Keynote at Athabasca University Graduate Students conference- Sept. 2012.

1. Athabasca Grad Students
Research Conference
Edmonton, Sept. 2012
Terry Anderson
(with lots of help from Jon Dron)

2. Learning
Living Researching

3. • Learning
– Pedagogies
– Connectivism
– MOOCs
• Living
– PLEs
– Social Networks
– Athabasca Landing
• Researching
– Open Access Press, Journals and Citations
– Julie’s Blog

4. Learning in a Networked Era
• Three Generations of Education Pedagogy
(Anderson &Dron, 2011)
• Cognitive –Behaviousim
• Constructivism
• Connectivism

5. Behaviourist/Cognitive Knowledge Is:
• Logically coherent, existing independent of
perspective
• Largely context free
• Capable of being transmitted
• Assumes closed systems with discoverable
relationships between inputs and outputs
• Readily defined through learning objectives

6. Constructivist Group model
• Membership and exclusion, closed
• Hierarchies of control
• Focus on collaboration and shared purpose
• teachers: guides
group
6

7. Connectivist Learning Principles
George Siemens, 2004
• Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or
information sources.
• Learning may reside in non-human appliances.
• Capacity to know is more critical than what is currently known.
• Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate
continual learning.
• Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts
is a core skill.
• Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all
connectivist learning activities.

8. Connectivist Learning is Emergent
• the very uncertainty and lack of predictability
of learning outcomes will be the key factor
that adds value to a learning community
• emergent systems will provide the necessary
triggers to enhance knowledge and
understanding
• emergent learning will be one of the critical
triggers to unleash individual creativity (Kays&
Sims, 2006,p. 411)

10. Two Genre’s of Moocs
cMOOC
• OrigionalSeimen’s – Downes -Cormier
– Connectivist pedagogy “knowledge is actuated
through the process of a learner connecting to and
feeding information into a learning community” Kop &
Hill 2008
– Aggregates distributed posts, no centre
– Large enrollment, many ‘lurkers’ no formal
assessment
– Heavy involvement and communication with
‘teacher/facilitator”
– Ex. Change12, CCK08, EduMoo

11. Massive Open Online Courses
(MOOCs)
Coursera Hits 1
Million Students,
With Udacity Close
Behind (Aug. 2012)
Follow MadelaineBefus’ Landing Blog at
https://landing.athabascau.ca/blog/owner/madelainebe

12. MITx - Stanford xMOOC
• Structured learning activities, instructivist cognitive behaviourist
pedagogy
• Heavy content interaction, little to no teacher-student interaction
• Centralized admin via LMS/analytics engines
• 2011 Stanford AI course 160,000 registered, 25,000 completed all
exercises, -85% drop out?
• some accreditation by institutions – not Stanford
• Udacity, Coursera, venture capital, spin offs
• MITx – adds assessment and certificate of completion from
MIT/UCLA/Harvard
• Machine Marking and Questions of authenticity?
• Colorado State first to offer credit after challenge exam- Athabasca
to follow??

13. ConnectivistMooc
Gordon Lockhart
http://gbl55.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/mooc3.png

14. Your opportunity to enroll in an
Athabasca MOOC
• CDE courses MDDE 622: Openness in Education
– pay for credit, enroll for free
– Starts next week
– Teachers George Siemens and Rory McGreal
• AU removing MOOC barrier by offering credit for
undergrad courses through PLAR and Challenge
exams
• Don’t miss Inge de Ward’s session on MOOCs in
this conference

15. Join an ATHABASCA MOOC
• MOOC on Openness in Education:
http://open.mooc.ca/about.htm

16. The Modes of Interaction
by Anderson and Garrison (1998)
The COI model
(Garrison, Anderson, &Archer, 2000)
Distance Teaching & Learning Conference 2011, Madison, Wisconsin 16

17. The Interaction Equivalency Theorem
by Anderson (2003)
• Thesis 1. Deep and meaningful formal learning is supported
as long as one of the three forms of interaction (student–
teacher; student–student; student–content) is at a high
level. The other two may be offered at minimal levels, or
even eliminated, without degrading the educational
experience.
• Thesis 2. High levels of more than one of these three
modes will likely provide a more satisfying educational
experience, although these experiences may not be as cost-
or time effective as less interactive learning sequences.
Distance Teaching & Learning Conference 2011, Madison, Wisconsin 17

18. Open Scholars Use and Contribute
Open Educational Resources
Because it saves time!!!

19. You are a Learner and a Teacher

20. Promising Signs of Change
• Ubiquity and multi-
functionality of web 2.0
• Growth of openness and
online resources, OERs
• Increasingly effective
pedagogical models and
learning activities
• Real educational
alternatives – including
private sector
• Death and retirement

21. Learning Summary
• Lifelong Learning options and quality are
expanding very quickly.
• Is your day expanding as well???

22. Living in Networked Era

23. • Creating Your Personal Learning Environment
http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.ca/2010/07/physiology-of-ple.html

26. • The Trick is to blend appropriate amounts of
social, tech, learning, earning and living.

27. Your Online Networks

28. 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

29. Networks Celebrate and Stimulate
Cognitive Diversity
Arises when from:
• different types of information and knowledge
perspectives
• different ways of viewing the world or a specific problem
interpretations
• different ways of categorizing a problem or partitioning
perspectives
• heuristics yielding different ways of generating solutions
to problems
• predictive models - different ways of inferring causes and
effects (Fisher, L. (2009)

31. Consumer Reports surveyed 2,002 online
households, including 1,340 that are active on
Facebook, for their annual State of the Net
report.
•Some people are sharing too much.
•Some don't use privacy controls. Almost 13 million users said
they had never set, or didn’t know about, Facebook’s privacy
tools. And 28 percent shared all, or almost all, of their wall
posts with an audience wider than just their friends.
•Facebook collects more data than you may imagine.
•Your data is shared more widely than you may wish.
•Legal protections are spotty
•Problems are on the rise.

32. Athabasca’s Social Network

33. What is the Landing?
• Walled Garden with Windows
• A Private space for AU
• A user controlled creative space
• Boutique social system
• Networking, blogging, photos,
microblogging, polls, calendars,
groups and more
• Differentiating and merging
work, from school, from fun

34. Multiple rationales
collective
Sustaining ties
Cooperation
Making ties
Sharing
Ad hoc networks
Serendipity
Knowledge diffusion net set Interest -orientation
Social capital
Sense-making
Social presence
Collective intelligence
Intentional discovery
group
Courses
Committees
Research groups
Study groups
34
Centres and departments
34

35. group net set
Where to look first

36. Popular activities
Wiki
photosub-
wiki page
Blog posts (4135)
Discussion topics
bookmarks Files (4023)
Wire posts (2335)

38. Hard spaces

39. Filling gaps with people

40. Stretching tools

41. Filling gaps the Landing way

42. The Landing Platform
1,424 plugins available, our installation using about 90
Fairly strong development team, plotted roadmap
42

43. Usage Data 2011-present
4,176 users and 313 groups as of Sept. 2012

44. Landing Groups
• 313 Groups
• Average of 10.79 members each
Type of Landing Groups
LANDING ADMIN (LA), 3%
RESEARCH (R), 7%
STUDENT GOVERNMENT
(SG), 5% UNDEGRAD
COURSES (UC), 16% UNDEGRAD COURSES (UC)
SOCIAL (SO), 4%
GRAD COURSES (GC)
ADMIN (AD)
BEYOND COURSE (BC)
BEYOND COURSE
(BC), 12% SOCIAL (SO)
GRAD COURSES
(GC), 29% STUDENT GOVERNMENT (SG)
RESEARCH (R)
ADMIN (AD), 24% LANDING ADMIN (LA)

45. Weekly Blog Posts

46. What Type of Networked Academic Persona
Have you Created?
Barbour, K., & Marshall, D. (2012). The academic online: Constructing persona through
the World Wide Web. First Monday, 17(9).
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3969/3292.

47. Diagram by Peter Sloep

48. Summary
You are Living on the Net
• Need to customize your Net experience for
your needs and personality
• Networks add diversity to our lifes
• The landing offers a safe way to expand your
networking within an Athabasca context

49. 3. Researching in Networked World

50. Open Scholar
• “the Open Scholar is someone
who makes their intellectual
projects and processes digitally
visible and who invites and
encourages ongoing criticism of
their work and secondary uses of
any or all parts of it--at any stage
of its development”.
– Gideon Burton Academic Evolution
Blog

51. Open Scholars Create:
• A new type of education work maximizing:
– Social learning
– Media richness
– Participatory and connectivist pedagogies
– Ubiquity and persistence
– Open data collection and research process
– Creating connections

52. Open Scholars Self Archive
Quality scholarship is peer and public
reviewed, accessible, persistent
syndicated, commented and
transparent.

53. Open Scholars Apply their research

54. Open Scholars do Open Research
• Open Notebook: a laboratory notebook that is
freely available and indexed on common
search engines. …it is essential that all of the
information available to the researchers to
make their conclusions is equally available to
the rest of the world.
• —Jean-Claude Bradley

55. Open Scholars License, Use (and re-use )
Open Data

56. http://www.concede.cc/index.php/products/open-data-set-on-ugc-in-
higher-education/ EU Project

57. Open Scholars Filter and
Share With Others
Using Twitter for research projects

58. Open Scholars Know How to License
Their Work for Maximum Impact

59. A Tale of 3 Books
Commercial publisher E-Learning for the 21st Open Access
Century
934 copies sold at $52.00 100,000 + downloads &
Commercial Pub.
Buy at Amazon!! 1200 sold @ $135.00 Individual chapters
2,000 copies in Arabic
Over 1500 hardcopies sold
Translation @ $8.
@ $40 Translated Chinese

60. Open Scholars Write and Read
Open Access Books
aupress.ca
www.irrodl.org

61. Open Scholars Publish in
Open Access Journals
• Open Access Journals have increased citation
ratings:
– Zawacki-Richter, O., Anderson, T., &Tuncay, N. (2010).
The growing impact of open access distance education
journals – a bibliometric analysis. Journal of Distance
Education, 24(3)
– Analysis of Google citations for 12 Distance Education
Journals (using Harzing’s Publish or Perish tool)
– 6 open access, 6 commercially published
– Early results show roughly equal citations/paper, but
recent gains in citations by open access journals

62. Are you Ready to Take the Pledge??
• I pledge that:
– “ I will no longer submit my
work to closed
publications, nor participate
in review or editorial
functions for closed
publications.”

63. Multiple Rationales and Means:
Learning, Living, Researching
collective
Sustaining ties
Cooperation
Making ties
Sharing
Ad hoc networks
Serendipity
Knowledge diffusion net set Interest -orientation
Social capital
Sense-making
Social presence
Collective intelligence
Intentional discovery
group
Courses
Committees
Research groups
Study groups
63
Centres and departments
63

64. Summing Up – Landing Poster Star
Julie Shattuck
• EdD Candidate
• Documenting her mixed method’s
research process
• Started a group on Design-Based
research
• Posting personal reflections and stories
Contributing to Athabasca’s by Learning, Living and
Researching in a Networked era
Follow her on the Landing!!

65. CU on the Landing !!
Your comments and questions most
welcomed!
Terry Anderson terrya@athabascau.ca
Blog: terrya.edublogs.org