George Veletsianos, PhD

The purpose of a MOOC? Google and societal well-being

On July 11, 2012

In emerging technologies, moocs, online learning, open

This entry is part of a reflective series of posts/questions relating to online learning, MOOCs, and openness.

MOOCS are everywhere nowadays. Coursera, Udacity, EdX, the connectivist MOOCs (e.g., #ds106, Change11), etc, depending on what lens one is using to examine them, are generating hope, excitement, uneasiness, and frustration. An important question that one needs to ask is: What is the purpose of a MOOC?

MOOCS have different purposes. For example, some MOOCs are built on the idea of democratizing education and enhancing societal well being. See Curt Bonk’s MOOC types, targets, and intents for additional MOOC purposes.

Other MOOCs are built on the idea of improving a specific skills. Today’s EdSurge newsletter included the following note:

GOOGLE’S FIRST MOOC comes in the form of a “Power Searching with Google” course consisting of six 50-minute classes on how to search “beyond the ten blue links.” Classes just started and at last count, over 100,000 people have already registered. Google promises to go way beyond the 101 stuff and dive into advanced features. We’re ready: we’ve been a little stumped at finding a query “to search exclusively in the Harvard University website to find pages that mention clowns.”

Let’s unpack this a bit. What is the purpose of this MOOC? This MOOC will help users make better use of google’s search capabilities. It will also help Google experiment with offering MOOC-type courses and reinforce consumer loyalty.

How does the Google MOOC fare with regards to enhancing societal well-being? Rather than offering courses to teach users how to search better, I would have rather seen Google develop online courses specifically aimed at reducing societal inequalities and enhancing well-being. I would have rather seen a course on “using our tools for speaking out against oppressive regimes” or “using our tools to facilitate the development of community in your neighborhood” or “using our tools to design and develop your own online class.”

I hope that this course is not the last that we see from Google, and that rather than focusing on teaching users a specific skill set, future courses focus on supporting the development of societal well-being.

Introduction to Instructional Design: Videos

By George Veletsianos

On July 5, 2012

In sharing

During the Fall semesters, I teach a course on the foundations of Instructional Design for our MA and PhD students. Two years ago, I shared my syllabus. Last year, I shared one of my favorite activities, in which I ask students to create a digital story comparing two instructional design models. This activity is part of the AECT open content portal, where you can find additional learning objects for educational technology courses.

I am now in the process of redesigning my course to be taught online in the Fall, and I thought I’d share three of the videos that I will be using in case others find them of interest.

The first video describes IDEO’s design process and is intended to introduce students to design thinking:

I use this second video as a discussion prompt for cognitive theories of learning.

And this third one is an instructional video from 1927 that I use to initiate a conversation about efficiency and effectiveness in designing learning materials (and, as a bonus, one from 1937)

Technology, Education, and Learning Institutions in 2025

By George Veletsianos

On June 18, 2012

In courses, online learning, scholarship

“Technology, Education, and Learning Institutions in 2025” is a signature course that I will be teaching for the School of Undergraduate Studies at UT Austin in Fall 2012. Thus, I was excited to learn the other day that George Siemens and colleagues will be teaching an open course entitled The Current/Future State of Higher Education. While the audiences and purposes of these two course may differ, it’s exciting to know that other groups are thinking that it’s important to lead a course that asks participants to think critically about the potential futures and alternative narratives of education. Anyone can make predictions about the future of education (e.g., predictions about the demise of higher education institutions are a dime a dozen). Yet, it’s hard for newcomers to differentiate between wishful thinking, “real” change, incremental change, and potential change. Thus, a well-rounded understanding of educational systems, and the multiple purposes they serve, is important.

Signature courses at UT are interdisciplinary seminar courses for incoming students emphasizing “discussion, critical thinking, short research projects, student presentations, and writing on interdisciplinary topics of contemporary importance.” Importantly, all UT signature courses carry the Writing Flag, meaning that they must meet certain writing requirements in order to ensure that students hone in on their writing skills. To this end, students in this course will write papers describing potential and alternative educational futures and institutions. To instill a sense of commitment, responsibility, encouragement, and hope , I approached the editor of Educational Technology and asked if he was willing to work with me on dedicating a special issue on student’s informed perspectives on the future of education. While we discuss the future of education, I think it’ important to hear from students and learn from what they have to say. Since Educational Technology magazine goes to about 2,000 readers in more than 100 countries around the world, I think that this is a great way to get some of these voices in the mainstream. Our guiding prompt will be the following: If you were going to design an educational system of the future today, what would it look like? This is a question that others have asked as well (e.g., Levin, 2002)

This is how I described the course to potential students:

What will education look like in 2025? What role will technology play in future learning institutions? What will schools and universities look like? Will we invent new forms of education that reside outside of schools and universities? What is the purpose of education and how will it change in the next 10-15 years? Will we still use lectures halls? Will online education be the norm? Are we reaching a point where “anyone can learn anything from anyone else at any time?” Or, are Google, Facebook, and Twitter “infantilizing our minds,” distracting us from meaningful learning and purposeful living? Together, we will answer these questions. Just as societies, governments, and other social groups adapt and change over time, so do institutions of learning, the work that they do, and how they do that work. We live at a transient time for education, at a time where entrepreneurs, politicians, philanthropists, college professors, and university presidents are defining what education may look like in 2025. Together, we will investigate major trends influencing education, and understand how education and learning institutions are changing with the emergence of certain technologies, social behaviors, and cultural expectations.

I’ll be posting my syllabus, readings, videos, and additional learning resources here in due course.

What Would You Do With Years of Online Discussion Data?

By George Veletsianos

On June 6, 2012

In sharing

Justin Reich asks: “What would you do with years of online discussion data?”

He explains: “[Emily] has access to a huge dataset from a for-profit college which includes student outcomes (graduate rates, annual re-enrollment, course completion), student demographic information, and transcripts from online discussion boards.”

And expands: “what could you do with the online transcripts that could teach you something about improving outcomes? How would you go about identifying practices in online learning environments that predicted better outcomes for students? And if you found those practices, could you understand them with enough granularity to make actionable suggestions for educators?”

Here’s what I think: I think it’s great that Justin is asking these questions. The idea of a lone scholar working by herself in an office and churning out papers is a relic of the past. My recommendation would be to publicize the research questions that you will be answering using that dataset, and then to anonymize and publish the data in the same way that biomedical researchers do. Figure out what you are interested in researching out of this dataset, but then make it available to others who may be able to pursue related research questions. Granted, colleges of education may not place a high value on the publication of datasets, but given that you might be providing the foundations for others to answer important research questions related to online education, I would argue that this should be considered an important scholarly contribution that our community should embrace.

Disclaimer: I am not interested in the dataset as the data do not appear to fit within my research interests/agenda.

Week 33 of the #change11 MOOC: Scholars’ online participation and practices

By George Veletsianos

On April 30, 2012

In sharing

I am excited to lead the conversation during week 33 of the #change11 MOOC. I am looking forward to share my research with you, to learn from and with you, and to help us gain a better insight of the topic that we are about to examine.

Update: The session was recorded. You can either download it as an MP3 Audio file or as an Elluminate recording. ~~Please join us for the live online session on Wednesday May 2 at 1pm Eastern (12CST or check your time zone). The session will be held here in Blackboard Collaborate.~~

Introduction

This week, I’d like us to think about scholars’ participation and practices online. In this instance, “scholars” refers to individuals who conduct teaching and research in higher education settings (e.g., instructors, professors, MA/PhD students, etc). We will examine this topic by discussing research that I have conducted on the topic, reflecting on our own practice, and synthesizing information already discussed in the #change11 MOOC. We will explore how academics/scholars co-opt and appropriate technology in their day-to-day professional lives, with specific emphasis on social networking technologies. We will discuss faculty members’ experiences and practices when they adopt online social networks (e.g., Twitter) and online scholarly networks (e.g., Academia.edu) for professional purposes, and investigate whether their online participation is (or is not) (re)defining academic work (i.e. teaching and research).

Background

Within the openness movement, we have seen increasing calls for scholars to employ open practices. Such calls are understandable: social technologies such as blogs, social networking sites, and microblogging fora, have the potential to democratize knowledge negotiation and dissemination. My work tries to make sense of what that potential looks like in practice, or what Selwyn and Grant call “state-of-the-actual” versus “state-of-the-art.” For example, to effective participate in social media, and realize the potential for networked learning, we see that individuals may need access to different types of literacies (e.g., see Week 15: Howard Rheingold and Social Media Literacies). It simply is not enough to embrace the technology and expect any real change, without understanding the embedded values of the technology, the beliefs/needs of scholars, and the organizational systems (e.g., universities) which house them. Framing our topic in the context of design-based research (Week 23: Tom Reeves), one could ask: What are the scholarly problems that social media are attempting to solve? Are they a solution to a specific problem? Or are they a solution seeking to find a problem? Ponder these questions for a second. If you look back at the link to the Selwyn & Grant paper above, you will notice that it is posted on Grant’s Academia.edu profile. Has academia.edu (and other similar sites) solved the problem of effortlessly sharing our work? Have they solved the problem of ongoing interaction and negotiation around scholarly artifacts? Or perhaps they allow us to harness the knowledge and skills of colleagues interested in the same topics that we are. There are some great examples of this: When Dave Cormier created a Mendeley Group for Rhizomatic learning, he is attempting to collect “the scant existing publications together into one place;” when Grainne Conole is authoring her book “in the open” (on Cloudwords, her blog, and copies of the document on a shared dropbox folder) she is atempting to gather feedback from others and make her expertise widely available. So. What are the problems? But, also what are the opportunities? During this particular week, we will consider whether the rise of online social networking within academic circles is a result of technological or cultural shifts, and investigate the purposes, goals, and pitfalls of networked participation.

My work in this domain has started with a desire to understand faculty member’s digital practices. Martin Weller’s research (Week 3: Digital Scholarship) provides the foundations for this investigation. Within this context, I have studied the relationship between scholarly practice and participatory technologies, and sought to understand (a) what faculty members’ do in online social networks, (b) what their experiences in these networks are like, and (c) what issues and pitfalls we might face when suggesting the use of social media for faculty members’ professional practice. This is an important topic of study because (a) digital scholarship is gaining increasing interest, and (b) a large percentage of higher education faculty have adopted, are considering the use of, or have rejected social technologies for professional practice. Importantly, the field is in dire need of empirical data to be in a position to critically evaluate claims with regards to the benefits that social technologies might afford academic practice.

A critical evaluation of academics’ participation in digital spaces matters because an understanding of these reasons will allow us to gain a better sense of how and why online social networks are used in the ways that they are. Whether we recognize it or not, we are part of a complex techno-cultural system that is ever changing in response to both internal and external stimuli, including technological innovations and dominant cultural values. An understanding of the contemporary forces that shape academic work is necessary for enhancing education and scholarship.

List of Readings (all links will take you to a pdf document)

Veletsianos, G. & Kimmons, R. (2012). Networked Participatory Scholarship: Emergent Techno-Cultural Pressures Toward Open and Digital Scholarship in Online Networks. Computers & Education, 58(2), 766-774.

Veletsianos, G. (2012). Higher Education Scholars’ Participation and Practices on Twitter. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 28(4), 336-349.

Veletsianos, G. & Kimmons, R. (in press). Scholars and Faculty Members Lived Experiences in Online Social Networks. The Internet and Higher Education.

Suggested Activities

Please feel free to complete any (or all) of the tasks below. Alternatively, create your own activity that will extend your thinking/understanding of the topic.

Task 1: Create a concept map that explains how the topic studied this week relates to and/or contributes to further understanding of the topics studied in preceding weeks.

Task 2: Del.icio.us was described as a place where “links go to die.” Write a blog entry (or create a video narrative or digital story) that reacts to the following statement: “Academia.edu is a place where academic papers go to die” Do you agree or disagree and why?

Task 3: This Google Spreadsheet is an archive of tweets from the recent AERA conference held at Vancouver (archived by Bodong Chen). Look at this data corpus and think about the activity of researchers tweeting while at a conference. What do the tweets tell us about the conference? About the individuals tweeting? What questions come up that we could study further?

Task 4: Write a 1-paragraph research proposal to examine an issue related to this topic. Alert me to it via Twitter (@veletsianos) and I will give you feedback. You should include: A statement of the research problem, a research question, a method of examination/analysis.

Engaging high school students in Computer Science: Course Map

By George Veletsianos

On April 27, 2012

In sharing

Following up on our project to develop a dual enrollment computer science course (i.e. offered to high school students, but with the option of receiving college credit for their work), I thought I would share our course map. In other words, when students are done with the course, this is what we expect them to know, understand, value:

(As mentioned, these outcomes are guided by the CS Principles project)

Critical perspectives on Educational Technology

By George Veletsianos

On April 22, 2012

In online learning, scholarship

I was in Vancouver at AERA 2012 last week, where I had the opportunity to present some of my recent work and catch up with colleagues. A few of the conversations I had centered around the increasing interest our field is receiving. This is a great time to be involved with educational technology, though there’s a lot of discussion about what higher education may look like a few years down the road. At the same time however, contemporary discourse on how technology can “transform” education concerns me because it is largely guided by techno-enthusiasm, techno-determinism, and a desire to improve “efficiency,” on models grounded on marginal costs and revenues. This is not a new concern – I wrote about it in the past as well. However, George Siemens does a great job describing what current thinking in the edtech corporate world looks like. My perspective is that, if we want to improve education for all, we have to engage with educational technology critically, involve educators in designing innovations, and use the research that a lot of us have done on learning, education, and technology.

To this end, I decided to share a a list of papers from my research library that offer a critical perspective on the use of technology in education. This is not a rant against the field. Rather, this is an attempt to highlight alternative ways of thinking. Alternative perspectives are important, because they help us question our assumptions and worldview. I thought it was about time for this, as the last entry that I wrote on this issue was about two years ago. If you have any additional work that might fit into this category, please share it in the comments section, and I will update the blog entry with those. Alternatively, you can add papers to this group on mendeley (feel free to join as well).

Amory, A. (2010). Education Technology and Hidden Ideological Contradictions. Educational Technology & Society, 13(1), 69- 79.

Bayne, S. (2010). Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies. London Review of Education, 8(1), 5-13.

Friesen, Norm. (2010). Education and the social Web: Connective learning and the commerical imperative. First Monday, 15(12).

Friesen, Norm. (2011). Critical Theory: Ideology Critique and the Myths of E‐Learning, (February), 1-20.

Kahn, R., & Kellner, D. (2007). Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich: technology, politics and the reconstruction of education. Policy Futures in Education, 5(4), 431-448.

Njenga, J. K., & Fourie, L. C. H. (2010). The myths about e-learning in higher education. British Journal of Educational Technology, 41(2), 199-212.

Oliver, M. (2011). Technological determinism in educational technology research: some alternative ways of thinking about the relationship between learning and technology. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, (November 2010), no-no. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2729.2011.00406.x

Peck, C., Cuban, L., & Kirkpatrick, H. (2007). Techno-Promoter Dreams,Student Realities. Phi Delta Kappan, 83(6), 472-480.

Piña, A. A. (2010). Online diploma mills : implications for legitimate distance education. Distance Education, 31(1), 121-126. doi:10.1080/01587911003725063

Ravenscroft, A. (2001). Designing E-learning Interactions in the 21st Century: revisiting and rethinking the role of theory. European Journal of Education, 36(2), 133-156. doi:10.1111/1467-3435.00056

Sahay, S. (2007). Beyond Utopian and Nostalgic Views of Information Technology and Education: Implications for Research and Practice. Information Systems, 5(7), 282-313.

Selwyn, N. (2010). Looking beyond learning: notes towards the critical study of educational technology. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 26(1), 65-73. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2729.2009.00338.x

Selwyn, Neil. (2011). Editorial: In praise of pessimism—the need for negativity in educational technology. British Journal of Educational Technology, 42(5), 713-718.

Selwyn, Neil, & Gorard, S. (2004). Exploring the role of ICT in facilitating adult informal learning. Education, Communication & Information, 4(2-3), 293-310. doi:10.1080/14636310412331304726

Warschauer, M. (2007). The paradoxical future of digital learning. Learning Inquiry, 1(1), 41-49. doi:10.1007/s11519-007-0001-5

Weston, M. E., & Bain, A. (2010). The End of Techno-Critique : The Naked Truth about 1 : 1 Laptop Initiatives and Educational Change. The Journal of Technology, Learning, and Assessment, 9(6).