OpenEd: Week 12
November 22, 2007, [MD]
So,
having duly apologized
(1,
2),
I will have a look at what people have written during these last one and
a half weeks, both on learning objects, but also on other things.
Boot camp/holiday camp/deadlines
Thieme has a number of very
interesting posts, many posted from the OpenLearn
2007
conference, where I’d have loved to be, but luckily I get to be exposed
to some of the ideas through Thieme’s blog. Thanks for that. He mentions
the
idea
that university has gone from being seen as a boot camp, with deadlines,
grades, and driving you through a pre-set program with strict
discipline, to what could be termed a “holiday camp”, loosely
structured
around self-chosen activities that are pleasant, but that you still
learn from. I find this fascinating because one of the things we
discussed quite a bit at the learning track in
Dubrovnik, was the idea that a school
or a university is much more than a collection of resources. It provides
you a pathway through the resources, both micro (courses/sections) and
macro (programs/degrees), it provides interaction with peers (students)
and mentors (professors/TAs), and crucially it provides deadlines.
Although not universally loved by everyone currently in the system,
deadlines play a crucial role in keeping us working hard. This course is
a good example of that - even though the topic interests me a great
deal, and I have done a lot of reading about it earlier, without being
prompted, there is no doubt that this structured course with weekly
deadlines has made me put in much more effort.
Tenure and dystopia
Greg
Francom
has already started on this week’s question, and tries to write an
alternative story to David Wiley’s Open
CourseWars,
which is significantly more sinister, centering on ideas that there will
be less money for science, a higher press graduate students and
professors that do not yet have tenure, and the idea that in the end
only the rich (who can afford to hire research assistants themselves)
with no lives (that work 24/7 publishing papers) will survive. Whether
this is a plausible trend, I do not know, but I am happy about the
discussion, because I find discussion on the basic structures and
mechanisms of academia to be very interesting. I am especially curious
about tenure, I know several academics have stated that this is not very
relevant anymore. I wonder if there are countries that do not use the
tenure model, and how they compare. In fact, I wondered if my own
country, Norway, has a tenure model, and I came across a very useful
page from European University Institute listing academic career
information for different
countries. Norway does seem to have
tenure,
and it works in a bit of a peculiar way:
There are thus three ways to become Full Professor: 1) Apply for promotion based on individual competence (as described above). 2) By applying for a vacant professorship in open competition at any university and be appointed the best applicant. 3) By applying for a vacant professorship at any institution in Norway, being found unanimously competent (but not the best qualified for the specific position) and then claim to be promoted to full professor at own institution. The first is by far the most commonly used.
Bike commute
This is
a bit of a distraction, but D’Arcy Norman
writes wonderfully detailed about his bike
commute
in Calgary. I love biking, and I have always been disappointed that
Toronto doesn’t promote bike lanes and bike safety more - coming from
Europe this is not an uncommon complaint I suppose. Downtown is still
wonderful to bike in, but it would have been so much better with just
a little bit of investment. As it is, I feel like a pawn in a video
game, constantly expecting a car door on a parked car to suddenly open.
And of course, I dream about seeing any city have the vision to pilot
implementation of the Velo-City!
The conundrum of context
One
word that has been bandied about a lot in this course, and especially in
the discussion about learning objects, is context. Learning objects
were portrayed as individual learning resources that should be as
de-contextualized as possible, so that they can be used in different
situations. I even wrote in my own answer, that people would have to
adapt resources anyway, and the most important part was to make this
easy and accessible. However, we have not discussed much how this
contextualization would happen. Indeed, this goes to a general problem
that I have had with thinking about education - I feel that I lack a
general framework of pedagogics (or andragogics, heutagogics) - how do
we learn? How does the combination of classroom lectures, use of the
blackboard/powerpoint, assigning essays, midterms, finals, orals,
projects… all lead us to learn? Not to talk about self-learners!
On
this note, Greg
Francom
led me to M. David
Merill
who seems to have done a lot of work on this - looking forward to
reading his work. However - this is my problem in everything that I do,
I keep coming across people and articles, books that I really want to
read, yet I have no time to do so, because there are always assignments
to be written, and students’ work to be corrected. Sometimes I feel like
I need to take a sabbatical year only to process all the things I have
added to my “read later” list this year.
Bobby McGhie
Allen
points out that there is an idea that only “white males can
contextualize”, and
Thiemeis
asking us not to underestimate students - they constantly
recontextualize learning materials, relating it to their own backgrounds
and interests. And thinking about it, it struck me as very true. Most of
the learning that I have done in my life has been individual and
self-driven, whether it was reading books on phsychology or politics, or
learning languages. In all cases, I use a wide variety of sources,
academic research, blogs, discussions with friends, foreign language
materials - and in all cases I take from it what I need, what is useful
to me, taking into consideration who has produced it,
what
their viewpoint is, how credible the source is, what it relates to, etc.
Would I have benefited from someone “pre-contextualizing” all these
sources for me? Not necessarily… This would probably be different in a
fourth grade textbook on social science, and I agree that for a Physics
101 textbook, having a very coherent and logical presentation would be
more important than for a course on women and development. (However,
would anyone here really argue that a Japanese text book in Physics 101,
translated word for word into English, would not be useful to me in
learning physics? Oh no, they’re counting rice grains and not potatoes,
I am so lost!?)
The way forward
In general,
I am very happy to see students starting to reflect on what will happen
after the course ends. The people who have made it through this program
form a wonderful learning community, or community of practice, or
whatever the current buzzword is, and it would be too bad if at the end
of the course we delete our OPMLs, and continue on alone. It would be
great if ideas and collaboration projects could grow from this list.
Another idea is to try to start an advanced course next term, perhaps
with the topics chosen by the participants, and trying to recruit
scholars in different fields to suggest reading resources, or to host
one or two week sessions on specific topics etc. It would be wonderful
if we could find a model for collaborative learning that is sustainable,
but still involved contact and tutoring by experienced scholars. But
perhaps with such an experienced crowd, just learning from ourselves
would be sufficient?
Stian\ (thanks to josef.stuefer @ flickr for the bicycle wheel photo, creativesam @ flickr for the camels, the tree and the jumping birds, MarkyBon @ flickrfor the boy in the train, ellhoisa @ flickr for the peacock, schaaflicht @ flickr for the hanging girl and Forth Photo @ flickr for the birds on the field)
Stian Håklev November 22, 2007 Toronto, Canada comments powered by Disqus