Connectivism and the Primal Scream

Keith Brennan writes a well-thought-out and evenly expressed criticism of connectivism as it is applied in connectivist MOOCs. It's worth taking the time to read it in full before proceeding with this post: here it is.

His argument is based on his experiences in cMOOCs and he says it's best described like this:

To learn in a cMOOC you need to connect. 
To connect in a cMOOC you need to learn. 

There's a lot built into that simple formulation, and I'll take the time to unpack some of it in this post. But to frame my own response, let's consider the analogous state of affairs in traditional education:

To learn in traditional education you need to be able to read.
To be able to read in traditional education you need to learn.

This is why the provision of education, especially adult education, in less well-served regions is such a challenge. It's what I faced personally as a classroom instructor teaching critical thinking in the north. How can you get your students to do anything if they can't understand the points the author expresses on a page?

Well, you can't, of course, and consequently I spent a significant proportion of my time in these communities teaching people how to read - not how to pronounce the letters and say sentences aloud, but how to read in the sense of understanding what the author was trying to say and how he or she was supporting, explaining or defining it. It wasn't easy and we spent a lot of time at it.

Now Brennan's argument is about a lot more than this, and we'll move carefully through his observations. But it's important to understand from the outset that connectivism - at least the way I do it - is to a certain degree a response to the same set of problems faced by students in traditional education.

Motivation

From this introduction Brennan moves to a discussion of motivation.This is the real beginning of the argument; everything to this point simply sets the stage.

He writes, 

"At the core of what I think Connectivism might be missing is this idea: Motivation is the engine of effort, and the sense of self is the ticking heart of motivation... One of the most important aspects of the learning experience is motivation. And one of the most important aspects of motivation is our sense of our own capability, and our sense that the environment we are learning in will allow us to achieve."

Interestingly - and, given all that I've written on the subject, a bit ironically - he cites Albert Bandura on the relation between motivation and self-efficacy.  

"Self-efficacy is one of Bandura’s ideas, and is, he says, the greatest predictor of student success in learning. It's something Connectivist theory (but not all Connectivist practitioners) largely ignores. Self-efficacy is our belief that a task is achievable by us, and that the environment in which we are working will allow us to achieve that task. It’s that ticking heart that measures out the motivation in us."

Let's take the following points as points of agreement: self-motivation is important to learning, and a sense of self-efficacy is important to learning. In short, in order to learn, you have to want to do it, and you have to think you can do it. Beyond that, though, I think we can identify some points of departure.

In particular, when Brennan writes about the relation between motivation and learning, he is thinking of a particular sense of 'learning'. Because, all things considered, motivation and self-efficacy are neither necessary nor sufficient in order to support learning. A child, placing his hand in the fire, learns not to do it again, so we have learning without either motivation or self-efficacy. A passenger in a crashing airplane reads a pilot's manual trying to avert disaster; he is certainly motivated, and may even think he can succeed, but here we have a case where both motivation and self-efficacy may not be sufficient.

Why is this important? The sort of learning Bandura's observations apply to is the sort of learning where there is a body of knowledge that is clearly defined and set before the person in a circumstance where, as often as not, the person might be doing something else, or want to be doing something else. When learning isn't something the person isn't naturally or by circumstance driven to do, we need to appeal to motivation.

And in such appeals, one factor - but hardly the sole factor, nor possibly even the most important factor - is self-efficacy. Certainly, thinking you can do something plays a major role in your desire to do it, but also, you have to feel that it is worth doing. Indeed, if something is really worth doing, you might try to do it even if you're not sure you can.

Brennan writes,

Self-efficacy is, in part, the story students tell themselves: I am going to succeed. I am going to fail. This is beyond, beneath, or within me. But as educators, we help shape that script. We set tasks that are challenging, and achievable, and we create environments that allow achievement to happen.

In connectivism (at least the way I do it) we recognize that the teacher plays a much smaller role in 'shaping the story' than is usually supposed, and much of what the teacher does to 'shape the story' actually defeats the ultimate purpose.

Very rarely does a teacher simply set out a task that the student can simply choose to do or not do. When teachers set tasks, there is almost invariably an element of coercion involved - you need to do such-and-such a task in order to pass, in order to earn a credential, in order to get a job. Teacher's create motivation by creating artificial sense of urgency - the contemporary form of teaching people to swim by tossing them into the water. Whether the student wants to learn is irrelevant.

Entire structures of courses, programs and schools of study have been built around this basic coercive premise, so much so that we can almost pretend that the student is engaged in the entire enterprise completely voluntarily. We even see the (facile) notion of 'learning contracts' that supposedly express this sense of voluntary participation, but which as contracts are negotiated between two very unequal parties. And the more the teacher sets the task - however well-intentioned - the less self-efficacy the student feels.

In connectivism, participation is presumed from the outset to be voluntary. Students bring their own motivation with them. We don't create conditions of coercion, so we don't have to employ a variety of motivational techniques to compensate for a student's loss of self-efficacy and motivation in an environment of compulsory learning.

I have often argued, you only need to motivate people when you're trying to get them to do something they don't want to do. Think how much damage is done to the cause of learning when education begins with that premise. My attitude is that the objective of an educational system is to help people do want they want to do, for themselves, rather than a mechanism that gets people to do what we want them to do, for us.

Cognitive Load

Brennan gives us the standard definition of cognitive load: 

Cognitive load is the amount of information we can take in, process and retain. It's probably fixed, and not that large (between 3 and 9 pieces of information, depending on who you listen to, and how difficult or new the task is). 

 The concept - at least the way Brennan uses it - is related to the associated concept of flow:

Both concepts have to do with the relation between the difficult of the task (and in some cases the relevance of the task) and the outcome. Hence we read in Brennan, "Too high a Cognitive load decreases a student’s sense of self-efficacy. Too low triggers a boredom threshold that tends to stimulate disengagement."

The two concepts are not exactly the same; there are some important differences that don't really come out in Brennan's presentation, and they play out in educational theory differently. But we can let that pass, and focus on the next step, which (Brennan characterizes as) the relationship between prior knowledge and cognitive load.

Novices in an area have high cognitive loads, and, typically low Prior Knowledge (the idea that what we already know has a powerful determining effect on what we can learn, and how quickly). This is key. It is variable amongst students generally. And it must be flexibly designed for, or we risk failure. Cognitive load and Prior Knowledge are why we tend to teach absolute novices using techniques and contexts that are different to the ones we deploy for absolute experts, and why we avoid exposing novices to too much chaos.

In the criticism of connectivism, this argument has two tangible consequences:

First is the suggestion that connectivist courses throw novices into the work at too high a level; there is no scaffolding to help novices learn to follow the information being presented at such complexity and high rates of speed.

Game designers and user experience interface artists know this principles well. One of the major reasons for Google's success is that novices can enter into the system in a very gentle way: they can begin with search, and bit by bit, be drawn into Google's much more extensive ecosystem. Civilization (the game) works in the same way - at the 'novice' level you have advisors to help you, and you can succeed without mastering trade routes and religions, but at the higher levels (like 'deity') you have to manage all aspects of the game.

The problem is, if the educators do this, you lose the ability to do it for yourself. There's nothing more frustrating for me as a learner to find that either (a) the educational designer has thought too little of me, and made the learning too slow and dull, or (b) the designer didn't think of me at all, and didn't provide any introductory guides or starter kits. I've encountered both online, and frequently.

At a certain point in a complex world a learner has to be able to set the bar for him or herself, to set the challenges appropriately, and find the relevant resources. The more an instructional designer does it for you, the less able you are to do it for yourself, and ultimately, the less useful the resource would be. That's why it's better to present the learner with a range of resources around a topic, and have them pick the ones most suited to them, rather than to try to pick the best resource (or to arrange the subject matter into tiers, or any of the usual forms of structured instruction provided in traditional learning).

If Google tried to organize the internet into some sort of 'diffculty level' for you, the results would be endlessly frustrating. The presumption that the instructor or the learning designer is more likely to be able to select material and work at the right level is difficulty is probably misplaced. Every minute spent by any person either bored to tears or frustrated to tears in a traditional classroom is evidence of that fact.

The second consequence is that, in a connectivist environment, there are many distractions (such as the need to navigate all the social software) that add to the cognitive load, making it more difficult even to learn simple elements. "In Connectivism, the distributed platforms, the networked nature of learning, the requirements for metacognition, digital literacy, the new tools and techniques add significantly to the novice's cognitive load."

This has less to do with the 'flow' picture of cognitive load, and more with the idea that there is a limited to the amount of information any person can process, and that therefore any information that is not 'on task' is in a certain sense wasted. This is why we are advised (for example) not to add distracting graphics or background music to educational materials. We can think by analogy of how distracting signs and displays on a highway make it harder to focus on driving safely, especially if they begin intruding into our perspective.

But if this thesis were completely true, there would never be any word problems in mathematics, engineering or physics, because the cognitive load involved in reading the text, comprehending the worlds, and translating them into the theorems being learned are extraneous to the theorems themselves, and hence, make them more difficult to learn.

But we know we need word problems, for two reasons: first, theorems in mathematics, engineering or physics do not exist independently of context, and a full understanding of them involves understanding them as they are applied; and second, learning a theorem isn't simply a matter of remembering it, it is a matter of recognizing when and where it is appropriately applied.

Even the most basic elements of what we learn exist in a network, and therefore their placement in a network, for example, in a social network environment, isn't an accidental and incidental feature of their presentation, irrelevant to their being learned, but is rather an essential feature of the concept, without which it cannot be fully learned at all.

To put the same point even more bluntly - part of what a concept P means is what P means on Twitter, and if you cannot access it on Twitter, then you are unable to fully comprehend what it means. Learning to navigate the social media, the langauge, the conventions and even the idiosyncrasies of a discipline are all part of what it is to learn a discipline; connectivism recognizes this and explicitly accounts for this, while traditional education barely recognizes the concept of context-sensitivity at all.

The Competent Self

Brennan then turns to four ways educators encourage or undermine self-efficacy. The first two are related:

1. Physical and psychological responses - We reassure students, so that their fears, anxieties and uncertainties are, largely, allayed.

2. Encouragement and persuasion - Good educators provide encouragement, and verbal persuasion, which can increase a student’s self-efficacy.

These, writes Brennan, are almost completely ignored in connectivism: "Classic Connectivism disregards the theories involved here (constructivism, behaviourism, cognitivism) as outmoded. Educators should be absent, or at most facilitators and not teachers. And peer rewards, or the rewards of social engagement, are not considered to be the primary drivers of motivation."

First of all, as I have so often argued, connectivism is not constructivism - there is no obligation for the educator to be absent, and he or she should feel free to 'teach', to 'preach', or make their presence felt in the course as much as they wish, the only limitation being that this presence is as a participant and not an authority figure.

But more to the point, if people come to depend in general on educators, and only educators, for reassurance and encouragement, then they will be sorely unprepared for life. One of the ways a connectivist course becomes massive is that it eliminates the psychological dependence on the instructor and encourages participants to learn to depend on each other for these necessary supports.

The next two points speaks to the role of the educator in the course:

3. Vicarious experience - our sense of our own capability increases when we see people we consider similar to ourselves achieve at a task.

4. Mastery experiences Mastery experiences provide students with the greatest boost to self-efficacy they will encounter in an educational context.

Actually, I think our own sense of capability increases when we see anyone complete the task. This first tells the student that it can be done, and equally important, offers important clues regarding how it can be done.

Traditional educators talk about the value of the worked example, and you can see its application here. It's reassurance that the solution isn't found by magic, that an application of knowledge and method can result in success, and that success has a recognizable form.

This is a role of an educator that I have emphasized a lot - the idea that the role of the educator is to model and demonstrate. The idea here is that the student experiences vicariously success in the field by watching the expert do it, and eventually to do it themselves.

The danger here, though, writes Brennan, is that what the expert does may be too difficult for the novice to master:

"Participants may self-blame, feel inadequate, or possibly, in extreme cases, undergo aspects of depression. Design for experts, and invite novices, and watch novices get shot out of the sky. The burning wreckage you can see trailing off the back as they quit is self-esteem."

Agreed. But if you hide the expert performance entirely, you never see the point of the exercise in the first place. You have to show the whole spectrum, from novice performance, to expert performance. It's a lot like a Karate tournament or highland dance competition, where they start with the young children first thing in the morning and continue through the day finishing with the adult championships at a gala in the evening.

But that's exactly what a connectivist course looks like, and exactly what a traditional course does not look like. In a connectivist course, you can see everyone from beginner to master, and all stages in between. When you perform, you perform for everyone. You don't set yourself up to compare yourself only with expert performances, or only peer performances.

And, most importantly, you don't 'design for experts' or 'design for novices'. You create an environment in which all levels can participate with equal facility, where people at lower levels can learn from those who are more experienced, and where people of almost all experience levels (and not just the instructors and experts) can provide examples, advice and encouragement to those just learning.

Novices and Success

Brennan summarizes:

Connectivism, as a theory, generally does not provide support for, or recognition of, prior knowledge, cognitive load, or novice issues, or recognise particular novice needs, even though individual connectivists sometimes do, or try to. It fails to structure experiences to follow that moving target. Its lens does not focus. Difference is blurred, and opportunity is lost. People fail.

The core idea being expressed here is that novices need support of various sorts, and because connectivism does not provide this, or even acknowledge the need, people fail.

Yes, people fail. But I think connectivism actually does a better job supporting the progression from novice to expert stage than traditional learning.

Here's why: connectivism does not treat people as novices their entire lives.

At a certain point, we want people to stop being novices, and to start being self-motivated and self-managing learners. They're going to have to do this in a world where knowledge changes rapidly, where it's less and less certain, and where the availability of formal education or support in an environment can't be counted on.

Ideally, they should stop being novices some time before tenth birthday. They should stop being novices somewhere around the time they able to acquire the ability to read, infer, navigate and socialize.

The idea that we are treating university students and adults as 'novices' is, to my mind, appalling. If a grown adult still requires a teacher to provide encouragement and support, positive role models, to select resources and scaffold learning experiences, then that speaks to the substantial failure of the traditional system of education. To my mind, it is as astonishing a failure as it would be if adults expected their teachers to read the lessons aloud to them.

Failure

This brings us to the final topic, the underlying thread that has permeated this discussion, and yet gone undiscussed: the concept of failure.

Just what is it to 'fail' in a connectivist course? Maybe the problem with Brennan's criticism as a whole is that he is defining forms of success and failure that are not inherent to connectivism at all.

Let's look at his examples of failure:

• The failure to be a node, or the failure to connect -  "All of my peers are nodes! Look at them connect! Everyone else seems to be succeeding! Why am I not?... Some people aren't actually nodes. If I type a 140-character message into Twitter and don't know how to use a hashtag, can anyone really hear me tweet?" 

It's hard to imagine how a person see other people connecting without being connected to them themselves, but let's leave that internal inconsistency aside and treat this as a general problem. And as a general problem, it's faced by every person in the world whether or not they are learning in a connectivist course.

We can read, for example, that one of the best predictors of success at an elite university (after getting in) is one's ability to form and work in study groups. Connecting is a necessity in every form of education, but while in traditional education this is learned only tacitly, if at all, it in connectivism it is addressed explicitly.

• Too high cognitive load, and no assurance, or anxiety relieving measures. “New to Connectivism and social media? Here's 300 tweets, 700 Google+ posts in your inbox, 70 blog posts, and a Java-enabled seminar software environment you'll need to calibrate your laptop to access (on a MAC we call that an adventure!), using totally unfamiliar software! Say hello to the LMS too! First task due yesterday, create a digital artefact using a piece of software you've never encountered!” 

When I look out my window I see several hundred trees (and a crow). I can pick out the one dead tree, the one white spruce, the tree closest to me, the tree about to fall down, and the crow.  Why is this significant? Well it's not, really, except to point out that an inability to deal with a large number of things is an artificial and self-inflicted incapacity (albeit one your traditional teachers may have helped you acquire).

The rational response to so much data is, first, don't read it all, and second, don't think yourself a failure if you haven't. The idea is to pick and choose, to focus. This is the first skill in any discipline - it is what helps us understand what is important and what is just noise. Children learn this, but somehow, by the time we're adult educators, it has been trained out of us.

Every single connectivist course I have ever offered has begin with advice about what to do with so many posts and messages. It's the first thing you read.

It isn't failure if you don't read everything, if you don't do everything. That's a very industrialist consumption-based model of learning (and of the world generally). Success or failure is found in the quality of the experiences you do choose to have, and are reflected in your own assessment of yourself, not against some arbitrary and impossible external standard.

• Decentralise the learning process to a degree where clarity and structure require skills you don't have to access the information you need. “Four different platforms! The information is out there! Somewhere! Choose your own path to it! In Connectivism, no one can hear you scream! (If you don’t tweet it with #helpImdrowninginthefreedom)” 

Cities have the same problem. The people are located in different buildings, all over the place, and you can't buy gas and engine oil in the same place you buy perfume (well, except at Wal*Mart).

The more pressing question is why your desire for 'clarity and structure' require that things be more or less centralized, and already organized for you. the very first lesson of Taoism is that all such organization is artificial and contrived, so you may as well learn to seek and master organizing the world for yourself.

Four different platforms? At least they're all in a computer - can you imagine if you had to navigate the intricacies of a cafeteria, a gymnasium, a scientific laboratory and a theatre all in the same day! Oh, wait...

More seriously - an inability to navigate across different websites is a form of literacy, analogous to being able to live in a city, go from classroom to classroom in a school, or read English as written by four different authors. Except that - you don't have to navigate four platforms. Connectivism is about choice. If it really bothers you, pick one platform and stick with it.

The presumption here is that there is some McGuffin, 'the information', that is Out There Somewhere. But that presumption is mistaken. Each person is expected to have a different experience, which may be as broad or as narrow as they choose, and whatever 'structure and clarity' they achieve is based on that experience - and not somehow 'wrong' if it doesn't encompass all perspectives on all platforms.

• Tasks that are too complex with no guidance in how to achieve them. “Everyones a node! Connect to learn! Setup your blog, crosspost to Google+ and socially curate to Diigo while using Audacity to post a podcast to Tumblr! That’s updated on Twitter! I’ve done my bit. Now learn!”

This may resemble Jim Groom's ds106 course, but not a connectivist course.

The problem here is one of mistaking a menu for an obligation. Sure, in traditional education, we've acquired this sense that anything set before us by an instructor is a requirement (and will be on the test, otherwise, why would it be presented?) but in a connectivist course such items are, at best, suggestions.

Brennan says, "if we unlearn the hard fought lessons of the past we fail our learner." But it would be easier all around, especially for the learners, if the learners would unlearn the 'lessons' inflicted on them by teachers who through they were doing good, but who were leaving their students woefully unable to cope with a 21st century world.

Connectivist Literacy

Brennan to the contrary notwithstanding, we have thought about these things, written about them, even offered a course (Critical Literacies) in them, to explore how connectivist literacies can be developed employing connectivist methodologies.

"Connectivism’s assumptions -- we are all digitally literate nodes, knowledge is in the network, we are all motivated, have good learning strategies, and information sifting abilities, and can cope with multi-platform information streams, in an environment where instruction is at most facilitative, but probably absent -- mean that the sensitive design of experience that engages prior knowledge, motivation, confidence level, and student need is absent, and not possible."

These aren't assumptions. They are literacies. They are to connectivism what reading and writing and 'rithmetic are to a traditional content-based education.

And - in my view at least - a connectivist approach is uniquely able to develop them in people as literacies.

The key is to stop thinking of these as content to be mastered, and to start thinking them as skills to be practiced. There isn't some point of success or failure in any of these, you just do them - like talking to your friends, like walking from class to class - until it becomes second nature.

Indeed, so long as you think of knowledge and learning as something to be acquired and measured and tested - instead of practiced and lived and experienced - you will be dissatisfied with connectivist learning. And - for that matter - there's probably a limit to how far you can advance in traditional education as well, because (to my experience) everybody who achieves a high degree of expertise in a field has advanced well beyond the idea that it's just information and skills and things to learn. Kind of like Dreyfus and Dreyfus said.

Anyhow, that's all for today.

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Technology Integration in K-12

I was asked,

I'm curious as to what you think the three most important things for new
teachers to know about technology integration in k-12?

1. Community - teaching can be a lonely profession, and it's easy to think you face problems nobody else faces. One of the greatest aspect of the internet is its ability to connect people who are isolated in just that way. A teacher who is able to find an online network will find support and resources. The exact technology doesn't matter much, and has evolved over the years, from the days of email mailing lists, to community bulletin boards, to social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.

2. Educational Resources - you want your use of the internet to be of practical value, and typically that means finding a quick and easy way to find resources for your classes. It is often a lot easier to find something than to create something. But it's important to do something better than just searching on Google; that can drain more time than you can imagine. Communities often support resource-sharing sites, or members can at least point to one.

3. Course Tools - the original LMS was called 'Web Course Tools' and the name was apt, because the desire here is to provide access to tools that make teaching in a class easier. Simple course tools can be one of the teacher's greatest assets - a place to store course documents and handhouts, to keep records and possibky grades, to develop a profile over time on each student. These tools *may* be accessible by students, in classes that have good technology integration, but the greatest value will be to help the teacher stay organized.

You'll note that I haven't included any presentation tools, like online video, or talked about having the whole class use blogs or Facebook. That's because of the question you asked, which focuses on new teachers and technology integration in the classroom. It is in my mind unwise to attempt to use technology to teach until after you have already learned to use technology for personal development and productivity.

This is partially because it is essential to develop an easy facility with technology before using it in the classroom, and partially because teachers without that experience tend to use technology as a type of television (or presentation tool). But as can be seen from the three points above, technology for personal learning and development is about connecting to community, leaning to find resources, and supporting improved productivity.

-- Stephen

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RSS Changeover Day Experiences

So today is the day Google Reader is vanishing from the web. What next? Well, I've done my duty and saved my Google RSS data, and now I'm looking for a new reader.




Digg RSS Reader - http://www.digg.com/reader/

This is I think the one with the most promise on Day One. Clean and fast, and loading content without obvious difficulties (though it's reporting 'no content found' on a number of feeds, reflecting the fact that it is still loading data from the world).

The big problem on post-Reader Day One is that there is no means of identifying which posts you've read and which ones you haven't. This sort of works and sort of doesn't. Also, it displays every feed, whether or not there are any new items. Digg promises this is something that will be fixed shortly, but missing the biggest deadline in your business isn't really a good start.

I really liked the one-click migration from Google Reader (you can see it here) which worked to perfection. I was reading feeds (old and new) in the Digg Reader in just a few seconds. Slick.

But the sign-in system is a non-starter for me. If you want to sign on to Digg, you have to use a Twitter, Facebook or Google account. This isn't something you'll notice when you import your feeds (because the sign-in is just merged with the import). If there were an open (or even an OpenID) alternative, I'd be OK with it. But there isn't.

Digg is also pretty weak on the suggested links section. Basically, it's a category listing you can browse, with all the usual (and U.S.-centric) suspects - the Times, Wired, etc. Tired. RSS is great for personalized links, not content factories, but Digg doesn't even attempt recommendations. Neither si there a search of feeds or posts; I'm really going to miss that.




The Old Reader - http://theoldreader.com/

One of the first replacement RSS readers off the mark. The Old Reader uses OPML for data import - here - and that will slow adoption a bit (mostly because Google doesn't export OPML very well; it buries it in a package containing a whole pile of stuff you don't need).


That said, the Old Reader performs like an establish application. It has everything harvested so there aren't gaps in the coverage. It's able to tell you whether you've read something or not. It hides the feeds with nothing new added. It even identifies recently updated and 'dead' feeds.

But... but... but: it may just be me, but I really dislike the visual impact. For some reason the designer has opted to highlight unread counts and blog titles with an ugly green circle or box with white text. Aesthetically, it's awful, and when you look at the screen, you can't see anything other than those ugly green blobs.

So far as I can tell, there's no recommendation feature, and you need to log into Google or Facebook to 'find' friends. No search. Ugh.




Feedly - http://cloud.feedly.com/

A lot of people like Feedly but my initial experience was confusing and disorienting. Like Digg, Feedly has a one-click import from Google Reader. It seemed to work OK (though it just sat there not really doing anything and I ended up trying it several times).

I wasn't sure how to actually view my feeds; all I got was a blank page. When I came back to it 15 minutes later I saw some content; obviously it had taken some time to populate. I don't like the menu on the left-hand side; you have to hover your mouse over it to see it, and when the content hasn't loaded yet from Google Reader you see nothing but an awful 'add content' button, which just takes you to category listings.

Feedly supports four views (others just support a 'list' and 'full content' view), including a 'card' view (which I don't like - I don't see the attraction of that format) and a 'magazine view' (which I do like). Two of the views have an 'In My Feedly' pane to the right, which wastes space and wouldn't be necessary if the left pane were always visible.

Feedly has historically been about the mobile and desktop applications, rather than the web-based 'cloud' version, and it shows. Yet ironically, I can't see from my web version of Feedly how to access the apps (but here's a list: iOS, Android, Kindle, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari).

That said, Feedly is a mature product, and you can see when you scan the preferences (bottom of that hidden left pane). "Feedly can curate and feature articles based on how popular they are on Google+ and Facebook." Also, you can share from Feedly to Twitter and Pinterest. Finally, you can "display a contextual menu when you select some text while reading an article" and look at a list of recommended feeds in magazine view. None of the views is particularly fast; they all appear to use an Ajax load, and there's no preloading, so there's always a delay.

I really had difficulty reading the articles. The 'Jump to Next' arrow would jump to the next category, not the next post or feed, even in full text view. So the only way to read is to scroll. Ugly. Also, there's no search (though from the blog it appears to be a priority).

People were complaining also that Feedly has no OPML export, but this has been quickly addressed. But as Dave Winer notes, it's not exactly by the book.


Newsblur - http://www.newsblur.com

I signed up and got the message: "There are 5,317 people in front of you, all patiently waiting
on their free accounts on NewsBlur. By going premium you can get full and immediate access to NewsBlur."

Thanks, no.

 NetNewsWire - http://netnewswireapp.com/

This is a downloadable app, but it's for Apple only, and you have to pay money (which is the norm in the Apple environment). I've stopped using Apple products, so this one is a non-starter.





gRSShopper http://grsshopper.downes.ca

This is not going to help very many people, but it's an  option for me. A while ago I built a reader into gRSShopper to make content filtering a bit easier. It's not the greatest reader in the world (Google Reader was that) but it has some nice features, including deep integration with the main gRSShopper content management system.

gRSShopper displays a single post at a time, so breezing through them is a bit slower than the other readers. But you can sort posts by feed or topic, search, and of course edit and post directly to the newsletter from the interface. It doesn't try to remember what you've read or not (I've had versions that had that; currently I don't) but it organizes everything into a chronological 'river of news'.

gRSShopper supports multiple accounts with a single harvester (indeed, multiple sites with a single harvester) so like the commercial RSS readers it downloads feeds efficiently.I'd like to add a PubSubHubbub functionality to it to do away with polling altogether. Though that said, Google will probably stop supporting this project as well, so its future is uncertain.

I'm very likely to settle on gRSShopper rather than make one of the other readers work for me, if only because if I want the interface improved, I can do it myself.

The nice thing about gRSShopper for other people is that if you can get gRSShopper installed and running on your own website, you'll never need to worry about your RSS feed reading service disappearing again. Though of course the ongoing attack against RSS by Google, Twitter and Facebook continues apace.

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What I Wish I Had Learned in School

School for me was not really a pleasant experience. Oh, sure, it had its moments, but it was a struggle. On the one hand, we had the typical high school curriculum, which was about as exciting as paste, and on the other hand, we had the Darwinian social environment red in metaphorical tooth and claw. I didn't fit in either academically or socially, and when I got out of there, it was like a great weight had been lifted from me.

So it's hard to know exactly how to respond to this request: "The idea is pretty simple, we think that as the world becomes more complex, the formal education system is having a harder and harder time keeping up. Plenty of people are spending plenty of cycles looking for answers, but what we really want to do is ask a more fundamental question, 'What do you wish you had learned in school?' We think that by collecting people's personal stories, we can start to develop useful insights and perhaps even come to a few conclusions."

I guess my first, cynical, response the the question would be, "I wish I had learned how to escape."

I read today about things like Class Afloat, which is a high school taught on a tall ship,or the Bronx High School of Science, a so-called magnet school dedicated to (not surprisingly) science, or the Perpich Center for Arts Education, and so on and on and on, and I wonder, why couldn't I have been afforded any of those opportunities. But that's not what happens when you grow up in a small farming community in rural Ontario.

Certainly, I tried to make the most of my high school education, doing things like Reach for the Top and model parliament (where I was the leader (and only member) of the Fascism Reform Party) and band and drama and all the rest of it. I reveled in projects I could design for myself; the teachers gave me quite a bit of latitude, and I would write to embassies and government departments and such for raw materials.

What would I have done in an environment where I could program computers and build robots and write blogs and fly quadrocopters?  Or maybe my school would have been one of those where all this was tantalizingly out of reach, my internet access a small-town trickle of connectivity, the movie-making and the podcasting and robot-fighting something that people at Gloucester and Nepean and Lisgar did, not us out in the country at Osgoode Township (though now Metcalfe is an increasingly-nice suburb of Ottawa, and we might not have been able to afford to live there).

So anyhow, would I have liked to have learned all those things? Well, in the 70s, definitely yes - coming out of high school in 1979 already knowing to program a computer or build a robot would have been a huge advantage. Today, though, it might seem more like vocational education, kind of the 21st century analogue to the courses where the industrial arts kids learned to work on electrical circuits and car motors (you know - the advanced tech of the 1930s).

If I were in school today I'd probably be wanting to learn about carbon fibres and nanotubes and capacitors, genetic creation and manipulation, bioengineering, and all that sort of stuff. I'm not sure - I only know that some of this stuff exists, I'm not sure exactly where it's at and what you can build (or grow) in a high school science lab, but it would be fun to be 15 again and exploring these frontiers. Except that... I hated being 15, and I could wait to get out of there.

I wish we had had a track team at high school. We didn't have individual sports; we had only teams - football, soccer, hockey - and you had to make the team, which meant being able to get in the practice, which didn't work well for people like me, partially because I delivered papers every day and didn't have time for that, and partially because I really didn't like these other people very much (especially in places like soccer fields and locker rooms). But I could run, especially long distances - I once clocked a mile in less than five minutes (4:45 to be precise). But there was only soccer, and I rarely got to play.

Maybe "what I wish I had learned in high school" should have a category for stuff I actually learned, but wish I hadn't. Like the survival skills I needed to get through classes and after-school activities, for example, the reptilian flight-or-flight response that follows me to this day, the alternating thick and thin skin needed to ignore remarks but be keenly aware of when they might escalate into some sort of physical attack.

Maybe what I wish I had learned in high school would be those smooth social skills that the best of us in society display. Watching DARPA's Kathleen Fisher on video last week, for example, I was struck by her geniality and the comfortable manner in which she worked the room and traversed some difficult material. I'm sure we all know those people, they are the ones who always seem to be at ease, comfortable with themselves, able to reach out and really communicate with other people. But you don't see that a whole lot in the smaller and less well-off communities; it feels like the sort of thing you have to be in a position of advantage to be able to develop. But maybe I'm wrong about that.

I don't think people understand the difference between growing up on the inside and growing up on the outside; certainly people who are on the inside don't see it at all, and the people on the outside sometimes sense it, but what can they do?

Take smoking, for example. That's another thing I guess I wish I hadn't learned in high school (though to be quite honest, I guess I actually learned it working at the racetrack in grades 11 and 12, serving drinks in the box lounge). Smoking is a poor person's disease. The people on the inside, for whatever reason, grew up in an environment where you just didn't smoke, but all the working people smoked. You pretty much had to. That was in the 70s and 80s, of course; I'm sure that's all changed now. But there are plenty of other examples like that.

I don't regret not being born into a home where I always knew I would be going to Yale and teaching at MIT or maybe Stanford. I would have become a different person. It was enough my parents gave me the expectation that I would go to university, and the tools that would help me succeed. And I've always known since those days that what distinguished me from them was not some aspect of my education, nor my innate intelligence, nor my work ethic nor my compassion and dedication, no, none of that, nothing but simple facts of birth and social standing.

Yes, I sometimes wish I had learned to escape - but if I had ever gotten that wish, I would never have seen life on the outside, and never sensed the urgency of doing something once I got through university and was in a position to do some good in the world. So I guess that's not what I wish for.

I guess I wish I had learned integral calculus. Yeah, that would have made all the difference.

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The Open Road

Right now, the government awards road-building contracts to large construction companies. But imagine the government decided to end these contracts, and to simply grant anyone who wanted to build a road a license to build a road.

It would still be a complex process, of course. Road-builders would have to secure easements and concessions from landowners, assemble road-building technology and staff, and of course put asphalt on the ground. After construction there would be ongoing issues of maintenance and management.

Still, such roads would be built. Some of them might be barely more than tracks - that's what we saw in the early days of concession roads. Such a road really was just some land granted to open access, where people could drive their carts without crossing someone else's property.

It wouldn't be long before people put tolls on these roads. That's what happened in Britain, as the common lands were enclosed, a network of toll roads developed, and travellers would have to pay a tariff every few miles.

In such an environment it is inevitable that there would be a call for open roads, sometimes also known as free roads, or freeways. The logic would be inescapable: toll booths are like sand in the engine of the economy, causing a harmful friction.

Toll Roads and Navigations:The toll roads and some of their dates are shown in red. River Navigations (improved rivers, even if primarily with drainage in mind) and canals are in blue. The stagecoach route came through Peterborough. The road off (not shown) that passes Barrow and ends at New Holland connected the re-routed stagecoach with the new ferry. (Source: Bennett, 1999, 86)

A movement would develop around the idea of free and open roads, and a logo and map system shared among open road owners and users. We could imagine an organization developing, 'Locomotive Commons', to create standard licenses governing the operation of open roads.

How would the people who owned toll roads respond? Well, we can imagine what they would do from analogy in other fields, like publishing.

Some would be vehemently opposed to open roads, and demand that the government not create or support open roads, as they create unfair "competition" to their toll roads.

Others, though, would embrace the free and open road movement, but they would redefine what the words 'free' and 'open' meant. Basically, a road would be 'free' and 'open' if - and only if - the person managing the road had the right to set up a toll on the road.

Any other license governing the use of the road would be considered to be "more restrictive" and "less free". This would be the case because it would 'restrict' the road manager's 'freedom' to charge tolls for the use of the road.

"You can always take another road," declared the proponents of the new "Free Road" movement. "Nothing prevents you from you from taking one of the more restrictive roads that do not allow the construction of toll booths."

Because of the number of people opposed to toll gates of any kind on the roads, the Locomotive Commons foundation established several different types of license, including:

- LC:NT - the non-tolls license, which prohibited managers from setting up toll booths, thereby ensuring people traveling along the road would never need to pay a toll.

- LC:IA - the "intersect alike" license (IA), which stipulated that if your road connected to a road with a certain license, it had to share the same license. Because, after all, if any part of a road becomes a toll road, it has the effect of making the whole road a toll road.

The "Free Road" movement launched a full-scale opposition to these licenses. They called them "restrictive" and argued that "people should have the right to make a living from the roads" (even if they did not actually build the roads).

Foundations (some funded by the original road-building construction companies that were losing out on the lucrative traffic) organized conferences to make "Declarations" defining the meaning of "free" according to "four freedoms: the freedom to run the road; the freedom to map where the road goes; the freedom to share the road with others; and the freedom to add other roads to the road."

Of course, "sharing the road with others" might involve setting up a toll booth; and any interpretation of "share" that did not allow the establishment of a toll booth was considered a "restriction" on one of the four freedoms.

Eventually, with considerable foundation support, and also the support of organizations that built tolls and managed toll roads, a lobby emerged with enough voices to convince Locomotive Commons to declare that some of its licenses - specifically, the ones prohibiting tolls on the road - to be "not free".

Eventually people just used the new "Free Roads," paying their tolls every few miles, because there was really no alternative. The "Free Roads" wouldn't connect to the "restrictive" No-Toll roads, partially because of the intersect-alike clause, and partly because NT roads really did connect to other places, and the Free Road owners simply didn't want the competition.

Not that it would have mattered. The Free Road owners could always depend on exclusivity. Often, the only way to get from point A to point B was to use a Free Road - they would obtain the concession (and often public financing) to build a Free Road over a river or through a mountain pass, and if you wanted to use it, you had to sign up for a Free Road Account and you would be billed for the full distance traveled, whether you used Free Roads or NT.

Young people would grow up angry about the tolls and fees, and opposing the cost of roads (which most of them couldn't afford anyways). They would join the Free Road Foundation or the Open Road Movement and lobby against corporate subscription-based roads.

But in the end, they found themselves arguing in favour of allowing tolls, because they were arguing for free and open roads, and had learned that licenses prohibiting tolls were actually less free and less open than Free Roads.

Off to the side stood now thoroughly discredited (or, at least, shouted down) the original no-tolls advocate. He had just wanted people to be able to move freely through the land without barriers and hindrance. He wanted people to explore the country no matter whether they were rich or poor. And he even understood how important the opening of free roads across the land was to health, education and commerce.

Now he reflected on a world where traveling down a "Free Road" would cost you money, and where the meaning of "Open Road" meant "could have tolls or barriers." And he began to wonder what would happen when these new meanings of "free" and "open" began to be applied to things like speech, religion, justice and the vote.

Because nothing is "free", I guess, unless someone can come along and charge you money for it.

p.s.

On 12/06/2013 12:58 PM, rory wrote:

If someone closes off OER, someone else can reproduce it elsewhere ad infinitum at no cost. This bears no resemblance to roads with their physical limitations.

I did address this in my text, but having heard from several people on this point now, I conclude my analogy may be been too subtle.

This was not an argument I hadn't anticipated. Here it is restated in my analogy: "You can always take another road," declared the proponents of the new "Free Road" movement. "Nothing prevents you from you from taking one of the more restrictive roads that do not allow the construction of toll booths."

I did answer it at length (though none of the critics gives me credit for even trying).

In order to reproduce something (let it be a road or an OER) one must first have access to the original. Once a commercial version of the resource exists, there is significant incentive on the part of the commercial owner to block or limit access to the original, so that the only available version is the commercial version.

I have over the years identified (and linked to in my newsletter) numerous examples of how access to the original free resource may be limited:
- legal challenges and FUD - making it too much of a risk to use the non-commercial resource
- poisoning - using technical and legal requirements requiring that resources in some way be 'certified'
- flooding - making the free resource just one out of hundreds of versions, pushing the free resource down in search results
- book-storing - creating self-contained environments in which links to free versions are not available
- salting - adding 'extra value' to the commercial resource not available in the free resource
I could add many more but you get the point. These are clear and obvious to anyone who actually looks for them; the evidence is as plain as day.

In my analogy I represented this response as follows: "Eventually people just used the new 'Free Roads,' paying their tolls every few miles, because there was really no alternative. The 'Free Roads' wouldn't connect to the 'restrictive' No-Toll roads, partially because of the intersect-alike clause, and partly because NT roads really did connect to other places, and the Free Road owners simply didn't want the competition.

"Not that it would have mattered. The Free Road owners could always depend on exclusivity. Often, the only way to get from point A to point B was to use a Free Road - they would obtain the concession (and often public financing) to build a Free Road over a river or through a mountain pass, and if you wanted to use it, you had to sign up for a Free Road Account and you would be billed for the full distance traveled, whether you used Free Roads or NT."

Again - maybe too subtle.

A great deal is made of the fact "non-rivalrous goods like data on the Internet" can be reproduced at will. But in publishing and commerce generally, there are rivalrous goods. The time and attention of readers, the trechnology at their disposal, the balancing of rights and regulations - all these are rivalrous elements in what would otherwise nonriovalrous market. It is from my perspective a naive and unsupportable argument to suggest that people can just reproduce free copies of these newly-commercialized resources.

Indeed, if the business model of publishers of CC-by content were so easily disrupted, there would be no return on their investment, and they would never get into the business. The very fact that there is a pro-commercial lobby for the use of (otherwise) free resources is itself proof that the "you can just make free copies" argument is fallacious.

OK, that's it, I'm done. No more arguing from me on this. If you continue to support the "everyone must support CC-by" position, I will simply regard you as being against free and open access to learning and learning resources, and working instead for people trying to privatize the education system, puting your own narrow self-interest ahead of wider social values (putting you in my mind on par with banks and the oil industry).

"Let's see someone close off the route to Europe from America. As long as the air and water are free they can close off what they want and who would pay attention!"

Indeed. There are millions of would-be immigrants around the world who would only wish that were the case. They wish nobody had thought of a way of defining 'free' in terms of borders. I do know that anyone attempting to cross from Europe to North America by means of a purely non-commercial route will be arrested for immigration violations. The Open Road has truely been closed.

p.p.s.


One more, and then I'm done, I promise!

Pete Forsyth wrote to this list, in part:

* Mr. Downes first (publicly) described the works of Shakespeare as "easy" to define in terms of openness; but when pressed for what that easy answer was, he (privately) described the issues as "complex" and outside the realm of a simple yes/no answer.
* He inquired (due to a misunderstanding of my questions) about the availability of the introduction and index of a certain edition of Hume's Treatise. For any who are interested, it is here, in several formats: http://openlibrary.org/books/OL23349825M/A_treatise_of_human_nature

I have learned a few things about Mr. Downes' thinking on the matter; I don't find any of it persuasive; and I have found his approach hostile and disingenuous. I intend to withdraw from this discussion.

I admit that I have become increasingly frustrated by this discussion, and I have been snippish to some people, for which I apologize.

But my desire to stay off-list was based in my belief that people on this list don't want to watch the back and forth debate on the point I raised. However, now that a version of it is on list, I offer you the full text of the discussion, and readers can decide for themselves whether my responses have been accurately represented above, and whether I have been hostile and disingenuous.


On 12/06/2013 1:39 PM, Pete Forsyth wrote:

Rather than exploring a complex hypothetical scenario, why not look at a real educational resource with an extensive history that long pre-dates CC licenses, and consider whether or not we consider it "open"--

The play Hamlet is in the public domain, and as such, there is no restriction on its reuse relating to whether or not that use incurs profit. (There's nothing analogous to the "NC" provision.)

So, any publisher can -- and many publishers have -- charged money for it. I find it difficult to understand how that can be described as locking it down or preventing reuse, because it can also be downloaded for free (or at least, free of charges beyond the needed equipment) from places like Wikisource: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Tragedy_of_Hamlet,_Prince_of_Denmark/Act_1

But more to the point, a (non-profit) high school *or* a (for-profit) theatre company may perform Hamlet without paying anybody a royalty.

It seems to me that your position is that Hamlet is not free, because there is no provision protecting it from commercial exploitation. Is that correct? 


(My response)


Shakespeare is easy. Do a real-life one: David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Biggs (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1888) (be sure to include Selby-Biggs's introduction and lengthy index, which are the real values of this edition).

I think you'll find that for pretty much every public domain work other than the few painstakingly gathered in Gutenberg the argument I offer stands up pretty well.

-- Stephen



From:Pete Forsyth []
Sent: Thursday, June 13, 2013 11:15 AM 

Sorry to belabor the point, but I don't understand your answer -- what is the easy conclusion? It's free and open? Or it's not free or open?

> Do a real-life one:

The reason I chose Shakespeare's Hamlet is precisely because it is real-life. It's a play I've both paid to read, and read for free; and that I've both paid to watch, and watched for free. As far as I know, no royalties exchanged hands when my high school put it on. I've learned from it in both formal and informal environments, and I suspect many others on this list have as well. To me, this seems like the quintessential OER.

In what respect do you consider it not "real-life"?

-Pete

From:Pete Forsyth []
Sent: Thursday, June 13, 2013 11:22 AM

Stephen, I replied on the list about Shakespeare. I don't understand why you're bringing up Hume -- but in direct response to that example, isn't that online and freely available? Is this not the introduction you're seeking?

http://archive.org/stream/treatiseofhumann01humeuoft#page/n15/mode/2up

-Pete

Hiya Pete,

I used the Hume reference instead of Shakespeare because Shakespeare is low-hanging fruit. It has been reproduced in Gutenberg and received wide circulation.

But the vast majority of public domain content is *NOT* freely available in the way that the Shakespeare is freely available. Shakespeare is the exception, not the rule.

That’s why I referenced the 1888 Selby-Biggs edition of Hume. It’s clearly in the public domain. But you just can’t find it anywhere; the only way to get it is to buy it. This is true of the majority of public domain work (and, ultimately, will be true of the majority of CC-by work).

You found an edition of Hume’s Treatise, but *NOT* the Selby-Biggs edition. I picked this edition specifically because Selby-Biggs added a long interdiction and famous analytical index. You cannot find that edition anywhere. At least, I couldn’t.

-- Stephen

> Shakespeare is the exception, not the rule.

You seem to be making an incorrect assumption about the conclusion I'm trying to draw. I'm not interested in whether or not the treatment of my example is typical -- only in whether or not you consider it to be free and open. You have yet to answer that, here or on the list.

> You found an edition of Hume’s Treatise, but *NOT* the Selby-Biggs edition.

Well, it's edited by Selby-Bigge, and was first published in 1888. It also has a very detailed index, and a preface that explains why it has such a long index. If there's more to it than that, and I missed the version you're seeking, never mind I guess. But I don't see how any of this is germane to my question.

Pete


My mistake, you did find the Selby-Biggs edition. It didn’t show up at all on the Google search (which is kind of my point, that the OA versions get buried). How dod you find it?

> I'm not interested in whether or not the treatment of my example is typical -- only in whether or not you consider it to be free and open. You have yet to answer that, here or on the list.

You’re just using a rhetorical trap, trying to get me to provide simple yes-no answers to complex questions. My point isn’t (and never was) a simple statement about whether ‘X’ resource is free and open. Under some circumstances the work could be free and open; under other circumstances the same work might not be. Right now we have no problems accessing Shakespeare, but longer term, after publishers do the Napster treatment to Open Archives and Gutenberg, we will have significant problems. My argument is that CC-by licensing doesn’t convey unique protections on resources, and that of a CC-by resource is a ‘free’ resource, it is no less legitimate to call a NN-NC resource a ‘free’ resource.

This isn’t about ‘winning’, it’s about understanding the environment in which we work, and rhetorical tricks don’t help with that.


From:Pete Forsyth []
Sent: Thursday, June 13, 2013 1:42 PM 


> My mistake, you did find the Selby-Biggs edition. It didn't show up at all on the Google search (which is kind of my point, that the OA versions get buried). How dod you find it?

I went to the Internet Archive, and using their search engine. In my experience this is a vastly more effective way of finding PD works than Google. I highly recommend it.

> I'm not interested in whether or not the treatment of my example is typical -- only in whether or not you consider it to be free and open. You have yet to answer that, here or on the list.

You're just using a rhetorical trap, trying to get me to provide simple yes-no answers to complex questions.

No, no trap -- I just wanted an answer. "It's complex" is a perfectly good answer, and helps me understand your thinking, though I'm still not sure why you're only answering here and not on the list where I asked.



This isn't about 'winning', it's about understanding the environment in which we work, and rhetorical tricks don't help with that.

At this point in this discussion, I have a lot more confidence in my own understanding of that environment, than in yours. You're free to disagree.


 
From:Pete Forsyth []
Sent: Thursday, June 13, 2013 3:37 PM

All:

I'd like to follow up on the Hamlet example I introduced. Mr. Downes replied on one of these lists, and separately in private; while I wish to respect any desire to keep specific comments private, I think a couple points in summary merit followup to the lists.

* Mr. Downes first (publicly) described the works of Shakespeare as "easy" to define in terms of openness; but when pressed for what that easy answer was, he (privately) described the issues as "complex" and outside the realm of a simple yes/no answer.

* He inquired (due to a misunderstanding of my questions) about the availability of the introduction and index of a certain edition of Hume's Treatise. For any who are interested, it is here, in several formats: http://openlibrary.org/books/OL23349825M/A_treatise_of_human_nature

I have learned a few things about Mr. Downes' thinking on the matter; I don't find any of it persuasive; and I have found his approach hostile and disingenuous. I intend to withdraw from this discussion.

-Pete

 

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Ongoing Digital Citizenry Training

Responses to comments on my recent online talk, in preparation for my keynote in Caracas in a couple weeks. Commenter voices are in italics. The original forum and comments are all in Spanish; I'm working through an interpreter.

·        Perhaps the greatest challenge lies in introducing technology in classrooms through an innovative methodology which suits the times in which we live. This will make subsequent ongoing training easier throughout the learner’s life.

This is a challenge because it is not a single objective, but one which changes over time. Each year we see new technology and new methodology. People change, society changes. So it’s important not only to help people adapt to the technology and methodology of the day, but to develop and adapt new methodologies into the future.

Historically, the classroom has been among the slowest segment of society to make these changes. As one person reported in a study a few years ago, “I turn off my technology when I go to school.” Outside school, we are connected and communicating and creating. But this seems still to be the exception inside the classroom.

Consequently, I am led increasingly over time to challenge whether we should be depending on the classroom for future learning at all. It is a very difficult environment in which to work, where teachers work alone, separate from each other and society, and more recently, with less and less control over their working conditions. I would rather see teachers work within information and communications networks, rather than debate how to incorporate these networks into an unfriendly and outdated classroom environment.

·        ICTs have opened up a wide range of training possibilities which are nonetheless not entirely new. For some time now there has been talk of the importance of personalised learning and the need for it to take the learner's interests and learning conditions into account. Today, technology allows us to apply constructive approaches which learning centres have been trying to introduce in training institutions for decades.

I would be the first to agree that many of the approaches now being adopted by technology-enhanced learning were developed and tried in learning centres in the years before technology. I myself remember working at development education centres in Calgary and in Northern Alberta employing adaptive and constructive pedagogy.

Many of these approaches, though, were difficult and expensive to adapt on a widespread basis. What technology enables is what Toffler originally called ‘mass customization’. For example, while connecting people with similar interests and aptitudes has always been a value, prior to the use of technology it was only possible in urban centres. But today people who are distributed geography can now associate with communities of interest.

·        ICTs are an inclusive tool, especially for those people who have obstacles that hinder their access to information or who have limited access to learning in one way or another, as ICTs define multiple ways to access information through multimedia, programmes and applications.

I agree that ICTs have this potential. But I caution that this does not happen automatically, and that there are risks associated with it.

For example, prior to the use of ICTs, we would buy products, and own them. This we could buy a book or a record album and read it or listen to it and share it with our friends and even resell it. But digital content is typically licensed, not sold, which means that one copy can only be used by one person, which may actually increase costs and barriers, unless addressed in some way through ‘fair use’ legislation or through licenses that permit sharing.

·        Currently, learning takes place in the community and as a result of an interaction with all its social elements and agents. Thanks to technological advances there is now an endless amount of knowledge which can be put to the service of the community. More is probably learnt from those elements from which we believe we learn least – knowledge is certainly not located in any specific special place. It can be found whenever someone wants to find it and in any place.  Do you agree?

Yes, I agree. One of the slogans I have used for many years to describe the use of ICTs is this: “People should learn about forestry in a forest, about law in the courtroom, about cuisine in the kitchen.” I still believe this. One of the advantages of ICTs that we Will eventually see, I think, is that we depend less and less on content and textbooks, and more and more on real experiences in the wider community.

·        If we want to learn, we have to seek out sources ourselves. We firstly need to do this whilst in the school system, as we have more interest in learning. The truth is, however, that we learn on a daily basis. We learn from each other, through our own experiences, from trial and error, from new technologies, from books, magazines, and from the few educational programmes we can find on the television. We learn from everything and everybody.

This is quite true. One of the great challenges for the school system, though, is to not destroy this interest in Learning. There is an old ‘Calvin & Hobbes’ cartoon where Calvin is all eager to attend his first day of school, ready to learn all about the world, and where he returns home, dejected, hating school and hating everything to do with Learning. This is sadly far too common the result of school. We do as humans have a natural desire and ability to learn, but it can be beaten down and defeated by the education system.

We read a lot in educational theory about motivation. But motivation is only necessary when we are trying to persuade people to do things they do not want to do. The fact that we need to motivate students is already a sign that we are failing. We as educators should be followingstudents, helping them pursue their own interests in their own way, providing the support and encouragement and expertise they need, but helping them meet their own ambitions and objectives, not burdening them with ours.

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