge. But what are the metrics for doing this? With the portfolio (and blog) assignment on Google Sites (that I have just created), students will be learning how to create an effective professional presence and how to contribute knowledge to the web. Again, how do I grade these things, are they different than before? [In both cases I use design as a venue, but the skill sets are universal.]
Any ideas?
Not being a blogger, remembering to do it is the first challenge, but I have been busy.
Unfortunately, the path to a pedagogy of convenience is complicated largely by my impulse to change everything.
Brad, Audrey, Matt, and Jeff are all giving me new ideas, ie, new to me. Audrey redid my course website on Google Sites using the Sites templates to good effect and cross linking in ways that will be very helpful to the students. My student assistant Kiersten is now helping me do the content. Matt has shown how using Forms (in Docs) for surveying users is a great way to get the product design data that the students always did manually in the first design project. Jeff (and Carla) have inspired me to add a blog to the portfolio that I had just begun to require. It looks like a great way for students to develop a dynamic professional identity in design. Brad has shown me how to use Google Reader to organize RSS feeds, which tackles knowledge acquisition and development in the age of the web. This contributes to so many things, including the portfolio, it will take a separate blog. I now have a small Reader assignment and many required uses.
On the side I am revisiting how I represent the design process and must now integrate that into the course and the assignments. I am also expanding my use of mindmaps (FreeMind, Mindmeister), but use Google Draw for flow charts now.
All of which means the summer is too short and the first day of classes looms. Sigh.
After several team meetings, the work around Richard Devon's Faculty Fellowship is starting to take shape. Richard is a professor of engineering design and has been using web-based tools (primarily Google Apps) in his classes to facilitate team work. Richard is looking at the advantages of using systems and materials that can by used anytime, anywhere, by anyone. These cloud-based services power what Richard refers to as a "pedagogy of convenience". Does this convenience lessen the impediments to learning when in a technological environment, as well as lessen the impediments inherent from life issues (e.g. illness, family obligations, etc)? Does the anytime, anywhere nature of Google Apps increase student learning and performance?
The anytime, anywhere aspect of these environments becomes more important when you consider that some engineering design students take part in teams consisting of people from around the globe. The open nature of cloud services make them ideal for this kind of collaboration. Consider that many systems hosted at educational institutions are based on infrastructure, such as account management systems, that make it difficult for individuals are different institutions to use the same system.
All this gets at the fact that systems like Google Apps are more akin to the kind of systems users will find after they graduate and start to work. Learning and working are not that different. It is in the best interest of organizations that employee people to create environments that facilitate communication in the endeavor to help employees learn. Systems for communication in educational context should not be so different from those you find in the professional context.
Over the course of the summer, the team - Richard Devon, Matt Meyer, Audrey Romano, and Myself - will be working on redesigning elements of Richard's courses. We will be considering issues such as content as student shared construction of knowledge, openness of content, and the aforementioned pedagogy of convenience. Two elements we have already started to look are enhancing the requirements for students portfolios and having students tap into their existing social networks as part of the idea generation phase of a design project.
That's a quick summary of the thinking happening amongst this faculty fellow team so far. I'm looking forward to see where the summer leads us.
Working with Rich Doyle, we categorized impacts of technology as ranging from hype to autogenic, self replicating technology (eg, grey goo). Before the grey goo scenario is reached Rich argues that many technologies have been ontological in changing what it means to be human. Some recent examples would be atomic weapons, IT, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology will probably get there soon. Older ones include irrigation technology in ancient Mesopotamia and the printing press, but many have been documented under the rubric of technological determinism. More prosaic but often hugely important are mass technologies and their social and environmental impact. [There are no natural lines between these levels of impact, it is just a metaphor.]
So there is no doubt we are what we do and, as what we do changes with the technologies we use, we change too. Sometimes we change a lot, and sometimes even more than that. But as Popper long ago observed, you can't fully predict human behavior because of the agency of free will. With that free will comes a responsibility to choose well and recreate humanity anew in each milieu. The future does need us, to counter Bill Joy's famous dictum.
On Thursday night all of out TLT Faculty Fellows (current and past) got together with project team leads at Otto's for an evening of food and conversations. It was the kind of evening that has left me wanting more time with these brilliant people in settings like this. How we work to make sure we create informal time together is a big goal of mine for this year ... building these connections between all of our Fellows is the next step in my mind. I had an amazing time getting to hear each of them talk about their own projects and start to build links with each other.
Check out the Flickr photo set to see more from the evening.
I don't blog so everything about this is experimental.
I believe in Occam's everything: in optimizing what we do and do not need to know and to do in order to be effective. I suppose I am all about efficiency, about acting optimally, or perhaps simply being lazy. So using Google Apps is about the pedagogy of convenience in a user centered design of a service. As the infrastructure of knowledge development and communication disappears the focus is just on knowledge. That I like. And GA provides a space shared with everyone, with no one, or with named someones just by pasting in their email address. It is both collaborative and under each person's control. Social relations are flat and communication is synaptic, Storage, and file and site construction,are collaborative and easy, if not sophisticated. All good. Add a great team under Brad and I am a happy camper.
I think trying to find creative and collaborative spaces beyond the mediums used opens a continuum of sorts with those for whom perhaps the medium is the message. If so, I am bound to change, because there is a relentless proliferation of technologies and platforms to choose from and only by exploring them continuously can we hope to cope. Learning curves dominate our lives and fewer and shorter learning curves is a design axiom for me for products and services alike. But in learning ew technologies we are bound to see new things we can do.
More radically, I keep alive the idea that we don't need IT at all, or, if we do, we need to keep it under control and live for higher ends. Karl Marx in describing alienation said that when we are at work we are not at home and vice versa. My life begins when the I go off line. My work begins when I go online. So I wonder about the old case made about the alienation implicit in the virtual world where you can't smell the roses or taste the wine. [The dinner at Ottos was a good example of living I thought.]
In fact, much use of IT seems to have opened up social relationships rather than shut them down. But in so far as we should have clear purposes about what we do, and certainly about what we encourage others to do, realizing some better better world through IT would seem to be the metric to remember.