I’ve seen activities from his open class activities in the past, but meeting Alec Couros in person at Open Ed strengthened my resolve and I’ve signed up to participate as a (non-credit earning) learner in his Open Access Course EC&I 831: Social Media & Open Education. The amount of time I’ll have to participate is unclear—and subject to forces outside my control—but enjoying the freedom of participating at my own pace and in the way(s) that work best for me is one of the great things about Alec sharing this experience with the world.

Check out the EC&I 831 course wiki for more information and, if interested, to sign up.

Day Two of Open Education 2009 and I can honestly say I’ve yet to see a presentation that wasn’t at least as good as the best presentations I’ve seen at any conference anywhere.

Gardner Campbell’s “No Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable About Open Educational Experiences” is one of those that had me repeatedly saying to myself “every teacher needs to watch this.” In true Gardner-esque fashion—the model I aspire to—he weaved together the invention of the alphabet, Brazil, Shakespeare and the music of the spheres, and much else besides into a (there’s no other word for it) compelling whole.

I came to this conference seeking hope… hope that despite the brokenness of our educational institutions, good teachers can elevate the profession; hope that despite the toll exacted by the daily grind of working within those institutions, excellence can be had. Gardner’s presentation restored some of that hope… his excellent (and funny) analogy to being given a bag of gold is what I need to keep in mind when I return to the other part of my real world.

My question is, how to maintain that hope? Gardner puts forth a premise that we should be teaching using narrative, curation and sharing. We all like to talk about the regressive factors that hold us back: institutional lethargy, recalcitrant educators, simple fear, technological complexity. But worse still is that as much as those factors exist, progress towards this vision of education is impeded by people at the front. Creating narrative is thwarted by concerns about community building and identity. Curation is pushed back by far-leaning constructivists and discovery-based educational theory promoting leading from behind. Efforts at sharing crumble and dissolve beneath the weight of arguments over licensing and which space should be used. Despite the clarity of these three simple concepts—narrate, curate, share—the world feels exceedingly dark.

Gardner used the example of a quotation that feels like it was written yesterday but was actually the words of Marshall McLuhan from over 40 years ago. I’ve used similar examples from the work of Baltasar Gracian (300 years ago) and Michel Montaigne (500 years ago). The wise words grab our attention and confirm our intuitions and desires… but they cut sharply the other way. Go back 40 years, 300 years, 500 years—go back to Plato and Haraklitus—and the relevance of their words also demonstrates clearly how little progress has been made. How do we keep the faith if the answer to that lack of progress is wait, wait, wait, it’s coming, but not yet?

“In light of 50 years of vast research production, backed by substantial resources and subsidies, is not a redistribution in order, particularly toward teaching?”

After outlining the problem of overproduction engendered by the “publish or perish” system he makes two recommendations for change, including the notion that:

“…subsidizers should shift their support away from saturated areas and toward unsaturated areas, in particular toward research into teaching and even more toward classroom and curricular initiatives.”

Can I hear an “Amen?”

Granting even my significant reservations with “education research,” Bauerlein’s recommendation makes sense. Not only do higher education institutions marginalize the practice of teaching in a variety subtle and not-so-subtle ways, but they’ve created an advancement mechanism with a process that works actively against good teachers, creating an artificial zero-sum environment pitting teaching against research and administrative activities.

Of course the entire system of traditional publishing as a measurement of anything (it never had anything to do with teaching, of course), let alone one’s value to an institution, has become epically problematic given that it evolved—in large part—as a way of determining value in an environment where access and distribution were greatly limited by physical and fiscal constraints. But without trying to eat that whole elephant, is recognizing teaching as an important, core part of the institutional mandate not a manageable and reasonable request?

Among other things she pointed out the SUNY TLT cooperative which provides online faculty development courses in a 4-course sequence, various 1hr webinars and an annual workshop at their Conference for Instructional Technologies (for example, the 2007 CIT conference). Also mentioned: the Course Redesign Initiative and their Faculty Development Program.

Information to be found in the MERLOT Pedagogy Portal could be quite useful in our own faculty development efforts.

Although we are not particularly into MERLOT, the SUNY TLT also shares planning and production materials to help others who want to put on Faculty Development workshops, and I suspect there will be much there that is broadly accessible.

Phil Moss stepped in for a presenter who could not make it and shared another interesting MERLOT subject area, the Developing and Delivering Online Courses Portal, sponsored by McGraw-Hill.

George: The Net Gen Nonsense blog fits right in, of course, with your predisposition– perhaps borne of seeing too much extremism ala Prensky– to be against the notion that learners are changing. And you seem to equate the idea, again ala Prensky, with being mostly– or even significantly– biological.

I suspect that we will see, in retrospect, that there are biological and neurological changes occurring due to technological changes, but it’s not really important. The remonstrations about the evidence remind me of scientists concluding that bumblebees can’t fly and philosophers concluding that there is no physical reality. Like Berkeley, I refute you thus, with the students I teach every term… but I will refrain from kicking them as proof!

More importantly, a whole lot of learning is not about biology but about cognition and the mental processes built on top of that biology. The two points with which you conclude your post ("1) the changed ways in which we can access, interact with, and create information, and 2) the changed ways in which we can access, interact with, and connect to each other.") are changes in learners, and they are changes that happen as a result of living in a very different and quickly changing technologically mediated environment than others. Fight it all you want, but those learners are different. It has nothing to do with age and the biological origins are at best unclear… but it is immaterial. Anyone who pays attention to their students can see this in the divide they face within their classes between the haves and knows and the have not/know nots. Whatever the label, a host of educators nod in recognition of the characteristics regardless of the question of the origins, which has always been my central point in this debate: I don’t care about the reasons as much as I care about the solutions, and I won’t discount what I see and experience because the research (which hasn’t been an enviable guide when it comes to education so far, but that’s a different discussion) isn’t there or isn’t unclear. A refutation would make a difference, but there’s an obvious reason why there isn’t one, and I don’t mean the philosophical bit about proving a negative.

I don’t know how much you teach and how many of those you teach are adolescents, but clearly you see these changes or you wouldn’t so explicitly point out some of the conditions effecting that change in your two concluding points. It’s not as if all of us who teach are likely to be suffering a mass delusion and I think too many people with too many different, varying backgrounds when it comes to experience teaching and knowledge of technology and communication hear the squeaky wheel to be convinced that it’s just an illusion they are bringing to the table.

I won’t pretend to understand most (much!) of Beckett’s Nohow On, but there are two phrases in it that have stuck with me since the dizzying experience of reading those three slim volumes. The opening of the third movement “Worstward Ho”:

“On. Say On. Be said on. Somehow on. Til nohow on.”

Coupled with its famous closing:

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

This extremely loose couplet is Beckett’s exhortation to the tune of “try, try again” or “outwrite the bastards” but with higher stakes than a good poem or story… Beckett is reminding us that to say and do– repeatedly– is to be and and it is imperative that we keep at it until there is nothing else.

I was reminded of this extremely loose couplet while reading “Quantity Breeds Creativity” at Lifehack. There are two obvious educational aspects here which sometimes get overlooked (particularly if you believe, as I do, that the creative process is one of the most important parts of learning):

First, creativity isn’t efficient. There has been a lot of focus in the past few years on network effects, collectives and connectives, learning community and collaboration, much of which has explicitly or implicitly embraced a desire for efficiency. In my experience, creativity is most often fuzzy, vague, messy and characterized by a feeling of not really being sure what one is doing until they have done it. Creativity is driven by a variety of overlapping and sometimes partially opposing forces of experience, knowledge, and desire. In between making something great and making nothing lies a whole lot of making the mundane, mediocre, inessential, and irrelevant. Making something finally real– and thus being in the world– is harnessing the wisdom of the crowd of one… our multiplicitous self.

Second, creativity depends on repetition. This is really an extension of the lack of efficiency. We know from other aspects of our lives that where there is less efficiency there must be more effort to achieve the same goal. There’s a limited– but important!– amount that can be achieved by waiting for the intersection of the perfect moment and the muse. I’m not discounting the inspired stab in the dark, but most creative thought emerges from repetition, and most of that repetition will be, if not failure, something other than success.  Flannery O’Connor once said that she wrote every day because who knew if a day she skipped might have been the day she would choose well?

I see ramifications of ignoring these two facts at work in the classroom all the time. As educators we try to find the most efficient way of teaching, the combination that– when right– will facilitate a particular learning process, frustrated when it doesn’t “work.” It’s not wrong, of course, to want to be efficient– we all have limited time and resources– but I wonder how often we go too far or simply hope for too much clarity in a process that is so individualized. Educators and learners alike often don’t put the tools, concepts, or techniques to work often enough and for long enough to really understand them. If lightning doesn’t strike immediately or consistently enough, promising and productive paths are abandoned.

There’s a bit of magic in the process where wholes become more than the sum of their parts and tools and creativity are melded. No matter how clearly and often I try to explain the value and nuance of blogging, for example, it must be engaged regularly and for a length of time before those lessons become real. It was the same with regular paper journals before and it will be the same when we have cyborg monkey servants in the future. It isn’t luck that these proven models work for some but not for others, it is a product of practice (of the repetitious kind that leads to the Zen kind). To end with a sports analogy to complement the video, think of Arnold Palmer’s famous response to the accusation that a tough shot out of the rough he had just made was luck: “All I know,” Palmer answered, “is that the more I practice, the luckier I get.”

[linktribution: Doug Belshaw]

…these forceful teachers did have a few qualities in common: they enjoyed using their minds; the paid attention to what was going on outside the classroom; they were demanding and generous and patient; they cared passionately about learning; they lived in light of what they knew. They left their mark on me not merely because they passed on knowledge, although that was crucial, but because they demonstrated ways of being fully and richly human.

[...]

"I thought professors had it all together," a woman said.

"I’m hardly a professor," I answered.

"You don’t know everything there is to know about these books?" a man asked.

I laughed. "Not by a long sight."

"Like what Moby Dick stands for? Or why Anna throws herself under a train?"

"I’ve got my hunches," I said, "and I’ve read what a lot of other people think. But I don’t know fur sure. Nobody knows for sure. Not even Melville and Tolstoy."

"No wonder literature’s so confusing," someone said.

"Just like life," another student remarked.

"Just like life," I agreed, "only books hold still so we can look at them."

After that exchange I felt less afraid. I kept making notes for discussion, but left them behind when I entered the classroom. I tried to ask only genuine questions, ones for which I had no certain answers. I learned to bear silence, realizing that it might cover the presence as well as the absence of thought. I allowed my enthusiasm as well as my ignorance to show. When I got worked up, as I often did, about a book or an idea or a cause, the students watched me with shy bemusement, and when I hushed they spoke up with passion of their own. The excitement in their voices gave me courage to keep on trying this difficult profession."

–Scott Russell Sanders
from "Teacher" found in The Country of Language