Facing the Future Together: Technology, Communication & the Future of Higher Education
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Presentation on November 17, 2014 at Seattle Pacific University looking at the opportunities for existing higher education practices to better utilize software platforms and the idea of online structure when forming learning models. In short, our dominant notions of structure are outdated and limit rather than grow the opportunity for the Internet to transform education.
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Facing the Future Together: Technology, Communication & the Future of Higher Education
- 1. Facing the Future Together Technology, Community & the Transformation of Higher Education Rolin Moe, Ed.D.
- 2. Practical Tools for Today • OER Research Hub • Personal Learning Network • Federated Wiki • Domain of One’s Own • Hashtag Learning (as seen in some MOOCs) • Hybrid Pedagogy • Known
- 3. 1. History of Infrastructure Artist Unknown (German School) – 1848 Revolution, Berlin
- 4. THE CONSTR UCTION OF THE DRAMA. 1 15 p /ze. Betw e e n these thre e p a r ts l ie ( th e pa rts of) t he r ise a n d th e fa l . Ea ch of th e se fi v e pa r t s ma y c onsist of a sin g le scene , or a su ccession o f con - n ected scene s, bu t th e c lim a x is u su a l y com p osed o f o ne chief scen e. C’ Th ese p a rts of th e dram a , (a ) ' int rod uct ion , ( é ) r ise , cl i-m a x , (d ) re tu rn o r fa l , (e ) b d ca ta st rop he, ha v e ea ch w h a t is p ecu lia r in p u rpose a nd in con-structio n. Be tw ee n th em sta nd a 0 thr ee im p or ta n t sce n ic e f e cts, t hro ug h w h ic h th e p a rts a re se pa ra te d a s w el a s b oun d tog e th er . Of the se th ree dram a tic m o m en ts, o r crise s, on e , w h ic h in dica te s the be g inn in g o f t he sti r ring a ct io n, sta n d s be tw een the in trodu ction a nd t he r ise ; the secon d, the beg in nin g of the coun ter-a ction, betw e en th e cl im a x a nd th e r eturn ; th e t hi rd , w hich m u st rise o n ce m o re before th e ca ta s-t rop he , betw een th e retu rn a n d the ca ta st rop he. Th ey a re ca l ed he re the ex ci ting m om en t or forc e, t he t ra g ic m om en t or force, a n d the m om e nt or force o f the la st su sp ense. ‘ Th e op era t io n of th e f i r s t i s ne ces sar y to ev er y pl ay ; the second an d t hi rd a re g o o d b ut not in dispe n sa b le a ccessories. In th e fol ow ing sec tio ns, there fore , th e eig h t com - p one nt p a r ts of th e d ram a wi l be discusse d in th ei r n a tu ra l order . Th e [ ntrodu ctz'on— It w a s the custom of th e a n cien ts to com m u n ica te in a p ro log ue, w h a t w a s p re-su pp osed for th e a ction. The p rolo g u e of So pho cles a s”. ee fi i i a' e . §: ~ §_ 3 3.SS = . 2 — ' i Ge n era ted on 2 0 1 4 -1 1 -0 8 1 6 : 0 0 GMT / h ttp : //h d l.h a n d le.n et/2 0 2 7 /coo.3 1 9 2 4 0 1 4 4 2 4 1 4 1 Pu b lic Dom a in in th e Un ite d Sta tes, Goog le-d ig itized / h ttp : //w w w .h a th itru st.org /a ccess_ u se# p d -u s-g oog le Gustav Freytag Karl Stauffer-Bern, 1886-1887
- 8. 2. Theory vs. Practice
- 9. Digital Classroom by Dan Hetteix via Noun Project: (CC BY 3.0)
- 10. 2. Technological Transformation & the Open Web
- 22. 3. Creating Our Future
- 24. Butterfly by gabontur - CC BY-SA 2.0
Editor's Notes
- Before we begin, I would like everyone to think about EdTech, a term I am using here because it is general rather than limiting. EdTech can be anything you see where education intersects with technology. And I want you to think about two things you see working well in EdTech, two places you see technology having a positive effect or a positive potential or just good, and two places where you see challenges, or obstacles, or elements you may worry about. If you have a device with you, there is a Google doc you can share to; if not, we can (write them on board?)
- Clay Shirky says no laptops in his class (and has research to boot); I beg to differ (and I have research too; sharing later). This is not an airplane; mobile devices can remain on and laptops open at all times during the presentation. Here is list of the specific elements we will look at today; links to their sites available at my website
- Usually when an educational technologist talks about revolutions in a presentation, it Is as metaphor for change. This is a popular trope, used in the last two years by technological and political luminaries such as Bill Gates, Sal Khan, Thomas Friedman, Sebastian Thrun, Jeb Bush, Jerry Brown and President Barack Obama. I chose to start my presentation with a picture of the 1848 Revolution of the German Lands in full awareness of the revolutionary metaphor. What is interesting about this presentation is how the subject of this painting has a literal importance to education, or more the way in which educators and the system of education view learning infrastructure. The revolutions across Europe and much of the globe between 1848-1849 represented a time when people demanded rights and freedoms separate from rule of a select few. These revolutions are viewed by history as failed, as the fervor that united working- and middle-class people against totalitarian government could not hold up to the existing power, resulting in a more despondent and disenchanted population than existed prior to the fight. As with many revolutions, the fall-out included significant advances in philosophy and culture, as the artists and theorists of the day attempted to make sense of their hope versus their reality. In Germany, we have Karl Marx and Richard Wagner taking their disillusionment in very different yet relevant directions. While it would be tidy to stop at Marx and Wagner and provide a simple narrative thread of history, the years and decades post-revolution were filled with artists, authors and philosophers who were integral to the development of German thought and culture but who have largely been forgotten by the world as time has progressed. There were naturalists, realists, romantics. There was the Bierdermeier and the Junges Deutschland. Their views of society both converged with and contradicted one another, a struggle to define their personal meaning but also define what Germany means.
- One of these prominent individuals in post-revolutionary Germany was an author and professor named Gustav Freytag. His writing is from the school of realism, he supported the revolution, and he was distressed when it failed to result in meaningful change. Like many middle-class Germans of the time, he saw the post-revolution threat to Germany not coming from the aristocracy as much as from the working-class elements who engaged in looting and rioting, groups such as the Junges Deutschland. I have spent the first three minutes of a presentation on educational technology discussing esoteric 19th Century German history, which riveting as it may be, will lose my audience if I cannot connect it to education, much less technology. But I wanted to introduce Dr. Freytag because, amongst his works of narrative realism and his histories of the German middle-class, in 1863 he wrote a dramatic criticism called The Technique of the Drama, a rejection of the popular romanticism of the day for a realism he linked to Aristotle’s Poetics, the classical Greek comedies and tragedies, and the neoclassical English writings such as Shakespeare and Marlowe. And, buried on page 115 of this writing is a simple diagram Freytag points to as the basic structure of the great classical and neoclassical writing. These works shared a common five-act structure: an exposition, a period of rise, a climax, a period of fall or a return, and a catastrophe. I should ask a psychologist what it means that the realism author Freytag saw all great stories ending with a catastrophe. Freytag’s Technique of the Drama gained an international popularity. Not only was it easy to digest, but it focused on the existing canon of literature and propelled longstanding popular works in academia to a place of greater prominence. The diagram was but one part of Freytag’s opus; he had suggestions for how to properly use verse and meter, dramatic action, setting construction, the influence of Christianity on neoclassical literature, and even the proper ratio of characters to scene. Technique of the Drama is a fitting example of an artifact, a text befitting a space and time and providing utility to those within that situated environment. Authors of a romantic sensibility would not have found favor with Freytag’s Technique, and the connection he makes between a certain segment of historical literature and German Realism of the 1860s became less and less useful as more and more theories and variations entered the landscape. When Emile Zola began writing about literature from a naturalism lens in 1880, scholars found Freytag’s work outdated. This is the nature of artifacts: they serve a use-value for the people of the time and provide a snapshot into the thoughts of the past for us today.
- Fast-forward to 151 years after Freytag. Today, in classrooms across the country, students will be learning story structure through the Freytag’s Pyramid diagram, or if they are in grades K-6, the Witch’s Hat. This is the structure from which Jossey Bass, ReadWriteThink, Scholastic and Pearson build their curriculum for writing instruction. A story has five parts, shown here to be equal: a conflict, rising action, a climax, falling action, and a resolution. There are some variations on what Freytag saw in a story (note the removal of catastrophe for a more politically correct resolution), but the essence of Gustav Freytag’s dramatic structure model in 1863 is the predominant manner in which America teaches story structure to its students. This is problematic, mainly because the vast majority of stories have not held this type of structure for at least 130 years. A book such as A Separate Peace has a lot of realist elements, and its climax would be in the middle when Gene shakes the tree branch and Finny falls. But a naturalist would say such a bare bones reading ignores the truth of the book, which is a look at adolescence surrounded by the horror or World War II. In the original Star Wars, the place of Freytag’s climax would be when Luke, Han and Obi-Wan realize Alderaan no longer exists. It is almost impossible to shoe horn a book like The Grapes of Wrath, or a movie like Interstellar, into Freytag’s Pyramid.
- The problem is, we try. We continue to force Freytag’s Pyramid onto stories not because it is a universal instrument for dramatic structure, but because it is the instrument for dramatic structure we used in the past, and will continue to use in the future. We have come up with other diagrams to denote structure, such as Syd Field’s 1984 diagram for looking at a Hollywood blockbuster movie. It is another example of an artifact: it is specific to a space and time that has resonance for those in the environment, and it does not suppose it is the universal structure for story; even there, it fails to apply to many blockbuster films such as Inception, Pulp Fiction or even The Wizard of Oz. We could let Freytag’s Pyramid represent realism and classical writing and letSyd Field’s structure fit for Hollywood storytellers and Emile Zola for naturalism and Proust for modernism and Joseph Campbell for heroic archetypes. However, we have anointed Freytag’s Pyramid as the way in which story is and should be structured, and if the story a student is analyzing or writing does not fit, it is up to the student to make it fit, whether that means changing the story or massaging the structure of the analysis.
- Like Freytag found solace in the structure of classical literature, formal education finds solace in the structure of classical education. Of the ancient civilizations, Greek and Roman schools provided the foundation for the renaissance of higher education at the dawn of the last millennium. The classroom was primarily a place of direct instruction, presented content by a teacher and expected to engage and memorize it with little in the way of scaffolding. It was not that scholars and teachers, referred to in the Greek as pedagogues, were not interested in exploring manner and method for instructing students; younger children learned their alphabet through song, and the study of drama and art was both studied and practiced. But sharing content was only one of an ancient school’s three aims. The other two were to collect texts and artifacts, and to curate them. 2500 years ago, content was not ubiquitous. While the alphabet could be easily memorized and thus put to verse and meter, communities and city-states had a collection of knowledge and artifacts that had to be preserved, protected and shared. When we think of school we think of the student with the stylus and the wax tablet, but perhaps the border around this picture is just as important when thinking about ancient schools. The purpose of the ancient schools was more aligned with the purpose of a modern museum than a modern university. 2500 years later, where are we? We still teach the alphabet through song, and have a greater number of musical choices. And when the budget allows, we continue to provide both scholarly and practical experiences in drama and arts. Education is not left to young males of middle-class and higher means, but is available to every person, with systems of assistance designed to help reach that goal. And technology has created an opportunity for everyone with access and a device to communicate, collaborate and create with one another w/o geography, time or physical limitation being a detriment. Using the same technology, the content secured at school sites on scroll and under lock, key and guard can now be everywhere; people have the ability to gain knowledge for free without paying the tuition of a university. Yet despite the changes we are still looking at an educational structure based on the needs of ancient communities, when content only existed on a scroll in the library or in the brain of a teacher, and the most pressing exercise was to transfer that content to a student.
- This is the foundation of the predominant educational software used in higher education for faculty to interact with students: the learning management system, or LMS. And I want to stop here for just a moment to talk about the graphics in this presentation. Every image is licensed through the Creative Commons, an organization dedicated to promoting openness and shared resources while still protecting the historic aims and intentions of copyright. I have the right to own my image and use my image for financial gain, but I also have the right to allow others to share and use my image and to in some cases build upon it or change it or share it, and we will talk more about this. I stop here to say this because there are some great images representing LMS that are not labeled for Creative Commons reuse; it’s jarring how many LMS graphics are copyright-protected while not respecting the copyright of the LMS provider’s logo. A good one - http://edtechreview.in/dictionary/360-what-is-a-lms The LMS today is a behemoth of educational software, various providers attempting to be all things to all people. It has the features to function as a gradebook, an analytics instrument, a social network, a publishing platform, a third-party content conduit, an automated grader, a plagiarism checker…it is the Burger King of education, an opportunity for faculty and administration to have it their way. This is an evolution of the original LMS, which was more of a CMS, or course management system, where the onus of the software was in providing course materials and resources to students and collecting student assignments and surveys for localized aggregation. Historically, the LMS is structured around faculty notions of curating and sharing content; however, the evolution of the system puts a greater emphasis on administrative responsibilities. Faculty across the nation complain about the LMS. This is for good reason; we are keenly aware of the idea of Learning Management as educational structure at odds with existing learning theory and personal teaching practice. That said, faculty do not want to abandon the LMS. They have learned it and it is easier to manage than the pre-LMS world. 3. The LMS has value to the education system. Like Freytag’s Pyramid befitting classical literature, there are elements of formal education that the LMS excels at, most notably as a central nervous system for the University.
- In the faculty-centered or administrative-centered view of the LMS, we have not considered a student-centered LMS. This continues the notion of the student as a passive user or reciptacle of content who provides data and information to an administration, not a dynamic aspect of the community whose needs may have evolved beyond the traditional structure. It is dangerous to adhere to the LMS’ vision of education structure, because while we may unconsciously assume its relevance, it is changing constantly not because it is re-evaluating its product with contemporary learning theory, but because the marketplace demands change and it will follow the market. *Blackboard – started as a content management service in the mid 1990s. Today it enables blogs, vlogs, wiki, messaging, and many other buzz terms around education. If a teacher asks for it, Blackboard will build it. *Canvas – (note: I am building a Creative Writing MOOC in Canvas at present) Developed with teachers in mind, its customizable options are more, eh, personal than other products *Sakai – An open-source alternative to the existing LMS marketplace. *NextThought – an effort to embed the opportunity for social learning and communication in every element of course management. But just because we can fit these things into a LMS, does it mean we should? The LMS was built along the same structural design, which was a traditional course, built along the same structural design as the schools of 2500 years ago. Despite learning theory today telling us this is not an ideal structure for learning, we continue to add and amend to this structure because it is already there.
- *Go back to Shirky comment about closing laptops – there is an argument that the LMS supports this kind of thinking; Michelle Pacansky-Brock argues that through the ubiquity of the LMS (99% of universities rely on a singular LMS for all of its online course offerings), we reinforce the mental model where the course is a closed space, so the notion of an open laptop and access to the Open Web is seen as a threat rather than an opportunity.
- The first place we can see the real transformative power of technology is in the open movement. Sharing content, information, code, architecture or even power is not a novel happening thanks to the Internet, but what the Internet allowed was for a psychological desire to connect with one another to manifest through the sharing of resources old and new. *SETI program a brilliant example *Apache as the structure for the Internet/WWW built on Open Source *Because the Internet is largely designed by a community of sharers, our initial forays into the Internet were sharing forays, and although it may not seem to be as shareable as it once was, the design promotes collaboration, communication and creativity.
- Slide on Soren Nipper, John Daniel and Tony Bates – distance education scholars who looked at technology as the key to solving the problems they saw in their field. *Remember, the LMS was a descendent of Computer Aided Instruction, the idea that a computer could take a student through content; at the heart of the design was sacroscant content. In distance education, content had been the driving force because of necessity – there was not an opportunity to have low-cost communication between student/teacher or even student/student. Scholars worked to design learning that could supersede, but always opined for two-way communication (technology here – radio and TV provided communication but only of the one-way sort). *So when low-cost telecommunications via the Internet become more readily available in the late 1980s, distance education is the first to really see it as transformative, an opportunity to now enable two-way communication in the learning space. (Drop in the Garrison quote here)
- Slide about what makes the Internet transformative: opportunity to communicate, collaborate and create as was not possible before *This ties into the constructivist theory of learning, where students actively construct knowledge rather than passively acquire it. What makes this theory work so well in the digital age is the opportunity to create artifacts for learning, items that can exist with meaning for those in the community but also have phenomenological meaning for those outside it. In short, there is a direct relationship between the artifact and the builder’s learning, a secondary relationships between the artifact and the members of that environment, and a tertiary relationship between the artifact and those outside the environment, who can utilize it as a launch pad into a new field of inquiry. *This Open opportunity promotes sharing, lifelong learning, further inquiry, etc. Look at Wenger and situated learing as well as communities of practice, and how communities must have elements of openness for others to join and perpetuate the community. Also, you cannot create community…community is an organic happening.
- Back to the LMS: it has the tools to allow people to communicate, collaborate and create. To an extent. These tools are add-ons from the original intention of the product. And this is especially seen with the closed aspect of an LMS: the knowledge and artifacts created within LMS are closed off to anyone outside the direct community, but they also close for the learner, the creator. With some systems, this happens at the end of the semester. With others, this happens when a student graduates. The event is not an artifact, as it disappears. The space is not a community, as it also disappears, and it probably was not a community to begin with.
- Slide on what something means when it is OER: Reuse, Remix, Revise, Redistribute Note that OER is not a community, but rather an opportunity to engage with artifacts designed not only to provide a launch pad into a new world for learners, but to adapt and freely utilize both in an effort to make the artifact more viable for the learning community but also to inspire unique learning artifacts that can further both the specific community and the field-at-large. There is a fear in making everything open – this likely has something to do with the institutional memory of how we structure education, as a closed system of content transfer. Whether looking at the institutional history of what happens if our content is lost, or the idea of a closed mental model, jumping into an unknown is frightening. Luckily, there is precedent for doing this – MIT’s Open CourseWare. Over the last 14 years, MIT has gone from putting its syllabi online to putting everything associated with a course online – lectures, videos, assignments, discussion prompts, etc. This does not undercut their purpose or their “business model” because education is not a distribution of content but an amalgam of content, context and creation. We are not content shops but spheres for knowledge and wisdom development.
- This presentation is not a call to broadcast every bit of the university experience on the Internet. Rather, it is a look at what the future can be, a future if we build our structures and design our pedagogy with the needs of the student as the primary call. Few universities have the same mission as MIT; most are designed to be pillars of the local community with reach for a national and international scope for a specific segment of the population. There is use for the LMS, but we should not suppose the LMS onto all learning because we have the LMS.
- FEDERATED WIKI
- DOMAIN OF ONE’S OWN
- HASHTAG LEARNING
- HYBRID PEDAGOGY (open publishing)
- WITHKNOWN
- PART 3 – CREATING OUR FUTURE
- This happens thoughtfully and incrementally; each classroom is its own environment, and transforming it should be the focus of our attention, not toppling campus walls. One commonality about each of these technologies and applications of ubiquitous technology is its focus as a situated, environmental use of technology to better a learning environment. There are no claims of democratizing education, globalizing education or “solving education.” Education is not a system to be decreed from the top down, but rather from the bottom up. But as far as addressing some of the existing crises of higher education, each of these fits the bill and does so with a nod to educational psychology and an understanding of how technology can be an opportunity to further thought, learning and culture. Every one of these initiatives is borne of the OER movement, open source and open access. Domain of One’s Own, as seen through Reclaim Hosting, is the only $$$ and its cost is remarkably less than the open market.
- Change comes with care, community and collaboration. This is already happening here: discussions of the future through learning communities, assessing teaching methods through empirical research, building artifacts for faculty use in developing pedagogy. We can also see the development of some of these before-mentioned initiatives at SPU; the SPU EdTech Sandbox is playing with some of these elements. Our job is to further that, to talk through the questions, to scaffold the development and growth, and to work alongside one another as colleagues.
- Transformation rather than Revolution. The right structure for the right environment. And don’t be afraid to keep your laptops open and mobile devices on. TIPS: Make sure to break into moments of discussion and contemplation. Do not break into jargon so effortlessly; this is about teaching to all levels. This position is about bridging the gap between techies and non-techies. Need to be approachable on all aspects here.