Reviewing an old blog post

I was reading the article “Is IT Becoming Extinct” by Miguel Guhlin

http://www.edsupport.cc/mguhlin/archives/2008/03/entry_6863.htm

The topic of In-house IT systems and the development of utility computing has been interesting. I like to chime in from my personal experience and reading of various sources, one being a book by Eric Larsen, in “Devil in the White City”. He describes a time when electrical service was new. There was a big debate about AC or DC electricity.

Many of the institutions in the early days of electricity had their own power generating plants. They employed many people who saw the switch to utility electricity as a great threat and passed around a lot of scare stories about how horrible it was and all the hazards.

Of course, the switch happened and not many institutions employ big groups of technical specialists to generate a private source of electricity. The naysayers lost all credibility and the whole specialization evolved.

Same thing with IT, utility computing is here. In spite of all the horror stories and manipulations of the tech elite, there is less and less reason to have a big group of specialists to operate expensive and clunky private networks.

As a teacher using a computer mediated approach over the last 10 years, I found myself “working around” IT a lot of the time. Many of the tech folks didn’t believe that computers should be used for the purpose of education even though they worked for educational institutions.

Nor did they think that teachers were capable of using technology and they reinforced that opinion by constantly undermining any effort teachers made to develop the necessary skills.

The cultural clashes between corporate IT and administration didn’t help either. Lots of energy was spent on those epic battles and teachers and students were a very minor consideration for all the espoused values of “Students are #1″ in every educational institutions mission and vision statement. The struggle for control and authority have resulted in most of the failures of education related technology innovation.

In-house, corporate IT is like the steam powered DC generating plants of 100 ago. Pretty much done. It is going to take a little while for the change but probably not as long as it took to switch to AC electricity. One of the benefits is that education is being transformed. Technology will accommodate education rather than the other way around.

I know lots of teachers who just gave up on computers and the web and felt that they would never be able to develop the necessary skills. It was just so draining always having to get IT to open a port or set up file system or authorize access to a resource. So they stuck to Outlook, MS Word, Internet Explorer, the “approved tools”.

Happy to say that web based tools and cloud computing has made it incredibly easy for teachers to support learning in the digital era. All the alarmist rhetoric about identity theft, cyber-bullying, online predators etc. is being recognized as the last gasps of a system in transition, a struggle for control and authority. I would encourage all teachers to take another look.

Glen Gatin, Ed.D.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/glengatin
 

Enable cheap failure

Some random thoughts gathered listening to a podcast of Yochai Benkler at U of Ottawa

Success depends on commons-based production. Loose networks layered over social networks, individual or collaborative, commercial or non-commercial.

Authority to act located where practical capacity to act resides.
Change and complexity replacing well-behaved change; innovation and growth overwhelm efficiency and optimization

Scruffy adaptive learning systems with late binding design where you don't know exactly what the thing will do or how to optimize for it but instead you need to constantly have the thing learn and embody a little knowledge as possible, the core idea behind PCP/IP vs tightly coupled, slower moving optimized systems that characterize, for example the traditional telecommunications networks.

http://www.techlaw.uottawa.ca/index.php?option=com_content&Itemid=770&id=333&task=blogcategory&lang=en

 

The Future of Education

David Wiley contrarian argument that the university system of lecture will survive the internet just as it has survived other disruptive innovations over time. The Catholic church survived the introduction of the printing press but its power and authority were reduced (in spite of the best efforts of the one true church, like the Inquisition) and people had choices.

The Internet is disrupting the one true church of the university. Some of the true believers (in university credentialism) will remain but the spell will be broken and the world will have choice.

As much as the university served an important role when knowledge and information were scarce, it is overdue for a major overhaul.

 

 

Topics in Critical Pedagogy

Topics In Critical Pedagogy
View more presentations from Glen Gatin.
 

"meaningless and intangible social constructs"

Onion news has an excellent bit on the shared illusion that is the monetary system.U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion http://www.theonion.com/content/news/u_s_economy_grinds_to_halt_as

Then today an article about The Social Contract of Scholarly Publishing in Dan Cohen's excellent blog, Digital Humanities.

http://www.dancohen.org/2010/03/05/the-social-contract-of-scholarly-publishin...

Wonderful post and many excellent comments.

I could fill up quite a few blog posts considering many important issues raised but I will start with this one:

The demand side( for non-traditional and electronic academic publishing),  however, has languished. Far fewer efforts have been made to influence the mental state of the scholarly audience. The unspoken assumption is that the reader is more or less unchangeable in this respect, only able to respond to, and validate, works that have the traditional marks of the social contract: having survived a strong filtering process, near-perfect copy-editing, the imprimatur of a press.

All part of the huge hostage incident that characterizes so much of academia. These highly trained critical thinkers are unable to break out of some very restrictive bonds. There is the whole horrible Stockholm syndrome effect then cuts in; the hostages emulate the values of the captors and become even more rigid and repressive.

 

Three things about open access

Just putting together a few things. I have to come back when I have had a chance to ponder. I'll start with this.

First was an article that came by way of the University of Chicago Defining Wisdom newsletter. Very interesting article by Patricia Mooney Nickel

Second was a reference to the wonderful TED talk video byHans Rosling, Let my dataset change your mindset http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_at_state.html

And finally an article published in the most recent edition of First Monday by Ulrich Herb.

 

Mooney Nickle talked about the closed mindedness of the acadamy and how ideas are shaped by conformity to a dominant mindset that supports the status quo and reinforced the theories of the intellectual capitalists. She points out that the recent movement within some academic settings toward openness or public intellectuallity is a sham, intellectual hegemony exists in spades.She uses the case of Gustav Klimt and the ostracism that he faced when he proposed concepts that didn't fit with the intellectual elite.

The Herb article explores this theme a little more.

Acceptance of open access "... does not depend on slogans derived from hagiographic self–perceptions of science (e.g., the acceleration of scientific communication) and scientists (e.g., their will to share their information freely)"

Rosling talks about the benefits of open access to public data and talks about some of the feeble arguments that academics use to restrict access to information and knowledge and the impact that has on the world. Great quote talking about the replies he has received from UN authorities about the possiblity of ensuring access to publicly funded data sets. Rosling reporst the official said it wasn't impossible, just that they couldn't do it.

 

Mooney Nickel, P. (2009). Public intellectuality: Academies of exhibition and the new disciplinary secession. Theory & Event, 12(4). doi:     10.1353/tae.0.0089.

TED. (2009). Hans Rosling:Let my dataset change your mindset |. US State Department. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/hans_rosling_at_state.html

Ulrich, H. (2010). Sociological implications of scientific publishing: Open access, science, society. democracy, and the digital divide. First Monday, 15(2). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2599/2404 

 

Night Ski to Jackfish Cabin

Skied out to Jack Fish cabin on the Newfoundland trail under the moon last Friday night, then skied back on a perfectly beautiful sunny Saturday. 42 kms round trip, minus 13-27 C. Not the best glide at those temps so my legs were a little quivery the next day. A couple of doses of magnesium citrate fixed me up.


Spruce_woods
 

The first doctoral program in distance education in North America

Check out this article I found at irrodl.org

If the timing had been right I might have considered applying to this EdD program at Athabasca University. As it happened I was already a year into the EdD program at Fielding Graduate University.

The Athabasca program looks comprehensive, useful and engaging and the people involved especially Terry Anderson are credible and personable. It will be interesting to read the dissertations that emerge.


Reading through this descriptive article I noticed that the program is predicated in part on Moore theories of distance education, particularly the concept of transactional distance.

"Interaction is a crucial element in distance education (Moore, 1991; Garrison & Cleveland-Innes, 2005) as it reduces transactional distance and facilitates the construction of higher levels of knowledge and more meaningful understanding."

The theory of transactional distance and the idea that transactional distance exists, is a problem and can be mitigated with specific techniques have recently been subjected to criticism. See Giossos (2009) Reconsidering Moore's Transactional distance.

Giossos, Y., Koutsouba, M., Lionarakis, A., & Skavantzos, K. (2009). Reconsidering Moore's transactional distance theory. European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning. Retrieved from http://www.eurodl.org/?article=374 

In my own dissertation research I used grounded theory to investigate some issues related to this concept. The theory that emerged from my analysis which I called "Keeping your distance" suggests that people use distance in many literal and figurative ways to gain and maintain control in various realms, physical, emotional, social. They also manage distance to preserve autonomy and energy. So I found that some people reported using distance education for precisely this reason, it allowed them to keep their distance. The problematic aspect of transactional distance was not a concern and people were seemed able to resolve any sensed deficiencies in interactions through personal coping strategies guided by a personal algorithm that adjusts distance whole preserving autonomy and energy. 

It will be interesting to see if the AU can provide some evidence to conclusively support transactional distance .
They may not be in the best position to do so now that they have developed a whole program delivery philosophy based on the precepts of the theory.

 

Medical ventriloquism

Great article on some chickens coming home to roost for the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34404170/ns/health-the_new_york_times/
 
Best line...." the cases demonstrate the importance of litigation in detailing exactly how drug makers operate their businesses."

So make a crappy product for a condition that you helped to invent. Market it heavily for the invented condition and everything from coughs, colds and congested blowholes. When it has contrary and detrimental effects, block all research, lawyer up and prevent the public or even most of the medical community from hearing the dangers. Put some weasel language into the fine print to CYA. Keep your shareholders attention focused on the bottom right hand corner.

Glen

 

Economic Hoover

U of M a $1.8 billion dollar economic engine.
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/U-of-M-a-18B-economic-engine-study-78567717.html

Nice for Winnipeg but that $130,000,000.00 drawn from out of town students represents a huge expense for rural economies. And it is not just the bucks but all the social capital that U of M pulls from rural Manitoba; small towns have their best and brightest siphoned off to the big city, most never to return.

As the quality of online learning improves it will start becoming obvious that to revitalize rural Manitoba economy you must make it possible for people to learn in place.

I think the main issue is the fact that higher education is not just an economic engine but a big fat milch cow for urban centers. The modern day equivalent of the residential school system. At least they are now acknowledging that it is mostly about the $$$$.

Glen Gatin, Ed.D.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/glengatin

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