Cognitive Cocktail

JMax of SFU's Publishing Program advocates for radical trust in the implementation of online education systems

What began as a general information session on the use of wikis for teaching and learning in higher education, quickly evolved into a stimulating session on radical trust in online systems, deliverd by John Maxwell, faculty member in the Master of Publishing Program at Simon Fraser University.

John outlined the evolution of his thinking about online learning and teaching by describing the various projects in content management and discussion management that he has been a part of during his career as an information architect, software developer, and now faculty member and teacher. His presentation, Using Wikis: Release the Community of Inquiry Trapped Inside Your Education Technology, captured the attention of session participants and demonstrated an elegant approach to architectural simplicity for online learning and teaching.

JMax described his various forays (versions i, ii, ii, iv, and v) into using wikis with his undergrad and graduate classes at SFU, emphasizing that what he was after was the establishment of a community of inquiry approach where learners benefitted not only from the scaffolding he was doing for the class by providing outlines, notes, resources, and links, but also from the contributions of peers. Initial fears of anarchy and chaos were replaced by the satisfaction that the online architecture ("the simplest thing that could possibly work" - W. Cunningham) did not get in the way of learning and promoted active participation on the part of students.

Press this button to listen to a few snippets from John Maxwell's preso.

A lesson for us in John's presentation has to do with trust in a teacher's intuition about what will work with students. By taking control of a wiki-based online learning environment and using its simplicity as a lightly structured approach to teaching allowed JMax to provide a convivial tool set that resonated well with students.

In an age where feature-rich online learning environments are being prescribed for use by instructional technology departments across a multitude of higher education institutions, it is indeed refreshing that the means exist for creative teachers to seize control of the technology in a manner that allows them to do for themselves what they believe will be a best match with students' needs.

I am reminded of what a wise person once told me: professional development is something you do for yourself; it is not a treatment that is done to or for you.

Journalist Mark Schneider delivered keynote address on "truthiness" at the ETUG Spring Workshop

June 1 and 2 are the dates for the Educational Technology Users' Group (ETUG) Spring Workshop at North Island College in Courtenay, BC (in the beautiful Comox Valley).

This morning's kickoff keynote address was delivered by Mark Schneider, visiting lecturer in the School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia. Schneider's topic was Cutting the Cord: Wireless Technology in Education.

Mark began his talk by citing the latest trend analysis tools from Google and by wondering aloud just how these new tools will get used. More importantly, Schneider questioned how we will make sense of the increasing cognitive load from media messages that we read, see, and hear. Schneider continued by challenging the audience to examine the truthiness in media reports to which we are subjected from all directions in a typical day.

Mark demonstrated some wonderful examples of the use of mobile and wireless geographical information system (GIS) technologies and highlighted the use of global positioning systems (GPS) and GIS technologies in new consumer applications that make location-specific information instantly available.

He ended his talk by imploring the audience to consider ways in which lightweight mobile technologies could be used by educators to deepen the understanding of phenomena and events by learners.

We did joust a little bit during the question and answer session about the relative value of reportage and the eyewitness accounts of political, social, cultural, and other events to which legions of bloggers around the planet have given an alternative voice.

However, Mark's preso was definitely an alternative and refreshing view on the uses of mobile technologies in education, and for that the audience gave him a well-deserved thank-you round of applause.

Bravo Mark.

TLt2006 - Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

Whew.  I'm worn out.  Spent the last 2.5 days in Saskatoon at the TLt2006 Conference hosted by the University of Saskatchewan and sponsored by Campus Saskatchewan and its partner institutions. The energy and enthusiasm that was brought to the event by both participants and presenters was infectuous.

We enjoyed the high energy input of Dr. Curtis Bonk of Indiana University at Sunday evening's kickoff event. Curtis talked about four "emerging storms": emerging technologies, escalating demands, erased budgets, and enhanced teaching. He showed us countless examples of the ways in which educators are exploring and appropriating technologies to support their work - everything from podcasts, to vodcasts, to high end simulations.

Bonk continued with his high energy pace, complete with wigs and props, at Monday's presentation on blended learning.  I had a hard time keeping up as I jotted down one cool idea after another. It was indeed a treat to have two doses from Dr. Bonk's Traveling Medicine Show in such close proximity. I was drained but happy and strangely enlightened by the experience.

The concurrent sessions that I had the opportunity to attend were all interactive treats for me.

Highlights included a session on live podcasting by Richard Schwier, Alec Couros, Dean Shareski, and Rob Wall. These guys did a great job of engaging the audience in a discussion on the power of social neworking while simultaneously, recording, editing, and sweetening the digital input from the audience, and then producing a live podcast on their EdTech Posse blog site at the conclusion of the session - a masterful demo for educators on the power of the possible.

A second session on leadership by Diane Janes focused on the theme of community bridges: building an e-learning stratgey from the ground up. What could have been a dry presentation was turned into an engaging interactive event by Diane who did a quick overview on the discovery process necessary in order to build a systemic e-learning strategy.  With the participants quickly acquainted with a common baseline of information, she proceeded in smart teacherlike fashion to assign a group breakout process that we would use to do the discovery process ourselves.  The result was a room full of diverse opinion expressed in an orderly fashion within the groups, then culled and sorted into categories, and presented for all of us to consider.  We got more work done in 40 minutes than I'm sure many similar committees get done in a month of meetings.

Even the luncheon was jam packed with activity. Over a 1.5h lunch period we ate, met in cracker barrel thematic discussion groups, switched tables to join other discussions, and literally underscored the conference theme of building community by our group discussion activities.  I felt that by the end of the morning I met just about every participant at the conference, and that this was an intentional design of the conference organizers.

A banquet and awards ceremony closed day one of the conference. During the meal, individuals and groups from Sasktachewan's colleges and universities were recognized by their peers with awards for the innovation and creativity with which they support distance learning students. Lots of stellar projects were recognized.

On day two my own keynote, Lessons from the web 2.0: building contemporary online communities, was my own contribution to the conference. After presenting my work for almost 1.5h, I got a chance to interact directly with lots of the participants who had questions or comments they wished to make.  Throughout the day I had plenty of other one-on-one sessions with conference participants in reaction to my preso and it was heartening to hear their reactions and compliments.

By mid-morning, I was on my way to the computer science building where Jim Greer and his colleagues Gord McCalla and Terry Roebuck demonstrated the University of Saskatchewan's iHelp system. This is an open source content management and contextualized help system knitted together in a manner that provides a wonderful peer managed support system for the university's computer science students. It was clear to me that iHelp has lots of power as well as analytical tools that could be used manage a state-of-the-art peer support system in just about any online situation.  I was very impressed by the work of Greer et al. and by the energy that grad students and TAs at USask have brought to adding features and services to iHelp in response to student or situational needs.  I'm now trying to figure out how best to incorporate iHelp into my own projects in  British Columbia.

The question remaining for me at the end of the TLt2006 event on Tuesday was how the conference organizers planned to capture and nurture all the energy and enthusiasm shown by participants until the the 2007 version of TLt.  In my wrap up summary I suggested to the audience that they react in blogs that a number of conference participants were putting up, or that the organizers quickly invest in a community of practice online support system.  Somebody needs to bottle the latent energy that these Saskatchewan educators showed and pour it into an online support system that would benefit the larger Saskatchewan educator community going forward.

CCL Learning Communities Retreat - ACTION PHASE

Day 2 of the CCL Learning Communities Retreat involved reflections by participants. Break-out group activities allowed all of us to review the characteristics of learning communities that were identified by the group as a whole on Day 1.

• Sustainability
• Innovation
• Inclusiveness
• Leadership
• Common good
• Accessibility
• Partnership

The break-out session also challenged participants to identify areas of focus that could advance a learning culture in British Columbia.

Tackling complex subjects such as defining the nature of learning communities is a messy business. And, despite the best intentions of everyone involved in the process, the outcome often results in divergent opionions on the nature of the beast, like the proverbial blind men and the elephant. In the case of this retreat, there was divergent opinion about the nature of learning communities, although not always openly or fully voiced.

One retreat participant suggested, and I've tested the theory, that if you Google (verb) the term learning communities you will primarily find reference links to electronic and virtual networks if you use Google in North America, and links to learning communities about place if you do so in Europe. 

He was right to a degree.  See what you think by trying the two links below ...

Results of a Google search on learning communities from Google Canada
Results of a Google search on learning communities from Google UK

What struck me about the retreat was the difficulty in getting beyond personal perspectives and moving towards any real kind of collective consensus on how to proceed beyond problem identification. Even the visioning process to conjure up and tell stories about what an ideal world, 20 years out, might look like in learning community terms, was too abstract, and ungrounded, and lacked a visceral problem statement that compelled attention.

John Abbott provided additional input on the afternoon of March 8 with a view to loosening the logjam of contemplation.  However, for me the storytelling approach, like myth-making, has passed its prime. 

Contemporary think is about reportage, I believe - using actual case studies and eyewitness accounts to highlight issues and to build solutions from the stimulus of need. From these stimuli emerge communities of interest and influence.

In this way, The Laramie Project scenes presented by student cast members from Lord Byng Secondary School became the most powerful and authentic stimulus of the two-day retreat. The student performances were based on current fact. The isuses raised were profound. And, clearly the need within their own school community to deal with issues of tolerance and inclusion were evident from the student reports and feedback to the retreat participants.

If I was to take away a single nugget of wisdom from the two-day retreat, it was a suggestion raised by a participant towards the end of the second day, to cast a wider net in our search for inspiration about the nature of learning communities and our quest to promote their formation.

With luck the CCL organizers will take this suggestion to mind, and will also search for authentic (and possibly, local) reportage that can provide the basis on which to point the solution of learning communities at a future retreat or planning meeting. Until then, learning communities for some may continue to be a solution in search of problem.

Promoting a Learning Community in British Columbia

TODAY WAS ABOUT VISION

Today was the kickoff for a retreat at Harrison Hot Springs sponsored by the Canadian Council on Learning as part of the 21st Century Initiative (Canada).

The purpose of the retreat is to examine how we can create a learning community in BC. The three areas of focus are:

1. to bring people together to build on existing initiatives and experiences;
2. to identify common goals and perspectives;
3. and, to develop a plan for how to move forward

There are 30 delegates at the retreat representing different age groups, regions, and sectors in British Columbia.

CONTEXT SETTING

Chris Kelly, Superintendent of the Vancouver School Board, provided a context for today's proceedings. He cited art exhibits, reports, and initiatives as contextual indicators of the forces at play around us. Initiatives cited included:

• Massive Change (art exhibit)
• Progress Board Report
• The Learning City initiative
• Atlas of Child Development
• Imagine BC

Chris eloquently presented a series of factors and issues that from his perspective could inform the discussions about learning communities over the two days of the current retreat. They included (paraphrased):

• Learning is essential to the well being of the person
  
• Development and change is around us - dynamic, sustained
• Unbounding of institutions. Mandates need to extend and connect themselves to actual needs of all people in all sectors
• Core metric - quality of life - observed experience - a measure of well being
• Centrality of learning to life?
• Our work needs to transcend professional and organizational zones of interest
• Are there inter-relationships between planes of interest - or lack thereof

BACKGROUND DATA

John Abbott of the 21st Learning Initiative presented background research and information on the state of the planet, with particular reference to resource depletion and questions of sustainability.

John referenced the nature of schooling and its relationship with everything else in the world. He emphsaized contextualization as an imperative for all teaching and learning - possibly requiring activist teaching and administration for us to move ahead in the current context.

He asked, "Why aren't we better storytellers?" - asking us why we are doing what we are doing?

John emphasized some key recommendations, outlined below, that he asked the participnats to consider as they engaged on discussions of learning communities.

• Curriculum of the future - the ability to see the hidden connections between phenomena - becoming "stewards of our humanity"
• Balancing thinking with doing
• Understanding what makes people tick
• Subsidiarity - a la Gateggno - the subordination of teaching to learning

ADDITIONAL STIMULUS FOR AN ACTION AGENDA

The day ended with a presentation of scenes from the play, The Laramie Project, presented by cast members from Lord Byng Secondary School. This play challenged audience members to consider issues inclusion and tolerance in its discussion of learning communities. 

Discussion with cast members following the presentation revealed the depth of feeling and learning that this work has engendered in the students as well as their classmates and the school community.

TOMORROW IS ABOUT ACTION - hopefully

The simplest thing that could possibly work

I recently had the chance to have a catch-up conversation with John Maxwell, Assistant Professor in The Master of Publishing program at Simon Fraser University. The chat surfaced a number of forward-looking insights from JMax on e-learning and teaching, the future of publishing, and views on emerging information architectures that instructors and developers should note.

John Maxwell talked about why he has moved away from conventional course management systems to use a wiki as his primary course delivery and student community tool.       

He also talked about new ways of looking at information architectures for teaching and learning, and offers provocative opinions about publishing and the world of books in an era influenced heavily by Google.

More about John Maxwell's work can be found here.

Press this button to listen to my conversation with John Maxwell.

The Promise and Perils of Desktop Slideware

This is a short paper for IAT 814 at SFU Surrey (SIAT) ...

The Promise and Perils of Desktop Slideware

Introduction

This paper deviates slightly from the assigned task of providing a critical review of a high quality paper from the visualization research literature. Instead, it focuses on the consumer level knowledge representation and information transfer issues associated with the use of presentation technologies such as PowerPoint, also known as slideware. The paper does not explicitly focus on the minutiae of information visualization techniques as outlined by Ware (2004). Instead it critically reviews the macro issues of visual information presentation associated with PowerPoint, a computer-based desktop presentation tool that is used an estimated 30 million times a day by end-users in all parts of the world (Keller, 2005).

PowerPoint was designed in 1984 and was later purchased by Microsoft to become a key component of its Office suite of business communication tools. It featured a set of templates, colors, and fonts for creating horizontally oriented pages that could be projected like 35mm slides using a video projector. The innovation of PowerPoint was its consumer focused tool set that provided an easy-to-use design interface and a host of projection techniques that included builds, fades, and wipes that had been difficult or expensive to achieve previously with 35mm slides.

PowerPoint was an early example of the killer app, a software tool that embodied the qualities that Ivan Illich called conviviality (Illich, 1975). Illich believed that people needed tools to make the most of the energy and imagination each had. The popularity and growing use of PowerPoint since its invention could be deemed a demonstration of its conviviality. However, since 2001 critiques of PowerPoint have begun to appear that bring into question the actual conviviality of this ubiquitous tool. Writing in the Annals of Business section of The New Yorker in May 2001, Ian Parker wrote, “PowerPoint, which can be found on two hundred and fifty million computers around the world, is software you impose on other people (Parker, 2001).”

The Perils of PowerPoint

Parker (2001) went on the to critique the structural biases inherent in PowerPoint from the perspective of its influence on the organization and presentation of information, noting that PowerPoint “edits ideas,” and that it is “almost surreptitiously, a business manual … with an opinion – an oddly pedantic, prescriptive opinion – about the way we should think (Parker, pg. 76).”  What Parker was referencing was the sequential format of bullet points that PowerPoint has popularized, making it easy for speakers and presenters to organize their thoughts on screens and then mechanically lead an audience through the key messages they wish to communicate. The AutoContent Wizard in particular, was seen by Parker to be a recipe for business presentations that in many cases needed minimal factual additions to make it produce a finished presentation. The apparent polish with which PowerPoint presented information Parker noted, lulled audiences into accepting even fragile business information as fact, a concern voiced by Edward Tufte in his article in Wired Magazine (Tufte, 2003b).

Tufte’s Wired Magazine critique of PowerPoint is a shortened version of his longer essay titled, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (Tufte, 2003a). In the short version for Wired Magazine Tufte used colorful rhetoric to capture the attention of readers, using the power of the printed page and his superior command of language to outline the failings of PowerPoint and to make his central point that PowerPoint presentations “elevate format over content.”

What Tufte did in his article was use the power of prose to demonstrate what he believed could not be done using the sequential slide-based format – convey a message clearly, accurately, and completely within the limitations of the medium. He noted that a typical slide contained 40 words, which was about eight seconds of silent reading. Thus, a complete presentation required many slides that audiences were compelled to follow sequentially at the presenter’s pace.

Tufte emphasized that the sequential format of slideware introduced two major problems with information representation. The sequencing of information throughout a presentation on separate slides made it difficult for an audience to understand context and evaluate relationships between information presented. Tufte believes that visual reasoning works best when relevant information is presented side by side, a condition that is often difficult to emulate in PowerPoint, especially when data intense tables are required.  PowerPoint has resolution limitations that inhibit the ability of presenters to display complex tables on slides, and worse makes it almost impossible to display side-by-side comparison tables.

Tufte’s ideas on the presentation of quantitative information were expressed in detail in his 1983 book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Tufte, 1983). The baseline concepts introduced in that work are those of graphical excellence and graphical integrity. Many of the concepts are relevant today to the display of information using slideware, and would make a valuable appendix to the user manuals for PowerPoint and its analogs from other software vendors. Tufte notes that graphical displays should:

• Show the data
• Induce the viewer to think about the substance rather than about methodology, graphic design, the technology of graphic production, or something else
• Avoid distorting what the data have to say
• Present many numbers in a small space
• Make large data sets coherent
• Encourage the eye to compare different pieces of data
• Reveal that data at several levels of detail, from a broad overview to the fine structure
• Serve a reasonably clear purpose: description, exploration, tabulation, or decoration
• Be closely integrated with the statistical and verbal descriptions of a data set (Tufte, 1983)

Tufte’s 1983 book pre-dated the design of PowerPoint software and was aimed at graphic designers and publishers who produced complex information for print. The limitations of the 1983 work and its recommendations for graphic display were further underscored in Tufte’s 2003 essay, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (Tufte, 2003a). Tufte’s background is in the display of graphical information for the print medium, a medium that affords relatively high-resolution display. A central point in his 2003 work is the limitation for information presentation inherent in PowerPoint that can be attributed to its extremely low resolution.

With low resolution comes dangerous tendencies for information display and knowledge representation according to Tufte – “over-generalizations, imprecise statements, slogans, lightweight evidence, abrupt and thinly argued claims (Tufte, 2003a).” The article outlines examples and provides sample slides that demonstrate the inadequacies of PowerPoint for the presentation of statistical data. Through analysis of newspaper, magazine, and slide-based data, Tufte noted that data graphics on PowerPoint templates showed only 10% to 20% of the information found in typical new graphics.

Another criticism leveled by Tufte is that “bullet outlines dilute thought.” Because the default format of most slideware is the bullet list, users typically use this format and find themselves confined to short phrases to represent important information. In worse cases, nested hierarchies of bullets resemble computer code and impede comprehension by audience members. Worse still is that bulleted lists leave relationships unspecified, and sometimes even confuse membership, sequence, or priority within highly nested displays.

In his worst-case example of bulleted data presentation, Tufte used the actual NASA slides prepared by engineers assigned to diagnose the potential impact of the launch debris that hit the space shuttle Columbia’s wings on take off from Cape Canaveral. Based upon the manner in which the data was presented in PowerPoint for analysis and decision by senior NASA staff, Tufte believed he could demonstrate the flaw in the decision-making process that lead flight control staff to believe that the shuttle could safely re-enter the atmosphere without the burn-through of the wing sections that were damaged by heat tile loss on launch from the Cape. The implications of this argument and the clarity with which Tufte demonstrates the logical flaws in the NASA PowerPoint presentation makes a powerful case for judicious use of presentation slideware when mission-critical data is presented for evaluation.

It is Tufte’s contention that the metaphor that drives PowerPoint is that of the software corporation. It is this metaphor that has given us the tightly nested bulleted lists and highly structured modular and sequential slide-based formats.  He believes that PowerPoint is suited best for marketing and sales pitches that depend upon messages and slogans that can be delivered in a few words. A better metaphor for presentation according to Tufte is good teaching, with its core ideas of explanation, reasoning, questioning, content, evidence, and credible authority – concepts that are at odds with the default market-pitch format offered by PowerPoint and other slideware.

Summary

In his critique of PowerPoint as a visual presentation tool, Edward Tufte presented well-reasoned and clearly supported arguments and examples that should provide users of slideware software with a cautionary viewpoint as they plan and execute their own information presentations. His notion of good teaching as being the metaphor to emulate for information display or knowledge transfer, provides a challenge to users of interactive media and presentation software tools.

Clearly the hardware and software tools at our disposal have not yet reached the level of sophistication required to achieve the kinds of presentation in electronic format that is currently achievable in high-resolution print. Nonetheless, the core concepts for visual data display that Tufte noted as early as his 1983 work must remind us that in visual presentations, graphical excellence and graphical integrity are the goals to which we must aspire.

References

Illich, I. (1975). Tools for conviviality.   Retrieved Jan 12, 2005, from http://www.incae.ac.cr/ES/clacds/proyectos/naciones_digitales/construyendo_escenarios/documentos/Illich%20Chapters%201_2_3.pdf

Keller, J. (2005, January 5).  Killing me Microsoftly with PowerPoint. The Chicago Tribune.

Parker, I. (2001). Absolute PowerPoint: Can a software package edit our thoughts. The New Yorker, p. 76.

Tufte, E. R. (1983). The visual display of quantitative information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.

Tufte, E. R. (2003a). The cognitive style of PowerPoint. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.

Tufte, E. R. (2003b). PowerPoint is evil. PowerPoint corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely. Wired Magazine, 11(9).

Ware, C. (2004). Information visualization: Perception for design. New York: NY: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.

Convergence of the Convivial

Right now I'm noodling the focus for my PhD thesis.

Based on the pilot studies I've conducted, and the papers I've written and researched during the coursework phase of my studies, two themes are emerging as interesting areas for further enquiry:

Requirements for On-Demand Computing in Knowledge Work Settings
There is a growing need for design research in the area of requirements engineering for on-demand information and knowledge management systems that can evolve quickly in an increasingly fluid business environment to meet emerging business needs.

Interorganizational and Networked Knowledge Management
Can individuals in one organization learn from the learning practices of individuals in other organizations?

This is a question that would require an understanding of the role of corporations and their employees in supporting a knowledge ecosystem world view.

Do corporations learn in interaction with others, and how does learning diffuse from one organization to another, is a research problem that would investigate how knowledge is created and transferred in exchange relationships between organizations, or between employees of organizations in their dealings with peers in other organizations.

A next level of analysis might be to research how knowledge moves within "networked" relationships and the ways in which knowledge is adopted, appropriated, or tranformed in different organizational contexts.

The potential research problems range from small to HUGE.

Contextualizing Conviviality

Everybody I know has a cell phone, a PDA, a laptop, or a combination of devices that seems to be part of their personal tool kit.

I've been wondering for while now just how convivial their tools are, and how they actually optimize their tools for personal productivity.

During the summer of 2004, I conducted a pilot phenomenographic study with a small number of senior managers from the business and academic worlds in order to test a qualitative methodology for gaining insights into the habits and practices of knowledge workers when using computer-based knowledge support systems - such as the web.

Specifically, I wanted to know how and when the study participants used computer-based tools to further their knowledge of trends and practices in their areas of interest.

The findings of the pilot study were illuminating and offered insights into how better tools for knowledge support might be designed. From a preliminary analysis of the data, four major themes emerged:   

• Client-driven or customer-driven concerns brought a focus to information and knowledge acquisition
   
• The importance of colleagues, people, mentors, and communication networks as knowledge acquisition tools
   
• The importance of human-mediated knowledge (mediated by reputation, authority, credibility) as key content sources
   
• The importance of the web and web-based research tools as knowledge acquisition methods – but primarily to gain access to human-mediated content in the form of email, blogs, wikis, network forums

Although the subjects of this pilot study were a very small subset of knowledge workers, the data indicated a desire for knowledge acquisition that was human-mediated and that included colleagues, co-workers, and mentors as trusted sources.

The questions I was left with and continue to ponder are from a macro-level design perspective:   

• What are the configuration and customization requirements for computer-based tools to support knowledge work?
   
• How are convivial tools defined in the context of knowledge work?

Tools for Conviviality

Picking up on the notion of personal digital collections ... I'm a fiend for new computer-based tools, especially those of the genre that are supposed to make you more productive. Daily, I scan the Apple OS X download site for updates to tools I already have, or for new ones that promise to be the the one.

Occassionally I'm surprised by the clarity and vision of a new application.  More often, I'm disappointed.

The most useful tool I've come across over the past year is iView Media Pro, a small but highly effective application for cataloguing media files by employing a simple drag and drop interface. The application was designed for professional photographers and digital media producers, but it would work for anyone who wanted to have a visual catalog of all of their media files, including photos, video clips, graphics, audio clips, or web pages.

Using iView Media Pro made me think about what makes for a useful productivity tool. I remembered a concept from Ivan Illich that he called the convivial tool. Illich believed that people need tools to make the most of the energy and imagination each has.

To me, conviviality is the essence of why someone would want to adopt a computer-based tool or practice.

My PhD research in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT) at Simon Fraser University is focused on this theme of conviviality, and more directly on what it takes to design or customize knowledge management tools that suit the situated learning practices or performance support needs of knowledge workers.

Repositories R Us

Three years ago at an IMS Global Consortium event held in Vancouver, BC, I was asked to take a position on the learning object repository phenomenon that was driving much of the IMS development effort worldwide.

As a huge fan of what was happening with peer-to-peer (P2P) technology and the Napster era, I called my talk Repositories R Us. Nobody paid much notice to the talk, and the examples I posed were ignored as the rantings of a techno-lunatic. A PDF of the preso I used for that talk is here.

At the time, the cognoscenti were into heavy metadata, centralized thinking about repositories, and who could build the most esoteric repository tools. BIG repository think was in. What was needed to loosen up thinking on the issues was probably some kind of mental suppository for the repository metadata crew. :-)

All around us, kids were amassing personal digital collections of music, images, and movies - just what we in the tech-ed realm were trying to stimulate on the part of teachers and university instructors - and were largely unsuccessful in accomplishing. The key point missed by the repository crew was to view the problem from the perspective of the end user. Instead, designers and developers were asking what they could do for instructors.

At the same time, some of us were thinking that instructors should be asking what they could do for themselves. University students understood the notion, their "betters" apparently didn't.

In an article in D-Lib Magazine (June 2005), I see I have been vindicated. In an excellent article titled Plenty of Room at the Bottom? Personal Digital Libraries and Collections, Neal Beagrie takes on the notion of personal collections and updates it to includes blogs, wikis, and shared services. He carries through with the notion of personal collections and tools to demonstrate the power in this kind of thinking.

Beagrie's article is right on - repositories r us!  Read it.

CCL Videoconference (June 29, 2005)

On June 29 after attending the OECD Conference on E-Learning in Post-Secondary Education at the Telus Calgary Convention Centre, I went to the University of Calgary iCentre to participate in a cross-Canada videoconference meeting hosted by the newly formed, and federally-funded Canadian Council on Learning (CCL).

Douglas MacLeod, Associate Director, Research & Knowledge Mobilization at CCL was the meeting organizer and brought his usual upbeat and positive attitude to the event. Douglas provided a guiding agenda for the meeting, outlining two main objectives for the participants to consider as they reviewed the current state of the art in e-learning in Canada and looked toward the future:   

1. To not just identify the key issues in e-learning but also to discuss a mechanism for crafting a strategy for dealing with them;
   
2. Give direction to the Canadian Council on Learning so that in the short-term it can help fill in the gaps and in the long-term, aid the community in finding sustained and long-term support.

These were and are good ideas for bringing together a community of interest. However, the participants at the various sites across Canada read like a Who's Who of the usual suspects in e-learning in Canada. This fact alone may spell disaster for this CCL effort. Surely the real answers can and will be found outside this circle of academics and professional research grant winners.

Jamie Rossiter (Rossiter Associates) provided the opening preso and listed some of Canada's strengths and the challenges facing it in implementing e-learning as a viable instructional strategy. He lead the call for:

• An independent arm's length body to organize national standards, facilitate communities of interest, orchestrate discussions and research
• Strategic funding support - especially sustaining funding

My fear continued to rise as the event proceeded throughout the morning, with calls for more government funding, but without any real effort to engage the audience on issues of sustainability beyond sucking at the federal granting teats. Communities of interest arise out of interest, they are not built by government or its agents.  Honest.

One lone voice from Montreal that was almost lost in the videoconference chaos of multiple sites (an Albertan attending a conference in Montreal) suggested that compelling e-learning success stories that would make sense from both a public and/or corporate perspective might invite other levels of participation in research and the implementation of e-learning.

I think the speaker was right on to suggest that the CCL and the videoconference audience consider alternative strategies to the predictable grant grab, and adopt tactics more in keeping with a sustainable approach to e-learning, building a growth pattern more like true communities of interest do, and moving beyond pilot project paralysis.

The videoconference meeting ended with an overview of CCL and a description of the research matrix and funding programs that CCL has created.

Of course, the big questions of the morning came from the academics at multiple sites wondering how much money CCL would make available for their grinding efforts. Answer: 45 projects per year - small and large, full funding with no overhead, not restricted to academic researchers (yeah!!!) - some start-up funding, with about $4M - $5.2M available for research and knowledge mobilization.

In the end, all the lofty talk of collaboration, communities of interest, and dissemination goals conjured up both Yogi Berra and eduSource Canada for me ...

"It's deja vu all over again."

Gee, I hope I'm wrong.

OECD Conference - Calgary (June 27-28, 2005)

I just returned from the OECD Conference in Calgary coordinated by the Canadian federal government and the government of Alberta. The conference brought together a combination of policy makers and researchers from OECD countries to discuss issues in e-learning. The basis for all conference discussions was a report produced in 2005 by OECD titled, E-Learning in Tertiary Education: Where Do We Stand?

The report outlined the findings of a study that was conducted with universities in 13 OECD countries. The research and reporting were coordinated by the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education and described research findings on engagement, pedagogic impact, costs, and ongoing challenges.

The OBHE must be some weird kind of "observatory" for it defined the questions and survey instrument in 2003 and reported on them in 2005. This left me wondering why an institution calling itself an observatory didn't use a more dynamic data collection and reporting mechanism, given that we are currently in 2005 and that the subject of study involved technology and networks in some pretty heavy-duty ways. Isn't there a way to mine data from institutions and report on it in a more contemporary, high-currency manner?

Highlights of the conference for me included some of the following people and presentations:

• Don Tapscott for his keynote, and for what it did and didn’t do
• Ms. Maruja Gutierrez-Diaz, Head of Unit (Innovation and Policy), EU Directorate General for Education and Culture, for being one of the few participants who refrained from touting their own organization and actually provided some enlightened answers to the questions posed to panelists by the organizers
• Sir John Daniel (CEO of Commonwealth of Learning) for pushing hard on the notion that in a global context, learning = common wealth.

Don Tapscott is a well-known Canadian writer and social critic on topics dealing with technology, policy, youth, business, and culture. While I heard lots of criticism of his keynote from academics who did not agree with his approach, Don obviously touched a nerve because he was referenced throughout the conference by other speakers from either a pro or counter-Tapscott perspective.

For me he supplied the audience with the proverbial whack on the side of the head, aiming the whack primarily at status-quo thinkers who remain unwilling to take any risks with research or policy investigation beyond the typical comparative studies - like the research design and the examples cited in the OECD report. These studies simply serve to keep us on the evolutionary path, like the pseudo-classrooms of the future I’ve seen, where all seats still face the front of the room and conventional thought persists. Nothing radical is noted, predicted, or recommended.

Thanks Don - even if you didn’t convince many in the audience about your position regarding the millennial generation and their learning preferences, you at least supplied the kick in the pants that woke up some of the suits - even temporarily.

In a plenary panel session, Maruja Gutierrez-Diaz was asked to respond to the OECD report from an EU perspective. Her very brief comments may have been some of the most important of the conference, for she actually surfaced the potential research agenda for the future. Straightforward statements by Maruja underscored the e-learning dilemma and pointed out where we might harness our research energy.

A few of her points follow (with my interpretations in some cases) …

• Although there is wide acceptance of e-learning, there is also wide acknowledgment that the promise of e-learning has not yet been realized in higher education - let’s figure out why and research best practices and/or potential transformative instructional models that use e-learning
• The use of ICTs to enhance learning should be our focus - an intentional approach to improvement, enhancement, and/or transformation of practice might be worthwhile research avenues to follow
• Link research with practice - that is, get the practitioners involved in the research designs - (I know I’m sick of reading studies based on designs that have had no participative input at the design stage.)
• Consider building the infrastructure for a “wisdom society,” rather than a knowledge society by being explicit about the mechanisms we use in the e-space to engage with knowledge and create wisdom
• Re-examine the pragmatic issues related to acceptance of prior learning assessment in higher education
• Design for learner mobility and accreditation in a global context
• Design for social inclusion - shrink the digital divide

Maruja Gutierrez-Diaz’s final two points were examined in detail by Sir John Daniel as themes in his outstanding presentation.

Commonwealth of Learning's focus is the world scene, so it was no surprise that Sir John’s preso included his co-authors from various parts of the globe, and that the examples he cited demonstrated how the developing world has picked up first world Open Source applications and made them fly in their own social and cultural contexts. Very cool. Not only is the developing world expert at recycling every piece of material goods designed abroad, it is now becoming expert at harnessing the pieces of our technological detritus that have positive potential in the cultural contexts of the developing world.

Sir John Daniel is an eloquent speaker (I’m envious) and used his oratory ability to clearly convey important examples that underscored the big points in his presentation, for which he used alliterative lists as the mnemonics:

• Access, appropriateness, accredited, affordable
• Efficiency, effectiveness, economy

Sir John cited C.K. Prahalad’s, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, as work that could help guide our engagement with the developing world in the use of appropriate technologies for mutual benefit.

The rest of the conference, notably the breakout sessions were disappointing.

Those that I attended had lots of circular discussion, various degrees of touting of personal positions on conferences themes (me included in the research break-out session), and some not-too-subtle angling by the consultants and professional policy courtiers from various levels of government that were in attendance in those sessions.

In the end, the breakout sessions I attended added no new tidbits to the knowledge with which I entered the conversations. Luckily, those sessions did not addle my brain further, particularly the discussions on quality assurance that had the potential to do so.

However, I did find a few kindred spirits, made some new contacts, and had a few pale ales with my pals in the evening after the formal sessions.

My follow up gig was a meeting at the University of Calgary organized by the Canadian Council on Learning.

Read on. Scary stuff ahead …

Foreword

Cognitive cocktail offers open, uninhibited, commentary on happenings, and is my place for posting comments and critiques about items and events that catch my professional interest.