I rarely just link to things like this, but I have been very excited to discover Mathemagenic where Lilia is interested in exactly what I have begun to pursue in my PhD studies. The difference is that she is way beyond me as far as the work she has done. Her list from November 17, 2004 looks like a very good list of things that will need to be studied in our quest to understand blogs academically. I just don’t want to forget it.
Category: Education
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Social Presence
I like what Moon has to say about Social Presence and the disconnect between student appreciation for social presence – high classroom satisfaction – and student performance with social presence – no significant improvement in student performance.
It seems intuitive that better social presence would lead to higher classroom satisfaction and that higher classroom satisfaction should translate into higher student performance. I do not doubt the research on student performance being unconnected to social presence, but as I think about it and how it really is counter-intuitive I am beginning to wonder if that might indicate that we are not measuring the right things as we track student performance.
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First Claim explained
Anybody in class reading my site will probably read PeiJu’s blog also, but just in case I highly recommend her Explaination of the first claim. I think she has hit the nail right on the head.
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EduBlog Digest
Okay, I’ve been thinking more about this than I should have (it woke me up at 4:00 in the morning) and I have a great idea for how to keep good blog dialogs visible – we should publish a journal of blogversations which are academic in nature. I’m not sure how to get this all down in writing, but I’ll try to summarize my thinking here and see what we come up with together.
“Articles” would consist of all the blog posts, comments and trackbacks of an idea that grew into a conversation. Each piece of the conversation would be attributed to the author of that piece and at the bottom of the conversation would be a list of contributing authors – everyone with a trackack into the conversation – with links to their blog pages. All content would be licensed under an appropriate CC license. The editors might have to seek permission sometimes from some potential contributors if they have too restrictive of licenses on their sites. Off the top of my head I can think of two such conversations from Nate, this one and quantum cognition. Obviously there are plenty of others out there, but those were just the first two examples that came to mind right now.
The structure of the journal would be to have an editorial board who would help to monitor and gather conversations as they emerge. We would need to have standards about what constituted a conversation (ex. at least two posts each from at least two authors) and then add those conversations to the journal that met the criteria as well as updating conversations in the journal that have grown since they were included. Besides the articles we might include an editorial piece that is just for the journal not more than once a month that talks about trends that the editors are seing in educational blogging.
The journal needs to be syndicated in blog friendly format (RSS) and non-blogger friendly format (email distribution when new articles or editorials come out) so that non-bloggers can be exposed to the rich conversation in a format they are comfortable with. When new articles are mailed out we can send links to those articles that have been updated since the previous mailing.
I have more ideas about the structure of the database that would support the journal but I’m not sure I have the know how to make the software to power the journal (we might be able to modify WP or something). Beyond that we would need hosting and a domain (EBD.org?) before we could really get under way. Maybe we should write a grant to fund the endeavor. By now my post has become confusingly complex so let me know what you think about the idea and how you would be willing to participate.
This is the type of site that we could advertise .
I enjoyed Rovy’s little rant. I agree that the lack of creativity is not rooted in the ISD process, but rather it is rooted in the lack of a design culture among LPs. We are taught how to develop things and then we follow the ADDIE recipe (or whichever flavor we favor). We have taken all the creativity out of design and turned this into learning science. We lose the artistry so that we have become cooks instead of being chefs.
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Seriously Funny
I have never laughed so hard as when I read Don’s partita in D. I could never do it justice in summary so let me just say that it is well worth the read – especially the last paragraph:
To turn to a musical metaphor, let’s look at a modern History 101 class. The chief instructor who knows all the notes has just been given a new synthesizer (think PowerPoint) that has all the range of his old saxophone, which he never quite mastered but at least it was familiar, but adds bagpipe, harmonica and peddle steel guitar to his possible instrument range. He has of course never been given any instruction on any of these instruments, but his father was a big Hank Williams fan and his mother watched soap operas while she ironed. The instructor has also been provided with a graduate student backup group. Two of these also have no musical training but one isn’t bad on the thumb piano which the university provided her and the other is working hard on the slide trombone which he found after last years homecoming rally. The third graduate assistant actually has some background, having taken tap lessons between the ages of 8 and 14, but has lately developed an unfortunate interest in late 70’s acid rock. So there we have our quartet, and it really is Bach, or maybe Mozart, they’re playing. And there really is an audience trying to make sense out of it.
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Not To Be Picky
I do not intend to poke holes here for the sake of argument. I just thought I would share this discussion that I have been passively enjoying at Cognitive Dissonance, but I think it is not just trivial to note that when Nate is talking about the Science of Baking he inserted a provision “baking — that is, applying heat to food in a closed box” in his definition of baking halfway through his analogy that was absent in his original definition “baking — that is, the transfer of heat into food within the confines of a box.”
I don’t consider the addition of the requirement that the box be closed to be a critical fault to the argument. Actually I think it helps to illustrate Nate’s point that we need to nail down a common definition of “learning” before we can productively argue about what makes learning happen. We need to confine our definition to a manageable scope. We will not make any headway in increasing our understanding of learning if we spend all our time arguing that learning takes place everywhere in unpredictable ways because I cannot manage all learning or all its ways. I can talk about learning and whatever is consistent about that or I can talk about what happens in a classroom (which is a lot more than just learning) but I cannot confuse “learning” with “what happens in a classroom.” I could argue that cooking is just chemistry but then I have to deal with all kinds of chemical reactions that were not considered cooking before. Maybe cooking is chemistry involving food that is intended for ingestion.
Whatever the case let us make sure that we do not inadvertently insert small new conditions in our definition in the middle of our argument because if we do our argument will not be sound.
P.S. I should note that this is not a critique of Nate’s argument, but an illustration of his excellent point.
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Academic Status of Blog Posts
Nate has some interesting and accurate thoughts on the academic states of blog posts. Roy had some interesting thoughts to add as well.
As for myself I think that there is little we can do to encourage bloggers to post meaningful content because it is their own content. That is the beauty of blogs. We control only what we subscribe to. If I deem the content of a blog to be frivolous I am free to not pay attention to it. Anyone who wants to join in serious discourse will already be motivated to ensure that they are posting worthwile thoughts. Nate has argued, rightly I think, that having high qulaity discussions will attract wider participation and will elevate the status of blogging in the academic community. The key is that it is an individual choice.
There will always be people who blog recreationally. It is no different than any other media, we have professional journals and then we have non-academic publicaitons. We are responsible to be professional if professionalism is the purpose behind our blogging. We do not need to worry about those who have no professional objective to their blogging because, in the end, a good idea is a good idea regardless of its source. Those who wish to put serious content on their blogs must trust that it will be recognized as such.
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Don’t Ignore a Good Question
Matt put a good question on his blog last week in response to Paul’s post. I just read the question again and realized that I had missed something the first time I read it.
“Why make learners go through the cognitively challenging task of reading, comprehending, thinking of a response, composing the response, and finally typing the response?”
There is benefit to forcing users to take the time to read, comprehend, think and then compose a response. There are times when that is not important, but sometimes it is and the designers of social software should consider what is important for the tasks they are supporting as they make decisions about what kinds of interaction to support.
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Breaking In
Nate has some great (and mostly accurate) things to say about Stature and Zero-Sum Games. If you go read his post make sure to read Ward’s comments as well, he has a valuable perspective to add.
I notice that while we have a mutual goal we seem to disagree a little bit on the proper approach to attaining that goal. I agree that the blogosphere does not operate under the same principles as traditional publishing. That fact that in traditional publishing “the number of voices is restricted by the economics of speaking” while “the blogosphere removes that economic barrier” is a salient point. The area that we seem to disagree on is in the rules governing diffusion and adoption.
Nate disputes the value of having people with stature in AECT joining the blogosphere. His argument is that their stature does not carry over to the blogosphere and I agree. The reason that I believe it is necessary to have such “ranked players” joining the blogosphere is not because their stature is useful in the blogosphere, but rather because they have social and professional stature within AECT. While publishing in the blogosphere is a different animal (probably a dog if Alan has anything to say about it) than publishing in traditional journals, diffusion and adoption of blogging by people within AECT is the same as diffusion and adoption of internet courses by people within AECT. In each case there are some adventurous people who stay on the cutting edge of technology but widespread adoption does not take place until some of the established people begin adopting the practice. When the ranked players begin using blogs more people who are slower to adopt new ideas will view them as a legitimate outlet for expression and information gathering. Admittedly that presupposes that there is enough good content. If there is enough good content already then a higher profile and broader participation are all that is lacking, if there is not enough good content then we have very little to recommend what we are doing to our friends in the field.