Expert ... novice learners, do they know who they are?

When I started teaching adults many years ago, I did so with the assumption that (a) they wanted to learn and (b) they took a position that they were novices. Over the course of time, I have learned that not everyone wants to learn, at least not just for the sake of learning. And I have learned that learners are less willing/able and perhaps justified in taking the role of novice in a formal learning experience. For me, the shift of roles accompanied the increasing access to information that provides any or all of us to think we know something about a lot of things. Early in my career I looked at novice vs. expert learning and the processes and expectations (at that time) are very different. It occurs to me that perhaps it is useful to provide ways to help students determine their level of expertise (I don't think grades, degrees, certifications, or even portfolios truly accomplish this) and be more conscious of how we approach learning and teaching interactions given the perceptions if not truthful realities of learner expertise.

I have run across the Dreyfus Model that provides a framework for a continuum of how people think as they move along their degree of knowledge. In my recent work examining storytelling as instructional method, I found this interesting post about the ancient game of Go in which Sorin Gherman, a programmer, applies the Dreyfus Model to Go. This post interest me because Sorin uses stories to illustrate levels of expertise. In an informal conversation with a pilot a few weeks ago, I found that Southwest Airlines uses storytelling in the interview process to determine the level of expertise of potential pilots.

Oftentimes, faculty will have students reflect on what they have learned in a course, but it occurs to me that students don't get the benefit of the larger personal journey they are taking, or where they lie on a continuum of expertise. I don't believe that such continuum is empirical, measurable or finite, but after thinking about the Dreyfus model, I do think helping students see where they are in their ability to know is valuable.

interesting analysis of

I thought that you all might find some interest in this article ...

Supporting Community Inquiry with Digital Resources
http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v05/i03/Bishop/#iLabs-activities

Two thoughts (a penny a thought)

Two issues come quickly to mind in this discussion: intellectual property/copyright and activity structure.

The IP/copyright issue, rather obviously I think, springs from the discussion of sampling y'all have raised. There's a fine line between repurposing and plagiarism. Given the current tendency of the courts to support copyright holders with seemingly limited regard to fair use principles, the whole issue of repurposing becomes somewhat fraught with danger. And therein lies, in my experience, a large component of the reluctance many faculty feel about moving into online education. They are unclear about what their own IP rights are (especially in the light of institutional IP policies that still fail to consider the online world) and they are unclear about what resources can be used safely in creating digital learning objects and online courses.

At the same time, use of online resources and activities is growing exponentially; such are the power and allure of the tools and the administrative efficiencies gained by going digital...

The second issue is that online tools, such as this blog system, are simply that: tools. Like a hammer, they can be used to build trivial little things or majestic palaces; and they can be used destructively.

It seems to me that blogs have a great potential to support a variety of educational processes and activities. Some of the most obvious uses are keeping a journal, presenting reflection/reaction "papers," and debate/discussion to name a few. Likewise, providing space for public ranting, like a soapbox in a public squares, can also have a valuable purpose.

Have you ever seen a classroom debate degenerate into a simple squabble? More often than not, the success of an academic activity depends on the structure and rules of the activity. With appropriate focus, direction, purpose, and constraints, I think blogs could be a powerful tool to add to instructors' toolboxes. So now to develop the "best practices" manual for blogging!

Mixin' for the Tone Deaf

I love the mixin' approach to stirring up content, Brian (where ya been besides Utah?) and I am all game for it.

Boom- Ha Phump- Splff- splfff- buff a hu ....

That's my problem, I stink at rap and mixin' so what's a newbie to do? I cannot carry a tune at gunpoint, much rather that regurgitate it like machine gun fire.

That's *our* problem because most educators, especially those who are Digital Immigrants, are scared to death of this stuff, of finding content, breaking into into morsels, and recombining it into something new. You have seen that audience look at deer in the headlights as you describe wikis to a group for the first time. The Fear Factor is huge, and it is more than a fear of learning new technologies, it is a fear of a different way of embracing unstructured information and chaos and being okay with it. It is a fear of loss of control. You cannot do much until you address fear.

But I find musical hope in the slick Apple program GarageBand which makes the mixing of musical bits both as simple and constructive as one could want. You click and drag from a library of sounds, layer tings or stretch them out, and play with media content. Where is the app that can do that with all kinds of content? It sure ain't a course management system.

And then take it to the next level of networked content such as MacJams where users of GarageBand post, share, and collaboratively do all kinds of mixin'

Boom- Ha Phump- Splff- splfff- buff a hu ....

Context and the culture of remix...

One reason I've been quiet in this space was my sojourn last week to Logan, Utah for the Instructional Technology Institute -- hosted by David Wiley and his merry band of co-conspirators. A lot of the discussions centred on themes that paralleled some of the points being made in the course of this blogathon... For instance, Patricia got the ball rolling on the classic dilemmas of granularity and context -- ie, should we (and can we) make content "context-free", and what is the appropriate level of "granularity" for an individual learning resource... much interesting dialogue has ensued.

There was a theme that ran through a number of the sessions at last week's conference that I believe are pertinent to the topic. The opening keynote, Lawrence Lessig stressed in the course of his talk that the culture of the internet is in many ways the "culture of remix" -- which didn't begin with the web but which has since been inextricably intertwined with it.

It was a theme that got picked up by a number of speakers, including David Wiley, Stephen Downes, and, well, me too (ahem). If we look at how resource sharing happens outside the world of education -- be it with weblog communities, wiki communities, digital photography, digital audio, whatever... it doesn't happen by people sharing discrete "blocks" of content in defined boxes, and then reassembling them by automated systems... Remixers "sample" the bits they want, and reassemble the context as they see fit.

What does this mean on a practical level? My opinion is that we need to remember that digital media works best when we remember that it is a liquid medium, not a concrete one. If we are able to "sample" the bits of content we want, and ignore the rest, then questions of establishing "granularity" and "context" might solve themselves -- they would simply become the choices made by whoever is "remixing" the content for their own immediate purpose. (Isn't it the teacher's job to establish context? Isn't that what educators do?)

For instance, if I can copy the text from a document I want, and paste it where I need it, it doesn't matter to me how long the original document is, or whatever else it's about.

Of course, it's not so easy to do that if the document is saved as a PDF, or if the author does not permit modifications of her work. So the culture of remix has two huge barriers before it can work in higher education -- a) educators need to loosen up and recognize that all online work is in perpetual process; and b) open content is fine, but for it to fly we need open formats too (html, XML - open, PDF - closed; MP3 open - RealPlayer and Windows Media - closed). Maybe the culture of remix will never fly for those reasons, but if it doesn't then education will always be something of an online ghetto, and we will always be consumers and not contributors to our online experience.

Sorry to come so late to the party -- there's some great discussion here.

Active LOs

I'm not entirely sure that I fully appreciate what a learning object really is, but I must say that Alan's posting really resonated with a proposal that I'm trying to pull together for the EDUCAUSE site. It seems to me that by attaching trackback functionality to any document, like O'Reilly and ITConversations.com are doing, it allows others to supplement the original data with more tacit observations and commentary that might not be captured or aggregated in any other mechanism. It also provides a mechanism for making the original information less of a static artifact and more of a living document. In that context, perhaps individual blog postings can be an excellent mechanism for providing tacit context to explicit knowledge found in other electronic documents? I'm not sure if that all makes sense or not, or if this is a very juvenile posting from someone outside of the profession, but it is all very germane to some of the work that I'm doing today.

If you share any interest in topics like this, you might find this related paper on personalized, socially aware and active knowledge management systems interesting as well. This blog posting on an emerging e-portfolio project might be of some interest too.

Focus Questions are critical

Blog use has been surging. My own “discovery” of the practical uses for me of blogging my ideas as learning objects made me curious about how the tool might be re-purposed as an academic research tool, as a tool to capture the insights of a group of diverse thinkers.

NLII established as part of the mandate of Virtual Communities of Practice that we research the potential of three tools (weblogs, wikis, and RSS feeds) to facilitate knowledge creation, capture, and sharing. Members of the 2004 rendition of the Learning Objects Virtual Community of Practice (LOVCOP) had chosen four aspects on which to focus their attention:

• Knowledge management
• Faculty development
• Digital asset management
• Vendor relationships

The Community Group focused on “Learning Objects and Knowledge Management” is exploring the three tools previously mentioned. Hence, the guiding questions at the top.

Susan Metros of Ohio State University, and myself, from the University of Tennessee, present frequently at conferences on the landscape of learning objects and how it feeds into the critical issues of knowledge management for higher education. My premise, once I discovered the adventure of blogging, was that knowledge management contained an implicit assumption of a skill set, a conceptual framework, that ran from a knowledge worker’s desk (thumb drive, digital camera smart card, and device such as an iPod) to the institution, to the creation of an information architecture that would capture and make accessible the digital wealth of a university.

This collaborative blog as a groupware tool could have been focused or targeted on any topic relating to learning objects and knowledge management, a vast, rich field to be sure.

The dialogue that has been occurring within this collaborative blog has broadened my own perceptions of how this tool might function effectively in an academic environment. Thanks to all who have contributed thus far. More ideas are welcome!!