The CCK08 round up was an interesting meeting. It seems like it was held at a difficult time for some and clashed with their teaching commitments, so a few familiar faces were not present.

There was quite a lot of talk about assessment. I think it will be worth listening to the recording again to capture this conversation. 

Most intriguing was George’s apparent frustrations with lurkers. He thought that in the next run of the course they would have to do more to encourage participation – in his view people need to participate more to make the course work. ‘Lurking is not appropriate.’ George expects everyone to be transparent in their learning and by default become a teacher in the course.

There seemed to me to be loads of participation – both in the blogs and in the discussion forums.  I personally would not have coped with any more. I’m not sure what percentage of people were participating in blogs and forums - probably not the 10% that Nancy White recommends should be active in an online course – but then this wasn’t a course in the true sense of the word – or was it? This question of whether the word course should be used to decribe the CCK08 experience was also discussed.

Perhaps Stephen and George need to be really clear about whether they are running a course or not ; they do appear to have different views on it. If they are just establishing and managing a learning community or network, then I think participants would view their responsibilities differently. In a community or network, peripheral participation is legitimate (Wenger) as George acknowledged. Lurking (I prefer to think of it as reading or observing) is legitimate. People get drawn into conversations as and when they need them. Stephen seems happier with this than George.

However, in both a community and on a course, (but maybe not a network), there are leaders who try to draw in participants and increase levels of interactivity. This requires skills and ‘teacher-type’ interventions, whereas I think Stephen and George’s model was more – let them (the participants) get themselves organised into groups, decide for themselves where they want to communicate and get on with it.

So it seems to me that you can’t really have it both ways. Either you let participants just get on with it, in which case you leave them to lurk if they want to, don’t worry about it and are happy with whoever, however small the number, actively participates. Or you go for skilled teacher intervention. George stated that he wanted a less didactic style for the CCK08 ‘course’ where he and Stephen would become less prominent as the course progressed – but this ‘hands off’ approach isn’t something that just happens. It has to be cultivated by skilled facilitators/online teachers. In my experience as an online tutor, I have to work very hard at the beginning of a course, helping participants to make appropriate relationships, establishing an ethos of security, trust and mutual respect, and that once this is set up I can withdraw. But it doesn’t just happen. It depends on my initial interventions (and I don’t necessarily equate interventions with ’talking’).

I agree that very few participants took the mic. in the synchronous Elluminate sessions, but I don’t think that is necessarily down to a lack of willingness to speak;  maybe more to the teaching style adopted for these sessions. It occurred to me yesterday that maybe it was a case of  ‘the teacher talks too much’. It was very noticeable in yesterday’s session that at the beginning of the session when there was only one tutor (George) participants took the mic. a lot more than they did at the end of the session when there were both George and Stephen, who then tend to talk to each other. 

There’s plenty of research around about teachers talking too much and there has been for many years. The original research showed that teachers are really surprised when they are observed and are given the evidence of exactly how much they do talk. Student teachers also always struggle to see that their job is not so much about their teaching, but about their learners’ learning and that if the focus is on learners’ learning, then the learners need more time to talk, even if this means tolerating silence while learners gather their thoughts.

So what I am saying is that if George and Stephen want more people to speak in Elluminate sessions, then perhaps the way in which the sessions are organised needs a rethink. Again, if they want more participation in the various communication groups, Ning, Facebook, Second Life, blogs, wikis, Moodle, then there might need to be more teacher intervention at the beginning of the course to establish this - but it seems to me that more teacher intervention is the antithesis to what the CCK08 experience (or whatever you want to call it) is all about.

So we are back to the tension between CCK08 being a course and the type of open learning experience it is trying to achieve. Not an easy one, for which there are no easy answers. Would a discussion about these very issues right at the beginning of the CCK08 course help?

I’ll be very interested to see how the course is run next time round at the end of this year.

Before starting on this week’s readings – I just want to draw breath a little. Getting the balance between action and reflection is not always easy and I have come to realise that writing a ‘public’ blog does not necessarily equate to reflection.

I have spent the weekend busy on other things (connecting with my life away from this course), but also trying to refocus on what it is I am really interested in. It is so easy with the wealth of information that is available on this course to go off at tangents, or to think that because the content has been provided on this course it must be significant and therefore I must spend some time on it, even if it isn’t of direct relevance to my area of interest. It’s difficult to know what to let go. So this course, and perhaps networking in general, and, I think,  active reflection, requires a degree of self-discipline that needs to be practised – or at least it does for me.

Despite my wanderings and straying off down a multitude of paths, I always come back to the questions -’How does all this apply to teaching and learning?’ and ‘Do I need to change my current practice?’

I have spent some time today searching for blogs to check whether others have the same questions or interest in teaching and learning, and of course most people do to a degree because everyone is a learner, but some people stand out for me as being particularly interested in the practicalities teaching and learning. I’m sure there are more, who I haven’t yet connected with.

Pierfranco has years of experience, which comes shining through his posts. The fact that learning is chaotic is no surprise to him, but he is still looking for verifiable results.

Carmen’s post is a wonderful description of the complex interactions that take place in a classroom

Tom  gives us a window into his classroom/s, which reinforces for us how unpredictable learning can be

John’s blog has many posts related to his deep interest in teaching and learning. He asks whether the curriculum should be negotiated between teachers and learners (see his post of Oct 16th).

Dave Pollard has made a great post this week where he writes: How much of what senior people know will never be learned by younger workers, simply because the networks of trust necessary for valuable conversations will not have been forged. This is not the first potential digital divide that has cropped up in this course.

Eugene Wallingford in the post Social Networks and the Changing Relationship Between Students and Faculty writes about ‘…. the newly transparent wall between me and my students…’ The question of transparency must be one being considered by many online teachers.

Adrian Hill draws our attention for the need for creativity in teaching and learning and asks how creativity should be understood in connectivism terms.

Lani has made a wonderfully reflective post this week about the potential of thinking about teaching and learning in terms of chaos and complexity

Matthias always has something thought provoking to say about teaching and learning: Certainly teaching influences learning in some way, but we don’t really know in which way (deterministic unpredictability), and certainly it is not that simple and controllable that teaching them neat concepts (input) will enable them (output) to make the world neat. 

and Maru (see her post of October 14th) brings up the question of feedback – how do we get the type of feedback that we need for our learning in an online network. This resonates with all my thinking about where assessment fits into a connectivism model and takes us back round to Pierfranco’s post where he says he is still looking for verifiable results despite wanting to encourage autonomous and open learning.

So there is still a lot to think about and I have more questions than answers, but I think the biggest question for me (which I have raised in previous posts) still lies around assessment. I think teachers can develop their understanding of teaching and learning and change their practice to meet current learners’ needs, but ultimately their best efforts may be constrained by assessment requirements.

I have just read Renata Phelps’ article – Developing Online From Simplicity toward Complexity: Going with the Flow of Non-Linear Learning.

It is interesting from a variety of perspectives and has certainly made me think.

1. I don’t find all aspects of the article very clear. The development of a non-linear course structure is described. The author presents a non-linear curriculum as one that is not presented in a linear format, that can be accessed in a non-linear way by the learners and that is open to choice about how much and what is studied.

2. The article describes the development of a teacher training course – ICT in primary and secondary education. I don’t think enough is made of the fact that the context is ICT education, as I do think that when talking about non-linear learning, going with the flow and that the ‘curriculum becomes a process of development rather than body of knowledge to be covered and learned’, the context is important. I suspect that some subjects can have a more flexible curriculum and course structure than others. I’m not so sure how selective a trainee medic can be about curriculum. 

3. The article doesn’t really evaluate the success of changing the curriculum from a linear to a more complexity-based model, other than to quote two positive remarks from students. In the 60s it was very fashionable to ‘go with the flow’ in school classrooms in the UK. I remember on being appointed to a new job and asking for the maths syllabus (so that I would have some idea of what we should cover in the term), being told by the headteacher that they didn’t teach in that way in his school – they followed the children’s interests, so if the children wanted to talk about birds’ nests all week,  they could.  The very strictly linear National Curriculum was introduced in the UK to combat the massive gaps that were becoming in apparent in children’s knowledge as a result of ‘going with the flow’ and ‘discussing birds’ nests for a week’ at the expense of time spent on the 3 Rs. My experience suggests that a curriculum is actually a good thing, so long as you don’t expect learners to learn in a linear way. You only have to observe young children learning mathematics to know that they don’t and won’t.

3. The article then equates learning objectives with domination, control, reductionism and an undermining of emergent learning. I have always thought about learning objectives as being about clarity of forward thinking and about knowing what to assess. I don’t see that learning objectives need to control or undermine emergent learning.  Assessment isn’t mentioned in the article and that seems to me to be a big omission.

4. There is a lot in the article about ‘authentic’ and ‘problem-based’ learning that encourages reflective and self-directed learners. This is not new. Donald Schon’s book on the reflective practitioner was published at least 10 years before this article was written and my teaching colleagues have been discussing how to encourage learners to become independent, motivated, self-directed and reflective since the 60s and I’m sure previous generations of teachers have done the same.

So although any article which promotes this way of working is welcome, I don’t think the ideas presented in terms of learning are particularly new. However, it is interesting to think about to what extent you want your curriculum to be ‘flexible, open, disruptive, uncertain and unpredictable ….accepting …tension, anxiety and problem creating as the norm’.

I would be interested in knowing whether a course structure such as the one described in the article would work for a curriculum such as medicine.

I’m interested that this has been chosen as an assessment tool for this course. If my understanding is correct then people that have signed up to be assessed have to produce a mental/concept map on a fairly regular basis.

I’m interested in this because I first began to explore concept maps at least 15 years ago. At the time I was a primary school teacher (ages 5-11 in the UK) and I was a science graduate with an interest in developing science knowledge and skills in the children I was teaching. Concept mapping seemed the ideal tool. I read up on Novak and Novak, and although their work was never originally intended for applying to young children, the primary science journals at that time were full of it. So I tried it out on the 5 and 6 year old children in my class

I won’t go into how I set it up, but what I found extremely interesting was that it wasn’t the children that I expected to be good at it who were. I had some extremely bright boys in my class that year, who just could not get their heads around it. And then there was Valerie – youngest in the class, wouldn’t say ‘boo to a goose’, was never noticeable in any other way, who was a complete whizz at concept mapping.

So is Valerie brighter than Ian and Stephen (the bright boys who couldn’t do it). No I don’t think so. Valerie just learned in a different way and internally organised her knowledge and information in a different way. The boys and Valerie just learned differently.

So this worries me a bit about using concept/mental mapping as an assessment tool, as some people simply don’t learn this way. It doesn’t make them any less able as a learner. They just learn differently.

I have just finished listening to the UStream session and the very last 5 or 10 minutes made me prick my ears up. The question was put to SD and GS – Give one simple practical suggestion for implementing connectivism in classrooms (with children). The suggestions were

1. Connect classrooms from people round the world.
2. Encourage children to work together to participate in a real way to produce something real of benefit to society.

Neither of these ideas is new.  My first experience of networking across schools was when I was at school myself in about 1962 or 63, when a group from my school in the North of England linked with a group from a school in London (which in those days might as well have been in a different country) to work on a project. Since then I have experienced this kind of activity both nationally and internationally, both as a learner and teacher many times. The same is true of working collaboratively on ‘real’ projects to produce  a recognisably useful outcome. Interesting though that collaboarative group work doesn’t seem to have been built into this course. Not yet anyhow.

No – I think Dave Cormier is much nearer what the change might need to be and that is in a negotiated curriculum. We need to start encouraging children to negotiate their own curriculum. Even this is not new. I remember that at least 15 years ago, when teaching 5 and 6 year old children, I once started the half term’s work by asking the class to plan their own work for the 8 week period. They were perfectly able to do this and planned a wonderful topic based on a nursery rhyme, in which they were able to say what maths, english, science, geography etc. etc. we would need to work on that term.

What is new for me – but not completely new is allowing students to negotiate their assessment. I have done this in the past as well – i.e. asked children to work together to determine assessment criteria and then peer assess, but there has always been a limit to how far I have been able to go with this because of quality assurance standards.

It seems to me that for connectivism to be useful to education, some of the issues surrounding assessment and a negotiated curriculum need to be resolved. In particular, I do believe it is very important to determine whether it can be applied to young children’s education.

Well, we’re moving on to Week 2 and I haven’t even got ‘What is connectivism?’ sorted yet. I was beginning to despair but have just come across this – posted in one of the forums and probably elsewhere – An interview with George Siemens on Connectivism

So here are my notes and some questions:

The learning process is being changed by what we’re able to do with technology. We can create and share more. We can do this with people at a distance who we don’t meet. The starting point for learning is the connection – which opens the door – so the act of learning depends on the ability to navigate these networks. Our knowledge is networked. Technology opens the door further. Not much to argue with here.

Connectivism didn’t start from nothing, but is a natural progression from existing theories. Nor here.

In connectivism the emphasis is on the connection, either at conceptual level, neural level or social level.

Would it be fair to say that there seems to be a lot of emphasis on the social level?

So how do we use this theory in education?

1. We need to encourage openness – a capacity for communicating with others, a willingness to share and externalise ourselves. I don’t see this as being very different to the communities of practice ideas. What happens to introverts in connectivism?

2. We need to think of the act of learning as the formation of a connection and so encourage our students to see that

• the world is highly complex and we don’t know the outcomes of learning
• we need to be adaptive to stay current and informed
• we need to give students links to networks and help them to navigate networks - this is probably harder than you would think
• we need to help students become critical thinkers – an old chestnut and not easy
• diversity of networks is needed and students need to learn what’s worth connecting to and what’s not – another tricky one
• we should bring in experts from all round the world; use resources that have been created by others
• the curriculum can’t be defined in advance; we don’t know what the students know and therefore we need a participatory pedagogy – negotiating the curriculum – the most interesting one for me and one that I have tried to implement in the past

The idea of a negotiated curriculum has around for a while, but the stumbling block in education is always assessment. Ultimately a lot of what is mentioned above is constrained by assessment.