I keep coming across great questions which really make me stop and think.

George Siemens  asked four really thought provoking questions in the Networked Learning Conference 2010 Hot Seat

1. What skills/attributes do learners need in order to learn effectively with networked technologies?
2. What role will educators need to fulfill in networked learning environments?
3. Can learning networks (partly) replace the teacher?
4. Given the prominence of networked technologies and the growth of networked learning, what types of research questions does our field need to pursue?

In fact I think George must be in question posing mode as in this week’s CCK09 course he has asked another great question

• This week is an opportunity for you to reflect on what openness means to you, what benefits you get from being open, and concerns with transparent learning (as well as how you expect to overcome those concerns).

And in this post George has alerted us to D’Arcy Norman’s question:

• How do you connect to people online?

These are all questions that I have been thinking about for some time but haven’t been able to articulate so clearly. They are all relevant to my life and work. So where to start in answering them?

Many online courses now require students to collaborate, but we know that just putting people together in the same space isn’t enough? What should a tutor do to prepare students for collaborative tasks?

Gilly Salmon’s 5-stage model provides very good guidelines on how to prepare for collaborative tasks online. These are usually designed into Stage 4 of the model after it has been established that everyone has successfully accessed the learning environment (Stage 1), participants are socialising easily and the learning community norms have become apparent (Stage 2) and  information is being freely exchanged and a culture of open sharing exists (Stage 3).

Up to Stage 3 activities centre around helping participants to feel stimulated by and comfortable in the learning environment. Relationships are beginning to be established. Students who are not comfortable with each other and the learning environment will not be able to collaborate effectively, so it is worth spending time on the early stages of accessibility, socialisation and information exchange.

Tutors also need to decide whether the collaborative groups will be self-selected or whether students will be put into groups by the tutor. My personal view on this is that it depends on whether the collaborative group tasks are to be assessed and assessed for what, and whether it is a short course or a longer course. If the task is to be assessed, then if I was a student I would want to be in control of the outcome of that assessment as much as possible and therefore choose my own group. If it is the ability to work in a group that is being assessed then maybe random mixing of students is appropriate.

Nowadays I often work on online non-assessed short post-graduate professional development courses. In these courses there isn’t a lot of time for students to get to know each other, but as a tutor, having done quite a bit of ‘back channelling’ and being able to see the student log in statistics, its fairly easy to create groups made up of a mix of very active participants and lurkers – so that these student characteristics are evenly distributed across groups. Even then a tutor only knows what s/he has been told by the students, so there’s no way of knowing whether a very active student who you are relying on to get a collaborative group going, is, for example,  going to be on holiday or away from the course at the time of the collaborative task, unless that student tells you. So your carefully planned groups can still go awry.

Once the students have started the collaborative task, a tutor can do a lot to help them be successful by making the norms of online group collaboration explicit – so ask the students to inform each other about when they will/will not be online, when they will/will not be able to work on the task, what roles they would each like to volunteer for and so on. Encourage them not to be ‘backward in coming forward’ and not to be shy of taking the lead.

Having worked on online collaborative tasks myself as a student in the past, I know what powerful experiences these can be. It’s surprising how well you get to know each other in these circumstances, even though you are only meeting online and have never met each other face-to-face  - but often these collaborative activities do lead to long-term working relationships.

But I also know from personal experience that group work can be a ‘nightmare’. On my face-to-face Masters degree we had to do a group presentation and I remember having to argue for an educational philosophy to which I was  opposed simply because I was the only person in the group to hold the opposite view (this was about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation and the use of rewards) – and everyone else wanted to do a presentation on something I didn’t believe in - so groups do require a lot of compromise.

This raises an interesting question for tutors about whether you would allow a student to opt out of a groupwork assignment and do an individual assignment instead, if they could make a sufficiently persuasive case, or should we insist that all students engage in collaborative group work.

I once heard Stephen Downes – at the 2005 ALT conference, describe collaboration as – “the joining up of things that do not naturally want to be joined up”, which challenges the whole notion of collaborative learning. But then David Jacques and Gilly Salmon’s have published a quite substantial text on Learning in Groups: A Handbook for face-to-face and online environments which really promotes groupwork.

So is it possible to collaborate online – Yes, of course and very definitely. Can tutors prepare students for this – Yes, of course – good teaching doesn’t change just because it’s online. Obviously there are things that you can do face-to-face (like a science field trip to study rock pools on a Northumberland beach) that would not be possible to capture in exactly the same way online, but an awful lot of what we do face-t0-face can now be done online.

The question is not whether we can get students to collaborate online – the question is whether we should. Are we asking them to do something that is worthwhile and that will enhance their learning.  Are we offereing them opportunities that they would otherwise not have? What is it that students can get from collaborative learning that they can’t get from individual learning? What specific challenges does online collaboration bring?

I don’t think there are necessarily any right or wrong answers here. If you want students to collaborate online, then there are tried and tested ways of making this a successful learning experience, but if you don’t then there will be equally effective alternatives that might suit the situation, context and culture better.

Here is the next set of questions (following on from previous posts which have raised questions about teaching with technology – for me teaching with technology means teaching online).

How has your daily routine changed?  What changes have you had to make to how you organise and manage your time?

I have to say that I hate routine and resist it as much as I can! So I prefer to think about how the patterns of my work have changed rather than the routines. This question is a little difficult to answer objectively as my work now is almost entirely online – I read online, I write online, I have meetings online, I attend conferences online, I research online and I socialise online. I don’t think I would be this much online if I wasn’t working as an independent consultant.

I chose to work independently because I knew that I could maintain my contacts and work through the affordances of technology. I could not do what I am doing now without technology.

So do I have any routines? Not many – but I do check my email consistently throughout the day – unless I am travelling or on holiday.  I haven’t yet succumbed to being accessible wherever I am and whatever I am doing and despite my love of working online, I hate phones, both landline and mobile. I’m in the dark ages as far as mobile phones go, although I do possess one – for emergencies!  I also check my social networking sites and RSS feeds most days – so I suppose these are almost daily routines.

I think technology has had more effect on how I organise and manage my time than on my daily routines. I am probably at my laptop for at least 8 hours each day and so I am very conscious of the sedentary nature of this existence. As such I make sure that I go to the gym at least twice a week and get out for walks as much as possible. Because my work is online – the eight hours don’t have to be consecutive – I can work at any time in the 24 hour cycle and if I work between 4.00 and 8.00 in the morning,  then I can take some time out during the day! So technology offers me a lot of flexibility and freedom in organising my time.

I have to be quite disciplined about managing my time to avoid procrastination – it’s very easy to go off task when online - and I have to be even more disciplined (as mentioned above) about taking regular breaks and making sure I am sitting correctly, maintaining a healthy diet, keeping my fluid intake up etc.

So I suppose the main change for me in relation to daily routines is that I no longer have a work/life balance issue, unlike when I worked for an institution. I am in control of how much I work, when I work and where I work and the boundaries between leisure and work are much more blurred as some of the things that I really enjoy - such as digital photography – require technology and can be used in my work.

It’s interesting attempting to answer these questions as it is becoming increasingly evident that the answers to them are very context dependent. My working context is quite specific. Although I work with post-graduate students, my days working from home 100% online and my uses of technology are, I know, very different from how I used to use technology when working face-to-face. But I do like the flexibility that technology offers me.

My third question in this series (from the list I posted) is: How has your role changed as a result of working with technology?

Recently – it hasn’t changed a lot, since I have been working and teaching online for a number of years now. Just writing this has made me wonder whether I am in a rut. Could I be in a rut when technology is changing so fast?

When I first started to work online (a number of years ago now), there was a marked and startling change in my role as a teacher. It crept up on me – but was none-the-less powerful in  its effect. At the time I was a face-to-face teacher trainer, teaching students how to teach science to school children. We had a heavily content-laden curriculum, where we crammed in as much content to our face-to-face science sessions as possible. The only relieving factor was that science is a very practical subject, so there was always a lot of hands-on practical activity in the sessions – but even so, we felt we had to cover the content of the curriculum – facts, facts and more facts. The introduction of a VLE into our institution released me from this heavily content driven teaching. I quickly realised that I could put as much information as I wanted up onto the website, and I could add as many links to as many websites as I wanted to, which meant that I was freed from covering this content in teaching sessions. What an amazing release. This changed my approach to teaching. I no longer worried about whether I had covered the curriculum, but focussed instead on eliciting and discussing students’ misconceptions. We were no longer learning facts, we were learning how to learn. So technology completely changed my approach to face-to-face teaching.

When I began to teach online, my approach changed even more. There was a lot of talk at the time of changing from a ‘Sage on the Stage’ to a ‘Guide on the Side’, to a point where people began to say ‘never let me hear that expression again’. Whilst the expression became a bit of a cliche, it did make people think about their role as teachers and whether or not we should be centre stage. It suited me very well not to be centre stage as I was never a ‘performer’ type of teacher (as I mentioned in a previous post). It was such a relief to me that I no longer had to be ‘the font of all knowledge’. In online classrooms it is so much more possible to access each individual classoom participant’s knowledge than it is in a face-to-face classroom. As an online  teacher I have far more contact with each of my students than I ever did face-to-face and it was a complete revelation to me, when I participated in my first online course as a student, how much I could learn from my fellow participants rather than from the teacher.

All this made me rethink my teaching role. There are still times when I might need to be ‘Sage on the Stage’, but not very often, because there are so many more qualified easily accessible (through technology) ‘Sages’ out there than I could ever be. I am much more likely to be a ‘Guide on the Side’ and even more likely to be a learner in a learning community with responsibility for ensuring that my fellow participants learn to their full potential.

Viewing myself more as a learner than a teacher means that I now have much greater respect for learner autonomy, that I like wherever possible to negotiate how the learning will take place with my students and offer lots of choice, that I try to listen more than speak and to ask questions rather than influence my students’ thinking with my opinions.

So I think I might describe my change in role as having become a ‘backseat driver’

How do you ensure that learners engage with the technology?

This is the second question from my list and my immediate response is similar to my initial thoughts about the last question. My primary concern, as a teacher, is to engage learners with learning. Technology is only a tool – a means to an end.

Most of my career has been spent in teaching face-to-face and I have taught all ages from four year olds to fifty-four year olds and older. I like to think that I have been a successful teacher, although teachers are never satisfied with their work. But I was never a ‘performer’ type of teacher – so I didn’t engage students through the sheer weight of my personality. So how do I engage my students with learning?

Sometimes we just can’t engage our students – we and they for some reason are together in the wrong place at the wrong time. But mostly I think teachers can engage students through their own passion and enthusiasm for and expertise in the subject, through always having the students’ learning interests at the forefront of everything we do, through recognising learners as individuals and building mutually respectful relationships (although this is tough with large numbers of students, it is not impossible) and through ensuring that the activities we plan for them are worthwhile. Humour, or a sense of fun is also very useful!

So how do we do this, if we can only meet our students online? First we need to establish an online presence and obvious though it may sound, we can only do this by being online. It still surprises me how many tutors will set up online courses and then disappear, leaving the students to get on with it. These tutors then complain that their students won’t engage online. I think it is possible for tutors to take a back seat once the course has become established but not at the beginning!

Overall we have  to be there as much as we would in a face-to-face situation. I always think that the beginning of an online course is critical – that’s the time when I work the hardest to engage the learners – I model and demonstrate (Stephen Downes’ definition of teaching - see Slide 36); I ensure that students get all the technical and ‘wayfinding’  (Darken and Sibert) support that they need (100% access throughout the course is paramount to a good learning experience), both through my actions and through the information I provide; I negotiate and so make explicit the norms of the online learning community; I socialise and build relationships and encourage students to socialise and build relationships with each other; I do a lot of ‘back channelling’, checking on students who haven’t come on line, asking if there is anything I can do to help; and I recognise that for some students they will be doing two things – getting to grips with the subject matter at the same time as becoming comfortable with an unfamiliar environment. I also have to ensure that all this happens within worthwhile and meaningful activities, so that students don’t think – this is a waste of time – and go away never to return!

Writing this has reminded me that when I used to teach school children, I would allow at least one week and sometimes two at the beginning of a new term for this process of familiarisation with my expectations – introducing the classroom norms, my expectations of how we would interact, negotiating classroom rules and learning about their expecations. When I moved on to teaching undergraduates, I would spend  the first session doing this – although sometimes their initial behaviour wasn’t a lot different to that of school children and I would need to spend more time establishing norms!

Engaging students with technology is similar to engaging them with the library, or introducing them to the students union activities, taking them on a campus tour and so on. We need to do the same things online, because without time spent on this famialiarisation process students will not feel safe enough or sufficiently comfortable to engage fully with the learning process.

So have I answered the question? To summarise - the key points for me are:

• focus on learning before technology
• use all the strategies that you would in a face-to-face situation

But a final additional point is  that I wouldn’t dream of using a technology that I wasn’t familiar with myself, unless I had negotiated with the students first that we needed to learn about it together – and for that to happen, the technology would need to be at least as important as the subject being taught, or enable the learning of the subject to be enhanced.

I think I have rambled a bit. Hopefully I will be more concise and succinct when I am actually asked this question!

I have recently been asked a series of questions about my work as an online education consultant.

• Tell me how and why you use technology in your teaching.
• How do you ensure that learners engage with the technology?
• How has your role changed as a result of working with technology?
• How has your daily routine changed?
• How do you encourage students to collaborate online?
• What difficulties do you have and how do you avoid them happening?

I have started to think about these questions and thought I would write a post in response to each one to help me clarify my thinking. I have now been teaching online for eight years – just a snip compared to some people’s experience, but long enough for some of my ways of working to become implicit. I think it’s helpful once in a while to make our implicit ways of working explicit both for ourselves and for others. As teachers, it can prevent us from making assumptions – a problem that was highlighted all those years ago by Stephen Brookfield.

Brookfield S D (1995) The Getting of Wisdom. What Critically Reflective Teaching is and Why It’s Important. http://www.nl.edu/academics/cas/ace/facultypapers/StephenBrookfield_Wisdom.cfm

For me its also helpful to write down my thinking – to recognise the importance of what John Mason calls Noticing – Marking – Recording, in his wonderful book Researching Your Own Practice – The Discipline of Noticing. He claims that by noticing, marking and recording, we develop our sensitivies so that we are more aware of incidents, issues and our resulting actions.

So I’ll start thinking about the first question – Tell me how and why you use technology in your teaching- and come back to it in my next post. It looks straightforward, doesn’t it, but I suspect that it might not be that straightforward.

This is taken from George’s blog. I have responded to his questions below.

I often hear educators talking about “education needs to change” (I do it too). This is the case for the K-12, higher education, and corporate training/education markets. 

As a small research project, I’d like to ask people to answer the following questions (on their blog, in YouTube, Seesmic, or wherever – please post a link in the comments section below):

1. Does education need to change?
2. Why or why not?
3. If it should change, what should it become? How should education (k-12, higher, or corporate) look like in the future?

————————————————————————————-

The questions imply that education is not changing. My experience is that it is always changing and has always been changing. In my career I have often been very ‘change weary’. Teachers are beleaguered by change on a regular basis.

So I’m assuming that George is thinking that radical change might be needed. I have been through some pretty radical changes in the past – one was the introduction of the National Curriculum in the UK in 1988. We went from discovery learning to a standards driven, linearly structured, constraining National Curriculum, pretty much over night. Many good teachers left the profession at that time.

So if education is always changing does it need to change now more than it did before? That again is arguable. My understanding of change management is that radical change is only really needed in a crisis. Is education in a crisis? I’m not sure that there is the evidence to say ‘Yes’ to this question. However, there’s no doubt that advancing Web 2.0 technologies are changing the way many people learn, so this will inevitably have an effect on education. Any change to education will need to be informed by this and there is evidence that this is already happening, e.g. this course.

For lasting change people need to feel ownership, but this is a slow process. People and education will change when there is a perceived need. 10 years ago a course like this would have been inconceivable, or maybe conceivable but not practically possible. This year it has happened and the voluntary uptake is evidence of a perceived need and the practical possibility.

There’s no real means of knowing what education should become. It’s a shifting target. Evidence from this course suggests that a good starting point would be to focus on teacher and learner autonomy and connectivity in small steps.  

We need change from both ends – from bottom up, with teachers and learners taking control of their learning and realising the potential of connectivity – but also from knowledgeable (dare I say educated!) leaders with vision.

There are no easy answers to George’s questions. Educational change is a wicked problem!

I really enjoyed Howard Rheingold’s Elluminate session today and there was lots there to comment on, but I would like to listen to the session again and reflect a little further before doing so.

But Howard’s session, and thinking about how teachers and learners are changing, for some reason reminded me of a past student of mine. I think it was when Howard was talking about how much and when he felt it necessary to intervene in his students’ learning. Here is the story of one time when I tried to intervene in a student’s learning.

Paul was a mature student in his late 30s, training to be a primary school teacher. At the time I was teaching science. Because of my subject I have only ever done a minimal amount of teaching in lecture theatres – it has normally been with students grouped round tables, working practically, problem-solving, discussing ideas and so on. Paul was very interactive in these sessions, contributing to discussion, thoughtful, creative and intelligent – also with a great sense of humour. As his tutor, I thoroughly enjoyed learning alongside him.

Then it came to the time when he had to hand in his assignment. I was very surprised and somewhat disappointed when Paul didn’t get the high mark that I had thought he would. His work just didn’t meet the marking criteria. All the students were always given the marking criteria, and of course we had discussed them in a session, so I didn’t see that he could have been unaware of them.

After the assignments had been handed back, I spoke to Paul about not meeting the marking criteria and suggested that if he wanted to get a higher mark on the next assignment, then he would need to address the marking criteria more explicitly. I have never forgotten his response.

He said he hadn’t come on the course to jump through hoops to get high marks for his assignments. He wanted to pursue his own lines of enquiry and follow his own interests. If he was going to spend a lot of time writing an assignment, he wanted to be sure that it met his own needs. He would do enough to pass, but he wanted to enjoy writing the assignment for himself. If he could do that and pass, then he was quite happy with the mark he got.

At the time I was surprised but admiring of this stance. In my experience - although I suppose it does depend on what job you go for – the final grade of your qualification or class of your degree is not always taken into account when you apply for a job. In Paul’s case, he was going to be a good teacher. That would get him a job despite the low marks on his science assignments, and in the meantime he had shown that he knew what he wanted to learn and how he wanted to go about it. It would be the latter that would go on his reference!

I am a week behind! I’m still thinking about whether the teacher’s role will change in the light of connectivism and increasing use of advanced web 2.0 technologies and if so, what might be the associated difficulties.

I have been a teacher for more than 40 years and have formally taught all ages from children of 4 years old (and informally even younger if I consider my own three children) up to 55 years of age. Length of teaching experience doesn’t of course make for a better teacher, but it does mean that, if you have kept your eyes and ears open as you have been going along, then there is a wealth of experience to draw upon.

The interesting thing is that much of what has been talked about in the last week and previous weeks of this course, has been discussed at various points in the past 40 years. Ideas come and go and then come back again. So I have been thinking hard about what the key changes are that a teacher now needs to take account of, to continue to grow as an effective teacher. And for ‘teacher’, I think of anyone and everyone as being a teacher in a given set of circumstances, just as anyone and everyone is a learner in a given set of circumstances.

Two things stand out for me as being significantly new. One is the word ‘connectivism’ and everything that that implies, and the other is advancing technologies. Neither of these were around for most of my 40 years teaching experience.

In trying to think about what might be significantly different for the role of the teacher, two words have come to the fore in my mind. The first is autonomy.

It seems to me that one of the things that web 2.0 technologies offers is greatly increased opportunities for learner autonomy, as we have seen in the take up of social networking, microblogging, blogging, wikis etc. A teacher doesn’t even need to offer these opportunities. Learners are simply taking them. But accepting learner autonomy as a given of education might mean that teacher needs to make a significant shift in the way in which they think about their role.

What do we mean by learner autonomy? I mean that a learner is free to make decisions about their own learning. What to learn? Where to learn? How to learn? Who to learn from? Free and open access to a vast range of resources on the internet, human and physical, means that learner autonomy can now become much more of a reality. Even with a fixed curriculum, I don’t see this as a huge problem. When I was teaching 4 year old children all those years ago, the children used to plan their own day. Each day they would come into the classroom and mark up on their individual planning sheets how they were going to spend their day – in the sand, in the water tray, painting, reading, writing, physical play and so on. My job as the teacher was to ensure that over time their curriculum was balanced and that they were making progress. I had a similar experience when I asked a class of 6 and 7 year old children to collaboratively plan a whole half term’s work, which they did quite easily. They decided how we would cover the curriculum for those weeks. For my own masters in education degree we chose which modules we wanted study and within those which lectures we wanted to attend and then what assignment we wanted to write. Learner autonomy can be encouraged at any age and it is not a new idea in teaching and learning. It just needs the teacher to be imaginative, creative and ‘let go’! It seems to me that a teaching approach that takes account of connectivism, is one that fosters learner autonomy, so that learners are encouraged to make their own choices and decisions, making use of the extensive resources that are now available to them on the web. If education is to result in people having increased choice and control over their lives, then it must model this from the bottom up.

The second word has to be ‘connect’. The one metaphor that surprisingly has not been put forward this week (unless I missed it) is teacher as connector. In other words, the teacher’s role is one of supporting learners in their ability to make appropriate connections to the subject content and to other learners (where learner means anyone who is learning, at all levels of experience and expertise). The teacher’s own personal philosphy of education will affect how these connections are supported, where, with whom and with what. So a teacher may focus on supporting the students in connecting with the subject, e.g. physics. This might involve lectures in traditional lecture halls, but with connectivism in mind, the lecturere might also point students to the possibilities of connecting with physics networks. Or a teacher may focus on supporting students in connecting with each other in a group, with the purpose of exchanging experiences or collaborative working on a project. Different types of connections will be made according to the purpose of the learning. If as George says, ‘all learning begins with a connection, then the teacher’s role here is to be aware of the range of possible connections that can be made in order to enable the students to make their own choices about which paths to follow.

Many other ideas were discussed last week, and there have been some wonderful blog posts, particularly those that pulled it all together for the rest of us, such as those of Keith, John, Lani, Dave Pollard, Lisa, Carmen, Maru, and I’m sure many more that I just haven’t got to yet. (As I said at the start of this post, I’m still in catch up mode.)

But ultimately, as I have mentioned before, I think the good teachers will not have to make significant changes. They were already doing a lot of the things that have been discussed over the past week or more. They just need to remember and believe that all learning begins with a connection. And then they just need to be aware of how their learners are using advancing technologies for learning and know how to exploit those technologies themselves to enhance their already good teaching.

It doesn’t seem all that difficult to me. Effective change has always been a slow process, especially where people are concerned and we have always had ‘good’ teachers willing to change and keep on learning (no matter what the press might have us believe), so I don’t see that a good teacher is going to have to make massive changes.

I’m wondering if I’ve completely missed the point here.

I’m definitely feeling the absence of a reading this week. It feels like a critical week and yet, at the moment, for me there is something missing. Was Stephen’s demonstration of power last week too much of a distraction. It certainly led to all sorts of discussion about whether the course is failing or not.

I have admired Adrian’s posts this week and was interested in his discussion about home-schooling and the seven deadly habits of pedagogical thinking. So I have filled my need for a reading through his blog. Thanks Adrian.

I think I decided long ago that home-schooling wouldn’t be an option I would choose for my own children, but this was in the days before home computers. I can see that now it could be much more of a ’safe’ option, given how much information, teaching and learning we have access to on the web and that online networks are so much easier to establish.  When I first thought about home schooling all those years ago, I was not only concerned about whether children would have access to the expertise they needed across a broad range of subjects, but even more so, I was concerned about how they would develop socially, away from the ’school’ community.  Whilst online networks can now maybe (if we know where to look) provide access to the expertise, do they/can they support social learning? Is learning how to communicate online the same as communication face-to-face, or are the skills different. Ultimately, I would want my children to be able to relate to other human beings face-to-face, not only through online networks. So I would still think very carefully about home schooling.

And the 7 deadly habits of pedagogical thinking. Adrian found these in Erica McWilliam’s journal article ‘Unlearning Pedagogy’ in the first issue of the Queensland University of Technology Journal of Learning Design.  These provide food for thought.

Deadly Habit No. 1: The more learning the better. As well as the argument put forward that in some cases ignorance might be better than knowledge, I would also interpret this in terms of the old breadth and depth argument. I can see that any course that is designed on connectivism principles will come up against this tension. In my own work, I still struggle in getting a good balance between depth and breadth.

Deadly Habit No. 2: Teachers should know more than students. Teachers won’t know more than students in all things, but they will know more than students in some things and vice versa. Teachers can be teachers and students and students can be teachers and students. Is this new?

Deadly Habit No. 3: Teachers lead, students follow. As above. Teachers can be leaders and followers and students can be followers and leaders.

Deadly Habit No. 4: Teachers assess, students are assessed. This implies that teachers are never assessed, which we have seen from this course is not true. It’s not the assessment itself that is at issue but the accreditation and validation of that assessment. In our current education system, accreditation and validation are in the hands of the ‘recognised’ teacher. How would students feel if it were not? For example, would the 20 students working for accreditation on this connectivism course accept me, a fellow student, as their assessor? Would that assessment have any value?

Deadly Habit No. 5: Curriculum must be set in advance. Connectivism really challenges this notion, but ultimately it is assessment that is the constraint. My experience is that even with the most rigid curricula, you can’t stop a creative teacher from being just that, creative! Or a creative learner from finding ways to subvert the curriculum, even if it is just learning how to ‘play the assessment game’. Of course, ideally this wouldn’t be necessary, but whilst we have our current assessment systems, there will probably always be at least a notional set curriculum, just as there has been in this connectivism course.

Deadly Habit No. 6: The more we know our students, the better. I have always felt that the relationship between student and teacher is very important. Of course, if we don’t have the strong distinction between student and teacher then maybe will not be so important, but in the meantime it seems important to a lot of people. We have had people on this course writing about this, this week. Mike has written a great post about it in relation to learning music. But we can only know our students as much as they will let us know them, just as they can only know us as much as we let them know us. Knowing our self seems just as important as knowing our student or teacher and may be a better starting point. Is knowing people online a whole different ball game? (This relates back to my comments about home schooling above and the need to learn about how to relate to people).

Deadly Habit No. 7: Our disciplines can save the world. The author’s argument here seems to be to think outside the discipline box, or discipline boxes. This seems to me to be about the ability to be a critical thinker (which is also discussed by Stephen and others in today’s The Daily). This is not new. As teachers we have always tried to encourage critical thinking, but maybe there is more at stake now, with so much information accessible on the web.

Thank you Adrian, for motivating me to blog. I was feeling decidedly blog weary before starting this post!