BEYOND LEARNING MANAGEMENT
TO OPEN LEARNING SUPPORT AND
INSPIRATION,
Terry Anderson, Ph.D.
Canada Research Chair in Distance
Education

Overview
• Energy drivers for change:
– Social constructivism and peer production
– Individual and group Choice & Cooperative
Freedom
– Group, Network and collective learning
opportunities
Technological Affordances of Distributed web
services
• Design Characteristics of Next Gen Systems

Values
• We can (and must) continuously improve the
quality, effectiveness, appeal, cost and time
efficiency of the learning experience.
• Student control and freedom is integral to 21st
Century life-long education and learning.
• Education for elites is not sufficient for
planetary survival

21st century learner
• Wants to learn things
• Continuously moves between on and offline
• Is learning to recognize and demand quality
when investing in learning
• Knows there are many paths to learning and is
used to staggering amounts of content
• Normally uses a wide set of information
processing, creation and communications
tools
“The decline of the compliant learner’. P. Goodyear 2004

Steven Warburton, 2007
5

Pedagogical Control
Transactional Control
Negotiated
Teacher Control Control Autonomy
Content, lecture Dialogue Self directed
assessment, Discussion, learning
wikis
Dron, 2006

Tony Karrer 2008

Openness challenge of Educational in
the21st Century
• Making the Formal Informal – Making the
Informal Formal (Martin Weller, OUUK)

The Theory of Cooperative Freedom
(Morten Paulsen)
• Affords Freedom to all
learning participants
• Voluntary, but
compelling
participation
• Means promoting
individual flexibility
• Means promoting
affinity to learning
groups and networks
Paulsen, 2008

Choosing the right for the right
amount of openness?
10
http://www.go2web20.net 2795 logos as of February 05, 2009

Taxonomy of the ‘Many’
Dron and Anderson, 2007
Group
Conscious membership
Leadership and organization
Cohorts and paced
Rules and guidelines Metaphor :
Access and privacy controls
Virtual classroom
Focused and often time limited
May be blended F2F
11

Formal Learning and Groups
• Long history of research
and study
• Established sets of tools
– Classrooms,
– Learning Management
Systems
– Synchronous (video &
net conferencing)
– Email
• Need to develop face to
face, mediated and
blended group learning
skills

Groups as Communities of Practice
• Wengler’s ideas of Community of Practice
– mutual engagement – synchronous and notification
tools
– joint enterprise – collaborative projects, “pass the
course”
– a shared repertoire – common tools, LMS, IM and doc
sharing

LMS and Distributed web 2.0 Group
Tools

Problems with Groups
• Restrictions in time, space, pace,
&relationship - NOT OPEN
• Often overly confined by teacher
expectation and institutional
curriculum control
• Usually Isolated from the authentic
world of practice
• “low tolerance of internal difference,
sexist and ethicized regulation, high
Relationships
demand for obedience to its norms
and exclusionary practices.” Cousin
&Deepwell 2005 Paulsen (1993)
• Group think (Baron, 2005) Law of Cooperative Freedom
• Poor preparation for Lifelong Learning
beyond the course

• Groups are necessary, but not sufficient for
quality learning.

Network
Shared interest/practice
Fluid membership
Friends of friends
Group
Reputation and altruism driven
Emergent norms, structures
Activity ebbs and flows
Rarely F2F
Metaphor: Virtual Community of Practice
17

• Collaborative Learning In
Groups
• Cooperative Learning in
Networks (Paulsen, 2008)

Networks Add diversity to learning
“People who live in the intersection of
social worlds are at higher risk of
having good ideas” Burt, 2005, p. 90

Networks
Communities of Practice
• Distributed
• Share common interest
• Self organizing
• Open
• No expectation of meeting or even knowing all
members of the Network
• Little expectation of reciprocity
• Contribute for social capital, altruism and a sense
of improving the world/practice through
contribution
(Brown and Duguid, 2001)

Creating
Incentives to
Sustain
Contribution
to Networks
The New Yorker September 12, 2005

Alec CourosVoiceThreadhttp://voicethread.com/#q.b67978.i350123

\"the network contains within it antagonistic clusterings, divergent sub-
topologies, rogue nodes\" Galloway and Thacker, 2007 p. 34
“There is crack in everything, that's
how the light gets in” Leonard
Cohen
Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/eeblet/423397690/

Network Pedagogies
• Connectivism
– Learning is network formation: adding new nodes, creating
new paths between people and learning resources
– “Learning can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a
database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and
the connections that enable us to learn are more important than our
current state of knowing.” Siemens, G. (2007)
• Partcipatory Pedagogy- Students as content-co-
creators
• Complexity
– Learning in environments in which activities and outcomes emerge in
response to authentic need creates powerful learning opportunities
– Learning at the edge of chaos
– Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity and Education
See the Networked Student by Wendy Drexler
24

Network Tool Set (example)
Text
Text
25
Stepanyan, Mather & Payne, 2007

Access Controls in Elgg

Network
Group
Collective
‘Aggregated other’
Unconscious ‘wisdom of crowds’
Stigmergic aggregation
Algorithmic rules
Augmentation and annotation
More used, more useful
Metaphor:
Data Mining
Wisdom of Crowds
Never F2F
27

3. Formal Education and
Collectives
“a kind of cyber-organism, formed from people linked
algorithmically…it grows through the aggregation of Individual,
Group and Networked activities” Dron& Anderson, 2007
• Collectives used to aggregate, then filter, compare, contrast and
recommend.
• Personal and collaborative search and filter for learning
• Smart retrieval from the universal library of resources – human and
learning objects
• Allows discovery and validation of norms, values, opinion and “ways of
understanding”
28

Collective Tools
29

Collectives, Privacy & Identity
• Best way to protect personal integrity is by creating a
robust but realistic web presence.
• Your actions are being mined, best to be a miner rather
than a lump of coal!
• Active social net users are more socially active and
integrated than non users (Ellison, Steinfield, &
Lampe, 2007)
• Use of Blogs reduces feelings of alienation and
isolation among online learners (Dickey, 2004)
• When perceived interest and benefits
increase, willingness to provide personal data increases
(Dinev& Hart, 2006)

Collectives, Communications and
Privacy
• The end of privacy as currently conceived
• Development of the affordances of Web for “privacy protected”
control.
• Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) tools to control access or
unauthorized release/sharing of data
• “PETsPlus – tools to transform otherwise privacy-invasive
technologies into privacy-protective ones, with little or no loss of
functionality”. See Searchlight Ontario Privacy Commissioner Ann
CavoukianCBC Search Engine Podcast – Jessie Brown
• Creating a positive (non zero-sum) return such individuals will
participate in data exchange ofprivate information for knowledge
gains without loss of privacy control.
• Users must be knowledgeable to make effective and non exploitive
trades

Taxonomy of the Many
Network
Group
Collective
Dron and Anderson, 2007
32

Net Technologies
Web 2.0 Tools
LMS
Network
Group
Collective
Dron and Anderson, 2007
Semantic Web Tools 33

Types of Teaching Different teachers –
different tools
1 Teachers who teach curriculum want:
1 Attendance and participation monitoring
2 Quizzes and gradebooks
3 Content management and distribution of teacher created and
filtered resources
2 Teachers who teach learning want:
1 Tools for individual and collaborative construction
2 Tools for reflection, self and group assessment
3 Content management (tags, spaces, organizational views) of teacher,
student created and web resources
4 Spaces for exploration and discovery
5 Networks for developing learning skill and social capital
6 Aggregators for assessing net-wide student artifact construction
3 Teachers who want it all!

Tools Create Behaviours and Attitudes
• “The confluence of constrained mental
models of teaching and learning, plus forces
that privilege problem-minimizing strategies
over the messy engagement of deeper
teaching and learning have trumped, for now,
the potential of the building’s innovative,
collaborative spaces.” Brown & Peterson, 2008

Critique of LMS
• LMSs concentrate on the course context.
• All resources are loaded and linked within the
overall structure of a course.
• LMSs have an inherent asymmetric relationship
between instructor and learner in terms of
control of the learning experience.
• The learner’s role is one of passive acceptance of
content and limited permissions set by the LMS.
• Nearly all learner experience is designed to
engage content in exactly the same way.

We publicly assert that all users of the
social web are entitled to certain
fundamental rights, specifically:
* Ownership of their own personal information,:
their own profile data
the list of people they are connected to
the activity stream of content they create;
•Control of whether and how such personal
information is shared with others; and
* Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal
information to trusted external sites.
A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web
Authored by Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington

Why destroy artifacts of
student learning?
• If people are continuously working in a walled
garden like Moodle, they are going to have to
make separate copies of the work if they
consider it worth keeping. Dave Cormier
• “In order to protect my own digital
identity, sometimes I have to filter content
that I share publicly. “ Sharon Peters

Design Characteristics of Next Gen
Systems
• Learning is Integrated into Real Life
• IP and Persistence – Student ownership and control
• Expanded tools for negotiation
– Real time communication– audio, video and immersive
– Voting, polling, presence indicators
• Expanded tools for artifact production, storage and
retrieval
• Connections beyond the courses, programs, peers and
institutions
• Increased transparency and Control
• Parcellation and Scale, Adaptability, Stigmergy (Dron 2007)

Engagement in Formal Education
• A social component
– Meeting and engaging new friends
– Discovering new social interests
• A Cognitive component
– Being challenged
– Being exposed to how much you don’t know
– Observing others with incredible interests and skills
• An institutional component
– Efficient and effective policies
– An organization that cares about your more than your
tuition.

Presence Pedagogy- Steve Bronach
“Presence is the sense of being in the immediate
vicinity of others.”

Presence Pedagogy-
Bronach et al (2008)
• Creating an environment that effectively capitalizes on
the presence of others requires
– Thematic design of space
– Promotion of presence
– Build help seeking and giving capacity
– Rich tools and support for collaborative work
– Stimulating emergent communities or practice
– Appropriate problems
• Both Asynchronous and Synchronous forms of
presence

From AEtZone
Appalachion State University
• Active Worlds based, 7 years continuous use
• closed virtual community
• “As of April 25, 2007, AET Zone is a patent-
pending application. A patent entitled
\"Virtual Education System and Method of
Instruction\" (application serial # US
11/739,866) was registered with the USPTO.

Network and Collective Tools are
Very Disruptive
• Christensen (1997,2008)
studies innovation and the
impact of disruptions.
• A disruptive technology
“transforms a market whose
services are complicated and
expensive into one where
simplicity, convenience,
accessibility and affordability
characterize that industry” p.
11

Unless steered by very wise leaders organizations will:
“shape every innovation into a sustaining innovation - one
that fits processes, values, and the economic model of the
organization - because organizations cannot naturally
disrupt themselves” (Christiansen et al. p. 74
From Leigh Blackwell’s LMS Comic at
http://flickr.com/photos/leighblackall/sets/1733041/

Is the Personal Learning Environment
a threat or a promise for education?
• A PLE is a user constructured web interface into the
owners’ digital environment.
– Content management integrating personal and professional
interests (both formal and informal learning),
– A profiling system for making connections
– A collaborative and individual workspace
– A multi formatted communications system
– All connected via a series of syndicated and distributed
feeds to each other and selected others.

\"The PLE is an approach not an
application.\" Stephen Downes
• An approach that:
– Values and builds upon learner input
– Protects and celebrates identity
– Respects academic ownership
– Is Net-centric
– Supports multiple levels of socializing,
administration and learning
– Supports communities of inquiry across and
within disciplines, programs, institutions and
individual learning contexts

What is your PLE?
Sue Perth, Western Australia, AU
2008 survey of 196 web 2.0 types

Scott Leslie’s PLE Diagramm
See others at Scott’s Wiki at http://edtechpost.wikispaces.com/PLE+Diagrams

Scott Wilson's PLE and the Institution image

Why service-orientation could make e-learning standards obsolete?
Vossen&Westerkamp, 2008

Professional,
Produsage,
Email
Hobby, Personal
networks
News
Identity
I
PLE Production
Formal
Tools
Education
Provider(s)
Personal Hosting: Social Networks Collections
Blogs, E-
Photos
portfolios, Presentatio
Books
ns, Profile Bookmarks
Tags Resources

Stages of PLE adoption
• imagination (we become aware of the
technology)
• appropriation (we identify ways it could be of
use to us)
• objectification (we personalize the technology
and its uses)
• incorporation (we make the technology part of
our lives)
• conversion (we become identified with our use
of the technology) Ling 2004

Connectivist Education
• Goal of education is to create connections
among and between learners, resources, ideas
and knowledge.
• How can we do this within contexts that are
closed to the outside world?

• Formal learning as a transition to lifelong
learning using and building networks
• Training wheels for open communication:
– Compulsion
– Feedback and evaluation
– Practice at critical reflection
– First steps at creation of an academic and
professional online presence

• As technologies on the Internet grow
increasingly sophisticated and open, the
ability for Information Technology
departments to integrate these new
technologies decreases.Michael Farmer, 2009

• “Every technology application hosted by an
institution or available on the web can be a
technical and bureaucratic obstacle course, or
it can be a launch pad into the learning
imagination.”
• Envisions a “harvesting gradebook”
aggregating contribution, multi media,
automated - as killer app of educational future
(Brown & Petersen, 2008)

Innovator Open Courses
Sustainable Future?
• Siemens and Downes (2008) ~2000 enrolled
19 paid fees.
• AlecCouros: Open Connected Grad course
• David Wiley 4th version, University of Utah
• Subscribe NOW (free) www.irrodl.org for
special issue on Open Educational resources
edited by Wiley fall 2009.

The promise of open, yet credited
courses – Is it real??
• Cormac Lawler on WikiUniversity:
– Giving people access to spaces in which they can share, discuss, and
question their knowledge
– Developing open peer review models around this knowledge
– Improving awareness about how knowledge is constructed
– Framing and critiquing knowledge in a learning context (and giving
people access to this open learning context)
– Developing peer review models around these learning contexts
– Improving awareness about how learning works
• http://cormaggio.org/?p=26Cormac Lawler, 2008
• What about accreditation??
• WikiEducator moving from Commonwealth of Learning to
Athabasca http://wikieducator.org/

Operational proximity
• We believe that these key concepts
– participation;
– emergence;
– operational proximity; and
– responsiveness—increase the possibility that
learning, from diverse professional and
organizational perspectives, can actively
contribute to the evolution of distance education
teams and their CMSs. Whitworth and Benson (in
press –emerging issues

Web Tool Affordances
Content Presence Communi- Reflection Collabor-
Discovery cation ation
Blogs
Social Tagging
VoiceThread
Wiki
Web Conference
-Elluminate
Moodle
From Siemens and Tittenberger, 2009

Conclusion
• Learners and society needs new types of
education and learning opportunities that
exploit groups, networks and collectives
• This requires new types of learning technology
that are controlled by individual learners
• The adoption of these disruptive technologies
is worth the gain!

• “The pessimist complains about the wind, the
optimist expects it to change, the realist adjusts the
sails.” William Arthur Ward (1921 – 1994)

\"He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes;
he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever.”
Chinese Proverb
Your comments and questions most
welcomed!
Terry Anderson terrya@athabascau.ca
http://cde.athabascau.ca/faculty/terrya.php
Blog: terrya.edublogs.org