This video is just brilliant. It uses the format made famous by the Common Craft Show (think “Wikis in Plain English“) to discuss networked learning and Connectivism. It’s 5 minutes long but really easy viewing.
URL: http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=e7oFzmr9_M4
Description: “The Networked Student was inspired by CCK08, a Connectivism course offered by George Siemens and Stephen Downes during fall 2008. It depicts an actual project completed by Wendy Drexler’s high school students. The Networked Student concept map was inspired by Alec Couros’ Networked Teacher. I hope that teachers will use it to help their colleagues, parents, and students understand networked learning in the 21st century. “
I believe this trend has already begun informally for education and will continue to grow in the future. In many regards it also highlights trends in web use and online learning amidst existing students and staff that are occurring outside of the formal IT channels. Despite attempts to keep tight reigns on a school/institution’s web presence and the data therein, and thus control the manner in which it is accessed and used by the public, students and staff have begun to circumvent these channels.
While institutions continue to rely on massive, monolithic systems that inhibit user freedoms and personal ownership, free and publicly available tools like wikis, blogs, social networking sites, instant messaging clients, video sharing sites, web conferencing tools and virtual environments facilitate immediate access to peers in extraordinarily flexible and customiseable ways. It is little wonder then that shadow systems of learning and interacting have begun to develop outside of recognised institutional channels.
The implications for institutions are clear. To ignore this reality is to ignore learning opportunities for students and ourselves. Regardless of whether these shadow activities conform to formal institutional web standards, it is undeniable that conversations occurring in the Read-Write Web are real. They are having a real impact, have a real audience, and convey real perceptions on both learning and student/staff attitudes about the institution.
To institutional decision-makers at all levels: we ignore these trends at our peril. To remain relevant we must remain engaged. The time is past when institutions held the keys to the castle and could dictate the conditions and terms under which students could interact, what they could contribute, and how they could do so. Today the castles are anywhere, and everywhere; and they are run by the learners.
I’d therefore encourage everyone to view the video and make your opinions known; so we can begin to consider the implications for projects, processes, planning and indeed the future of education.
Thank you very much for linking to this. It is really useful and inspiring:)
I agree, there are some really talented people out there! I’ve already circulated this video to my department. It’s a great overview I think.
I don’t know, Mike, it’s all very well talking about the institutions coming to grip with connectivism etc etc, but what about the students? Do they want it? Can they be bothered?
Look at us – we’ve learned heaps from the connectivism course but we are extremely self-motivated. Is the average student (I’m talking about higher ed) that motivated? Do they have the time (after all they have huge workloads both in terms of study, family & work)?
Forgive me, but am feeling rather cynical today. But I wonder how much of our dream will be shared by the average student?
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Hi Mike, great to hear your thoughts on this. I am an OT educator and I am passionate about linking occupational therapists in the online environment… my barriers are these:
1. Health care practitioners are people-people, therefore a computer is seen as a barrier to their ultimate goal of working with people (even though Web 2.0 IS so interactive!!!).
2. The curriculum is so tight that it is almost impossible to embed new technologies without going over the allowed hours.
3. Students are competitive for grades and do not like to share their new knowledge (not all of them, but most of them) and this means that Web 2.0 is counter-intuitive to their ingrained learning modes.
4. Students are feeling pressured to “get through the curriculum” not taking time to think and problem solve, so taking time to work collaboratively is like pulling teeth.
5. Students have become more like “consumers” of an education product as opposed to creators of their own knowledge, therefore point 4 applies again.
6. Health care practice settings do not allow Internet access or time to build online networks, therefore it is all on your own time and from home.
HOWEVER… I believe that it is important to create opportunities for networked learning as it is the key to lifelong learning.
My experience tells me to:
1. Start small first (small technology tasks that don’t have huge grades attached)
2. Run parallel education sessions about Web 2.0 technology for health care practitioners in the field, so that there is a willing audience waiting for our graduates
3. Reduce components of the curriculum if possible to create space for learning about online technologies (wikis, blogs, podcasts, and SL)
4. Network with others who are having success and ask them for help!
thanks for the link, I think its a great example and deserves wide viewing. My experience of higher ed students is they like being engaged.
Hi Mike, thanks for the video reply-I wish I could reply with seesmic, but my web cam isn;t working! This was the first time I watched you and you weren’t bobbing up and down!
What has struck me is the similarity between this approach in the original video and what we call scenario-based learning or problem-based learning. Our students love this approach to learning (undergrads that is) but they need very clear sign posts to guide them along the way. I guess like you Mike, I’m still getting my head around the whole topic and what it means to my particular discipline.
I am interested in your comment about student learning that goes on outside of formal channels. What I am finding is that students are starting to self-organise into Facebook groups etc, but are not including us (as in lecturers). Now, that’s fine by me. But the result is I don’t know what is going on informally so don’t know how to harness that activity. Or maybe the answer is that I do not harness it – it is actually nothing to do with me. Thanks, Mike – have a great weekend.
Hi Sarah,
Your comment about the Facebook groups is fascinating to me because that would seem to suggest the presence of network learning – at least in a small way. For institutions and schools this raises a very interesting predicament I think, because learning is going on on a topic directly related to the course – and in that sense is quite relevant – but if we don’t or can’t know what it is, how can it be tied back into the course (for the benefit of other students) or incorporated into recognition in marks/grades (assuming we can’t do away with them altogether).
To paraphrase the old analogy of a tree falling in the forest: “If learning occurs in a network, but no instructor or institution is there to observe it; is it relevant to the school?”
I’d absolutely call it learning, but when it comes to assessment it would suggest that knowledge exists that isn’t adequately reflected – which means marks aren’t representative of reality.
This leads me to wonder how or whether it could be tied into an adapted version of recognition of prior learning (but where the learning isn’t “prior” it’s informal). But how? I think the notion of using activity formats or course work that reflect or nurtures a distributed model of learning could start to tease out the learning that is occurring elsewhere, but as always the devil is in the detail.
It seems I have way more questions than answers at this point!
Cheers,
Mike
The problem we ran into this year is that there was a lot of mis-communication and information passed through the students’ networks which caused some grief. Unfortunately they didn’t think to ask us about it. But that will happen whether they have FB accounts or not.
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