A Sign Of Peace

This year, the musician and visionary, Benjamin Zander said,

“I can imagine a conversation between a Jew and an Arab which says, ‘It is a privilege to share this land which we inherited from our forefather, Abraham, and just think what we have given to the world in art and culture and knowledge and mysticism and religion, and what we could teach the world about living together.’ That is something! Now, that conversation hasn’t actually taken place yet. If it did, it would transform the world.”

On 29 December 2008 my daughters called me to the living room window to see a magnificent rainbow. It was indeed magnificent, and as all rainbows in the evening, it circled the east.

When I posted a picture of it on Flickr, Bonnie Kaplan said,

“What a great sign of good luck for all of us.”

I hope she is right. My hope is that it is a sign from the east that there will be peace in 2009 and for all time.

Experience is reality

I have always believed that the imagination is closer to reality than reality itself. As a child, I looked up at the sky and saw things in the clouds that didn’t exist here on earth.

But as I grew into an adult, I became quite naive. The sky is reality. What I saw really does exist. But it is through my imagination that I can see things in cloud patterns that may not appear to be at my level here on the surface of the earth.

Giuliana Guazzaroni, on Verso 3.0, has posted a video that takes me back to my childhood. The strangely accented voice of the narrator brings a matter-of-factness, almost ho-hum-ness to an unfolding digital future.

Take a look for yourself at who you are - the prosumer. Who will be the CEO of Prometeus?

Loosen the reins of your imagination; sit back; peek at a snapshot of the 50 years span of time that we are in; identify where you might be in 10, 20 or 40 years; enjoy!

The Media Revolution

The Media Revolution Part 2

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Help I've Been Tagged - Again!

Sue Waters has tagged me to list

7 things you really don’t need to know about me.

Truth is, I’ve already put a comment on Diane Cordell’s post, though she didn’t tag me, and I said it all there.

Ah but, being tagged means I have to write a post about it - if I accept the challenge. Then I think, “What’s this got to do with elearning?" Hmmm.

Oh well. Whatever. ‘Tis the season. I accept.

Here are 7 things you really don’t need to know about me:

1. Despite my love of words, I'm hopeless at languages. When at school I got 11% for Latin and 17% for French.
   Parliamo Italiano?
   
   
2. Though I don't have a fear of heights and I like hill climbing,
   I don't like rock climbing or mountaineering. The only similar sport that I dislike more than these is potholing. Potholing gives me the hebes.
   
   
3. Of the many years spent in three different countries, I enjoy living in NZ the best - that's why I've lived here for 34 years.
   I was born in Scotland, but it is too cold there in the winter. Malawi is nice - called Nyasaland when I lived there as a child.
   
   
4. At Downstage Theatre in Wellington in 1980 I had a part in the play, The Suicide, by the Russian playwright Nicolai Erdman, director Phillip Mann. It was a long play, almost 3 hours, and the season ran for 4 weeks. The play was extremely successful, with a cast of 16 actors and one fiddler. I was the (token) gypsy fiddler. I never spoke a word on the stage, which was fortunate, but I appeared first on the stage in scene 1.
   
   
5. The only reason I was 7 years studying at university was procrastination. At a time when I was about to go on to study teaching, after I had graduated the first time, I was offered a post-grad grant. I went into teaching 3 years later.
   
   
6. When my oldest son, Nicolas, was just over 2 years of age, he could catch flies in mid air. He never harmed them. He caught a wasp once, examined it closely, then let it go and wasn't stung. Only recently, I found that I had the same ability, though in over 50 years I'd never tried to catch a fly.
   
   I found out that I had this dubious talent when my daughter, Hannah, kept a pet female brown tree frog, Rocket, in a large vivarium. Rocket needed live food and lived for almost 4 years on what I caught for her - a record age for female Australian brown tree frogs, who live in the wild for only 16 months on average.
   
   
7. I was born Church of Scotland. I've studied several religions, including Buddhism. My wife was the Anglican parish secretary for years in Island Bay where we live, and continues to attend Church regularly. My youngest daughter, Catriona, travelled to Fiji this year, and lived there for almost a fortnight while she pursued her Anglican mission.
   
   I've played music at the Church and read readings. I've read the Bible - a goodly book that I enjoy reading - and know many quotes. But I'm not religious in the least. I stopped attending Church with my wife a few years ago as people got the wrong idea. They couldn't understand my acceptance of the Church versus my personal belief.
   

Mobiles in 2020

The earliest I recall watching a mobile phone in action was in 1991.
Rob Carter, then CEO of the Housing Corporation of New Zealand, addressed a conference of company trainers at a campus in Nelson. He'd been communicating directly by phone through most of his introduction by the presiding manager.

Carter’s mobile phone was the size of a slender builder's brick. It had an antenna that could have doubled as a child’s fishing rod and was heavy enough to inflict a painful injury if dropped on someone's foot.

By the end of the 90s the mobile phone, more commonly known as the cell phone or cell, was small enough to get lost in a handbag.

Customary usage:

One morning, while I was travelling to work in an almost full bus, a mobile phone went off in a woman's handbag. I could hear the device honking even though I sat several seats away. The woman searched frantically through her handbag as the honking got louder, the sound having been muffled by a copious collection of accoutrements.

She eventually found the phone and slapped it to her ear, shouting as if to communicate with a pedestrian in the street. Several passengers jumped in unison at the abruptness of her bellow.

Everyone, including the bus driver, was soon giggling as they listened in on one half of an intimate conversation. An elderly gent, sitting a few seats in front, turned and scowled in the direction of the banshee-like screeching, blinking at the ear-shattering outbursts.

When the conversation was over, she snapped shut her mobile, leaned forward and shouted, “Are you alright sir?” By this time the whole bus was well captivated by the commotion.

The gent turned very slowly, stared matter-of-factly at the woman for a few seconds, then spoke in a low, exquisitely clear voice.
“I didn’t think you’d need a phone with a voice like that!”

The whole bus erupted uproariously. I could feel the glow from her ears as the poor, hapless woman cowered in embarrassment.

Robust as:

At the beginning of this century, mobiles weren’t quite as sleek as they are now, but they could still fit in your pocket. My first mobile was a Christmas present from my son, Jack. It was a Philips, a bit bulkier than most, but remarkably robust.

One day I was running for a bus in town when my mobile dropped from my pocket, bounced off the kerb and cascaded its contents into the gutter. Instantly, a bus ran over the battery and halted at the bus-stop.

In desperation I collected all the bits I could see, including the battery, and grudgingly mounted the bus. After a few minutes spent squeezing the device back together again, I pushed home the battery. Immediately the display prompted me to reset the digital clock and the mobile made contact with the nearest cellular transmitter. I used that device for several years before it died.

So what for the future?

Ten years earlier, if I had suggested to someone that one day we’d have devices slightly bigger than a box of matches, that could be used to send text messages across the globe, I’d have been told that I was out of my tree.

Yet in 2001, while travelling by bus to work in Wellington, New Zealand, I was able to have regular text conversations with my daughter, Gemma, who lived in Harpenden in England. Today I can access the Internet with a mobile and update my blog.

It is predicted in The Future Of The Internet III that mobile devices will be commonly used to access the Internet in 2020. With the recent development towards a graphene chip, it is reasonable to think that future mobile devices will offer far more computing power and flexibility, enabling Internet access with a wide range of applications.

The predictions are that voice recognition will also be a standard capability of the mobile. With any luck, my computer dream might become a reality - before 2020 I hope!

related posts - >> ( 2 ) ( 1 )

Simply The Best

This month Joanna Young, of Confident Writing, challenges bloggers/ writers to select the best writing from their year’s posts. Accepting Joanna's challenge put a focus on what writing is all about for me.
I pick my September post, Learning and the Much Maligned Mistake.

This post is simply the best because it embraces learning, an important aspect of my blog, and is about the hallmark of the learner.
In particular, 2008 was a learning year for me; I learnt to be a blogger.

Good Will To All - Including Learners

Okay, okay! I admit it. I’m hooked. I’ve become a dyed-in-the-(New Zealand)-wool blogger, posting on Boxing Day. But I’m only responding to another dyed-in-the-wool blogger who posted on Christmas Day.

René Meijer's thoughtful and reflective post, My Learning Disabilities, is a response to Tony Karrer's, What Did You Learn About Learning 2008. René's post struck a chord with me that was almost a peal of Christmas bells.

He spoke of authentic and valid assessment, and posited that most people do not learn by engaging with the written word. I agreed, and I left a comment on his post. It ran something like this:

You say you understand that we only really learn by ‘interacting’.
I say, we need to define what’s meant by ‘interacting’. By my definition, you are correct.

Learning by interacting:

Others may have a different idea of what ‘interacting’ is all about and still agree with you. For instance, I believe that it is possible for interaction to take place when a learner is reading from a book. I know, I know, but this sort of interaction is indeed a high level thinking and learning skill, not often practiced by most learners.

You go on to ask, “How do we verify that learning has taken place, if we aren’t sure how (to) create authentic and valid assessments for the competencies we are not aspiring to instil?”

I say that the only way we can be sure that learning has taken place IS by authentic and valid assessment. I’m not criticising here - I’m concurring.

Assessing that learning has happened:

Thing is, our assessments may well show us that learning has taken place, but may not really validly measure to what extent it has occurred. This is not so much a problem for the learner as the teacher, but it is often placed as a burden on the learner. I think that this action is wrong.

But if I can put my glitch in here, assessment is all very well, but considering that it doesn’t always indicate what we (as assessors) think it should (in others words, it isn’t authentic and valid) we should restrict its use for us (as teachers) alone.

Assess the teaching not the learning:

That is to say that if it is neither authentic nor valid, it should NOT be used to assess the learner, especially if it is used as a measure of what the learner knows - more so because there is a difference between what is known and what was learnt. Note the use of tense in that last sentence.

My preference is that assessment should be used (exclusively) by and for the teacher. It should be confidential, between the learner and the teacher if such sharing is necessary. But it should be used by the teacher to validate that teaching has been effective, not that learning has taken place.

To use non-authentic, non-valid assessments against the learner is most unfair, especially if we realise that it is neither authentic nor valid. Most times it is not, and there are many reasons for this.

What's learnt on the learning pathway:

One of them, often not recognised or admitted, is when the particular assessment method applied fails the learner, by simply not recording what the learner has achieved along the learning pathways.

Extreme examples of this are an assessment test that returns a zero mark or a standard assessment criterion that reports a not achieved. Such instances can be interpreted as indicating that the learner has learnt nothing at all – a very unlikely scenario.

related posts - >> ( 9 ) ( 8 ) ( 7 ) ( 6 ) ( 5 ) ( 4 ) ( 3 ) ( 2 ) ( 1 )

Twelve Days Of Christmas

On the first day of Christmas
my browser brought to me
a tagged comment in a Twitter meme.

On the second day of Christmas
my browser brought to me
two Wordle blimps
and a tagged comment in a Twitter meme.

On the third day of Christmas
my browser brought to me
three permalinks,
two Wordle blimps
and a tagged comment in a Twitter meme.

On the fourth day of Christmas
my browser brought to me
four wicked wikis,
three permalinks,
two Wordle blimps
and a tagged comment in a Twitter meme.

On the fifth day of Christmas
my browser brought to me
five Open-Nings!
four wicked wikis,
three permalinks,
two Wordle blimps
and a tagged comment in a Twitter meme.

On the sixth day of Christmas
my browser brought to me
six Skypers Skyping,
five Open-Nings!
four wicked wikis,
three permalinks,
two Wordle blimps
and a tagged comment in a Twitter meme.

On the seventh day of Christmas
my browser brought to me
seven Seesmics screaming,
six Skypers Skyping,
five Open-Nings!
four wicked wikis,
three permalinks,
two Wordle blimps
and a tagged comment in a Twitter meme.

On the eighth day of Christmas
my browser brought to me
eight Delicious bookmarks,
seven Seesmics screaming,
six Skypers Skyping,
five Open-Nings!
four wicked wikis,
three permalinks,
two Wordle blimps
and a tagged comment in a Twitter meme.

On the ninth day of Christmas
my browser brought to me
nine Diggers Digging,
eight Delicious bookmarks,
seven Seesmics screaming,
six Skypers Skyping,
five Open-Nings!
four wicked wikis,
three permalinks,
two Wordle blimps
and a tagged comment in a Twitter meme.

On the tenth day of Christmas
my browser brought to me
ten Google searchings,
nine Diggers Digging,
eight Delicious bookmarks,
seven Seesmics screaming,
six Skypers Skyping,
five Open-Nings!
four wicked wikis,
three permalinks,
two Wordle blimps
and a tagged comment in a Twitter meme.

On the eleventh day of Christmas
my browser brought to me
eleven widgets wandering,
ten Google searchings,
nine Diggers Digging,
eight Delicious bookmarks,
seven Seesmics screaming,
six Skypers Skyping,
five Open-Nings!
four wicked wikis,
three permalinks,
two Wordle blimps
and a tagged comment in a Twitter meme.

On the twelfth day of Christmas
my browser brought to me
twelve bloggers blogging,
eleven widgets wandering,
ten Google searchings,
nine Diggers Digging,
eight Delicious bookmarks,
seven Seesmics screaming,
six Skypers Skyping,
five Open-Nings!
four wicked wikis,
three permalinks,
two Wordle blimps
and a tagged comment in a Twitter meme!

To all my great friends - bloggers, commenters, followers, visitors and mates, have a great time over the festive season.

Thanks for all your support and help. I really have appreciated being with you all this year.

That Remains To Be Seen

Learning, and one’s ability to retain it, depends on the distributed frequency of related study sessions over time.

Clark Quinn’s recent post, to do with the effectiveness of crammed learning, brought to mind a discussion I had with a colleague some years ago. We’d been inquiring about the rate of return of assignments from a distance learner who had crammed the equivalent of several months’ study into one day.

Does learning have a half-life?

Clark cited an article by Inga Kiderra outlining the research findings of Hal Pashler. What is learnt during a study session seems to decay. The rate of decay has a dependency based on the number of related study sessions in a series and its duration. A series of study sessions over a significant period of time has a cummulative effect and can lead to longer lasting retention.


Learning diminishes at a rate that relates inversely to the pace of distributed study sessions over time. It means that a series of crammed sessions, during the week before an examination, is unlikely to bring about learning that's useful a year or so later.

Competence over time:

A simple example of the properties of learning over time is how the skill and knowledge is remembered that’s needed to solve a quadratic equation in mathematics.

Though this is not an easy skill to obtain, it is one that can be acquired by a competent student of mathematics by cramming over a few days. To do this, competent learners have to grapple with new ideas, some concepts and some content. One piece of content that the experienced student needs to know is the formula for the solution:

A learner who has acquired the skills and knowledge during a few days of crammed study may be hard pushed a year or so later to remember that such a formula even exists, let alone how to apply it. If the practice of solving quadratic equations is not revisited during the interim period, there may be little remembered of the activity.

The learner who has gained skills and knowledge over several months of regular practice may not be able to remember the exact formula a year or so later either. However, recollection of the concept of solving a quadratic equation, as well as recalling that the formula exists, is more likely. It may be that the solution is only a Google search away.

What is really being assessed?

Every learner is different in the way they assimilate what is learnt. What one can gain usefully from a paced rate of learning may not be equivalent to that acquired by another, even if their end assessments are identical.

The ideas brought forward by Pashler’s research have implications for the results of tests that lead to qualifications, as in the New Zealand Qualifications Authority standards. One has to ask what is being assessed in these tests.

There is no doubt that a good result in a standard assessment shows that learning has occurred. This is a measure of the ability of the learner to learn and perhaps understand through study.

How do we test long-term retention?

Depending on what study has gone before, and the pattern of that over time, however, a grade in a standard test may not be a useful measure of learning that may be put to use in the future.

There are similar implications for the results obtained through online assessment. Study that’s performed online, by a learner who is able to access all the resources for a unit of learning, may not be carried out in the best way possible to enable long-term retention.

( 10 ) << - related posts - >> ( 8 ) ( 7 ) ( 6 ) ( 5 ) ( 4 ) ( 3 ) ( 2 ) ( 1 )

Let Me Count The Ways

The book and the paper it’s made from have recently taken a rap. The suggestion is that the book is outmoded. It's well past its use-by date in education and it's not environmentally friendly.

I like the book. Having had a lifelong association with the invention,
I realise my opinion inclines in its favour. To be fair to the book in the context of learning, however, the reasons gathered in support of its removal or replacement should be related to its merits and demerits as a learning resource.

When weighing the stresses, it is difficult to assess its effectiveness against digital counterparts unless a few ground rules are defined.

Judged by its cover

It is unfair to pitch the book against such things as an online chat or a wiki. Whatever the equivalents of these technologies will look like in future, their application and purpose cannot be compared, with any relevance, to those offered by a book. Try comparing the virtues of a submarine with those of a helicopter and you’ll see what I mean.

Neither is it fair to condemn the book just because its content may go out of date. Data in a web-page, a blog post or even a tweet are just as likely to go out of date, and for the same reasons, with no likelier promise of edits to correct these.

What are the benefits and drawbacks?

The rate of use of paper throughout the world is now higher than ever; it rages wildly and at a mounting pace. But it’s not the book, textbook, printed educational literature or school note-pad that is mainly to blame for the burgeoning rate of paper production. Advertising, and the wasteful packaging of goods, contribute to more than half the global consumption of paper.

More trees

This does not detract from the volume of paper consumed for educational purposes. It is huge. A recent article on campus sustainability and paper consumption by Clark University, reported that 720 trees are harvested each year to supply printer/copy paper for that establishment alone. It may be just a leaf in a tome, but I have an eye for conservation, and that fact leaves me pondering.

Burgeoning content

Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach states, in her September video, that by the year 2020, knowledge could be doubling every 72 hours.

She claims that by that time, there will be no place for the book in schools, as it would be impossible for it to keep pace with the rate of knowledge growth. Setting aside issues of relevance to the school curriculum, knowledge delivered at its predicted rate of creation by 2020 couldn’t possibly be accomplished in book form. I wonder if any data management system could ever deliver knowledge at such a rate - and for what purpose.

Pictures, images and diagrams

In the twentieth century, advances in the printing industry brought vibrant colour to illustrations in books. Only in the last 15 to 20 years has such quality of detail and colour been viewable on the computer screen.

The digital device has the edge on the book, with the use of diagrammatic sequence, melting images, moving images or other animated schema. Especially in student learning, there is a growing need for the use of visual images as learning tools to promote student understanding.

Videos in particular can provide amazingly detailed imagery. With the animation technology available today, it is possible to view a 3D virtual journey through the chambers of the human heart, or to observe the journey through the intake and exhaust valves of the internal combustion engine.

As David Whitehead said in his speech on strategies for improving literacy, simply asking students to imagine (as a thinking/learning tool) may not be as successful as it was in the past.

One might be forgiven for thinking that this may be as a result of the use of explicit animated imagery, rather than other teaching tools that are perhaps more likely to exercise the imagination of young minds. For as limited as a book may be in depicting complex concepts in pictures, its practiced use has the power to stimulate the imagination.

Visuals with text

When creating a learning resource, there is a tendency to overuse the features available to the digital resource designer. While acceptable and effective page design has become a well-established skill in textbook writing, the same cannot be said universally of digital learning resource design.

The misuse of PowerPoint as a learning tool highlights the vagaries of incorporating voice with text. Their joint use accompanying displayed images or diagrams in a learning resource causes cognitive overload in the learner. It is difficult to achieve this with a textbook. Verbal and written information simply cannot be presented simultaneously unless the teacher speaks while the learner is trying to read.

Copyright moves quick quick to music

One of the wonderful things about books is their ability to be shared.
A book, when first sold, can then be lent, gifted or sold again – the so-called first-sale doctrine.

But for the existence of that principle, libraries, second-hand book and CD stores, as well as video rental outlets would be illegal. Though there have been several attempts made over the decades to place restrictions on the resale of printed books, actions restricting the sharing of digital equivalents have moved more fiercely. It seems that even the publishers of printed resources may now wish to cash in on this idea.

It was suggested in The Future Of The Internet III that copyright protection technology may dominate content control in 2020. A little less than a third of expert opinion surveyed agreed that this was a likely scenario.

The tractable e-book

As I said at the start of this soliloquy, I like the book. But the thought of a digital replacement still excites me. I’ve yet to get my hands on an e-book, like the Amazon Kindle. As Jim Henderson says:

"For this to go, there has to be buy-in by the publishers."

Video

Top Ten Commenters 2008 and a Wordle Meme

When I took part in the Comment Challenge this year, I not only became a blogger, but I also learnt a huge pile of techniques and different ways to go about writing a blog post. One technique I learnt was to cover more than one topic in a post – a very fine tack when attempting to follow a busy schedule of blog assignments.

I’m using that technique in this post for I am honouring requests from two respected bloggers, Andrea Hernandez of EdTech Workshop and Paul C of quoteflections.

Paul’s request for my 2008 Top Ten List brought me, once again, to consider my wonderful commentsphere. My Top Ten list is of the top ten superb commenters whose contributions have helped to make my blog come alive. Over 40 commenters made contributions to the posts on this blog since it began in May this year.

My Top Ten Commenters for 2008 are:

Virginia Yonkers
Ken Stewart
Sue Waters & Sue Waters (-: joint equal :-)
Britt Watwood
Paul C
Michele Martin
Bonnie Kaplan
Laurie Bartels (joint tenth equal)
Christy Tucker (joint tenth equal)
Shaun Wood (joint tenth equal)

According to the terms of Scott McLeod's fantastic commenter award, this entitles the commenters in my top ten list to display the award medal on their blog.

Very close to those were Tom Haskins, Andrea Hernandez,
Tony Karrer, Rose DesRochers, Sarah Stewart and Nancy White, who all made equivalent contributions.

There were many more amazing commenters who did not make this list. I pay a special tribute to those for the significant contribution they made to the discussions in Middle-earth this year.


Andrea Hernandez tagged me at the beginning of this month and I didn’t pick this up until very recently. Her request was to create a Wordle from my blog’s RSS feed, to comment on it, to tag others and to link back to Andrea’s post, The Wordle Meme.

I must say that I got a rather weird Wordle, for no matter how many times I tried, I always got a Wordle blimp and the word trust appearing as a separate display as shown above. I was surprised that trust was featured so prominently, though Andrea did say that Wordle draws from the most recent posts. Two of my latest posts were about trust.

The rest of the blimp reflects what I’d expect, with the foremost words being learner, time, people, resource and resources.

The contributors tagged in this post are invited to participate in the meme of their choice. Details can be found at Life is One Big Top Ten and The Wordle Meme.

A Slice of The Cake

" because whoever has something, will have more given to him."
Mark 4:25

I am not religious, neither am I against religions, but Diane Cordell’s post, The Others, made me think about Mark 4:25.

She asks the questions:

1. Q - Do you believe that our educational culture could be/should be more inclusive?
   
   
2. Q - Are we reaching the Others?”

My reactions to those were immediately, 1. A – yes, 2. A – no.

Diane made me reflect on just how the educational culture that I know could be fairer, so that every learner was included, got a fair share, and got a fair chance to speak out. I wondered about practicalities and the reality of it all.

I left a comment on Diane’s post:

While it is true that teachers are not reaching all learners and all learners are not getting a 'fair share' (whatever that is), the practicality of it all is that teachers can't reach all learners. And of course all learners can't get their fair share.

The question is, how do we go about cutting the cake so that each learner gets their fair share?

I am a distance educator with some 200 or more students. The way the system operates, learners can phone me anytime they wish. I phone them sometimes too. But if a learner phones me and chats for 20 minutes, she's used 8 more minutes than I have allocated per week to spend with her.

A fairer share:

The reality is that my weekly ration is less than 12 minutes per learner to do all I need to do with associated teaching and learning. That includes phoning up the learner if need be. That's about 150 seconds per day per learner.

Fair? I don't think so. But how do I, as teacher, make adjustments so that all learners get a fair crack of my time?

Do I say to a caller, "Sorry, your time is up for this week. Give me a call next week and I'll give you the rest of the help you need"?

Or do I lay aside Jenny's assignment that's next in line for assessing because she spoke to me for 20 minutes on the phone?

After school:

Classroom contact is not much different from this. When I taught in a classroom, I used to give coaching sessions for maths after school. Effectively it gave kids an extra 20% more time with me. You can see the theoretical leverage that had on their achievement. Though in reality it was not quite as efficient as that, it still made a significant difference for those who participated.

A recent study has shown that the reason children from the so-called lower classes don't do so well at school is because, for them, the school IS the learning.

For more privileged children, their learning continues at home and that includes during the holidays. Oh, it's not all maths, science and English for them in the holidays, but it's learning just the same. Their parents groom them in other useful skills in preparation for their place in society. How does a teacher redress that inequity?

An eye for an aye:

Callous I may seem to be, but in the environments that I have taught in, including the present, I adopt the principle that each learner gets from me what they are prepared to give. That's to say, if a learner is prepared to spend time on the phone with me, I am prepared to spend the time with them.

Fair? I think so.

Trust In Blogs

Trust is a strange and capricious emotion. Its composition is built on experience from the moment of birth. The bonding between parent and child is a fabric woven out of the intimacy and trust within that relationship.

It manifests itself in the early school years when relationships are fashioned within groups of children. A child’s learning is influenced by the trust placed in the teacher, and likewise the trust the teacher has for the learner.

A foundation of partnerships:

Trust is the foundation of partnerships, whether in friendship, marriage, business, or trade and exchange. The lack of it can preclude the formation of any of those alliances and can lead to disputes, fights, battles and wars.

People in business, and in sales in particular, are aware of the reliance of success on trust between vendor and client, or between agents in partnerships.

Britt Watwood’s post, The Trust Factor, discusses trust from the point of view of trustworthiness as a quotient. At that time he had been introduced to a web device designed to assess a trust quotient.

Trust in blogs:

Recently, interest has been centred on people’s trust in blogs, and particularly though not exclusively in company blogs, fuelled by the latest report by Forrester Research Inc.

Tony Karrer’s recent post, No Trust, is a reflective take on this, and the opinions expressed by others. I left a comment, and he responded:

Often we don't have time to get to know someone. Rather we have to make snap judgements based on little pieces of information. There are lots of great resources from libraries about this problem of evaluation. Most of us have our patterns figured out. But what's interesting is to hear other people's likely patterns. Oh, this is a blog by someone I don't know - I don't trust this information.

Tony is right, of course. Often there is no time to form a trust of a situation or of a person. But with a blog, there are other emotions that can arise within the reader. Time is less urgently associated with the decision-making.

The power of the blog:

There is a complex mix of emotions, conceptions, misconceptions and beliefs that may well lead to diversity in how people view blogs. The wonderful thing about blogs for unprejudiced minds is that they can permit discussions to unfold.

Our discussion brought us to a consensus, and demonstrated the power that the blog post has to bring about accord. Isn’t that what it’s all about? I’d like to think so. I am grateful to Tony, and to blogging, for the opportunity to share our opinions across the globe.

My comment to Tony was much along the following lines:

There may well be a need to distinguish between not trusting a person/company/blog and saying that person/company/blog is untrustworthy.

I am clearly not going to 'trust' a person that I've never met before (why should I trust them?) BUT it would be libel for me here to say that person is untrustworthy. My experience is that some people cannot tell the difference between not trusting, and untrustworthy.

Distrust in blogs:

I can understand the distrust that readers have when they come across a blog for the first time. I believe it's a similar emotion that prevents a lot of people from ever putting a comment on a post. Some people just 'don't trust' the Internet. They may even think that it's untrustworthy.

There are many examples of this (type of) distrust. For instance, when telephone banking was first introduced, people distrusted that system.

When Internet banking became a reality, people distrusted it for the same reason – they needed time to gather more information about it, to hear of successful use, to meet people they knew who used it successfully. What would not reinforce their trust in the systems would be reports of Internet fraud or other things going wrong.

A mix of emotions:

There is a mix of emotions that most people experience when they have to put their trust in something or in someone. The transactional analysis of such a situation indicates that the would-be-participant has a degree of lack of confidence that explains their unwillingness to trust.

So I’d say that it is logical for someone to say, "Oh, this is a blog by someone I don't know - I don't trust this information."

Acquiring trust is a process:

The process of gaining trust is cyclical, with an indeterminate period. Observations are checked against a list of criteria. The list may be a defined checklist or it may simply be a list of doubts in the mind of the observer. In most instances it’s a list of doubts.

People who are duped by a person/company/blog have not utilised their cognitive abilities to the best, and some would just say that they were “too trusting”.

The snap decision:

In business circles, snap decisions are being made all the time - you will know this. Sometimes the decisions made, purportedly based on trust, are the wrong ones. I would say that in any snap decision, there is not sufficient time for it to be based on trust, for it takes time for the iterative cycle to permit trust to be established.

So when a person comes across a person/company/blog for the first time, they make a snap decision based on what they know. It requires an analytical mind to know what to do to validate their first formed opinion, to verify their doubts.

A few home truths:

Let me share a few home truths with you, for I am the most trusting person I know. :-)

If my experience was that I was often duped through interaction with people/companies/blogs, or I’d heard of the same happening among my friends, I might be disinclined to have anything to do with people/companies/blogs. I’m not like that of course.

Some would say that I was a very distrusting person. I’d tend to refute that statement and say that I am discerning and analytical.

I try to verify, almost unequivocally, any first formed opinion that I may have (of trust OR distrust) before I make any significant decision, other than transactional ones.

Unfortunately (either for me or others) most people aren’t like me. It's probably why I’m in the minority sector of society who reads blog posts and comments on them, never mind blogging about it.

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TRUST - A Strange Human Emotion

Manish Mohan has only recently written a post about trust. He made me think about this, and the decisions that I may have to make when I read a blog post.

I thank Manish for making me ponder deeply about this matter. He prompted me to leave a comment on his post that carried a weighty and profound question: Do You Trust Corporate Blogs? It went something like this:

Trust is a strange human emotion. It is deep-rooted in our instinctive mechanisms for survival. When the reason for a decision based on trust is analysed, it is often found to be highly complex. The nature of the complexity is often found to be meshed with a whole raft of subliminal things: hunches, preferences, likes and dislikes, gut feelings, undefined reasons.

It is rarely cut and dry - rarely logical.

So when you ask, "Do you trust corporate blogs?" I think about trust, and what it is based on.

You could say, "do you trust blogs?" Many people don't trust blogs - never mind the corporate bit.

And so we move on to ask questions like, "what is it about a particular blog that you trust?" You could also say, "why trust blogs at all?"

A more in-depth analysis of trust (associated with blogs or any other Internet sites) will yield other questions. Questions like, "how can you tell that a site is trustworthy? (Never mind the 'blog' or the 'corporate' bit).

For me, all sites have to be tested by my baloney detector, whether corporate or not. As naive as it may seem, I apply exactly the same detection kit to all blogs that I read (and all posts for that matter).

Trust is a movable feast. The occurrences on sites permit me to decide whether to trust them or not. There are some sites that I used to trust, and now trust no longer. I don't visit these sites anymore - at least, if I happen to come across them, I don’t comment on them. It's a bit like the people I meet in everyday life.

I recently received a request from a company (which I won't name here) to post articles on my blog. Effectively I was being asked to host articles.

The email included a couple of links to company sites. I looked at the sites. They were corporate and commercial. The advertising that would come with the articles I might agree to host contravened my comment guidelines. I immediately treated the request (which incidentally was written like a personal email) as spam. End of story.

Did I trust the request? Yes. Did I trust the attendant sites? No.

So, do I trust corporate sites? The answer is, it depends.

I am no more likely to 'trust' a corporate site than any other site that I come across. Every site I read is judged (by me) on its own merits.

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Learning Resources

In a previous post I responded to a request from Rupa Rajagopalan. She asked me to outline how I built a digital resource, and left a comment on that post requesting more on the same theme. In this post I feature a few other resources, with some detail on their usefulness.

Spice in variety:

I’m not advocating the exclusive use of digital resources for any purpose. My own feeling about digital resources is that one’s enough at a time. You may already have met my Death by Chocolate principle:

A poor chef may include chocolate as an ingredient in every dish, but it is a shortsighted one who excludes its use altogether. If the only recipe available that includes it is mediocre, then chocolate should be off the menu. Good chefs choose menus wisely.

A helping of fun goes a long way with the use of any resource. Applying some thought to how it may be introduced to the learner can spice up even a relatively mundane resource.

Learning objectives:

Resources are chosen to best fit a learning objective, whether it's to introduce a new topic, provide example problems, or for a revision purpose. Ideally a single digital resource should embrace one and only one learning objective.

I believe that within strict limits, there may be some exceptions to this such as when a resource may be used to provide enrichment around a topic. The Virtual Electric Lab is a resource of this type. It was built as an introduction to electrical circuits and their simple components.

Digital no substitute:

I must explain, however, that none of the resources that can be found in the Virtual Electric Lab is any substitute for practical experience in connecting circuits. Where possible, the learner should be introduced to the practical aspects of simple electrical circuitry. Hands-on experience in handling such equipment is essential. This also permits the learner to become more familiar with simple electrical components.

Young distance learners may not have access to such equipment, however, and this can also involve an additional matter of cost.

Electrical currents:

Being modularised, the individual labs can be used for separate objectives depending on the development and ability of the learner. The current lab can be introduced as a separate module, using the stations approach to introducing electrical components as resistors.

Electrical meters:

The meter lab similarly permits the presentation of voltmeters and ammeters and how they are used in circuits. Both of the above resources adhere to their respective objectives.

Bells and whistles:

If a broader sweep of the topic is in order, as would fit an able learner, then the complete lab with bells and whistles can be accessed. Again and depending on the ability of the learner and context of its application, a find-the-thimble approach can be incorporated into the lesson.

For instance, a learner may be given a few questions to find answers to on the way, such as; who gave the Christmas lectures on the candle? Or how many turns per minute does the wind turbine make?

In the main, the resources are interactive in that the learner is prompted to the next step within the resource and in some instances given simple questions that provide direct feedback to the learner.

Playing with an incinerator:

Sometimes it can be downright dangerous to expect a learner to find some things out by practical hands-on experience. An instance of this is learning about the relative efficiencies of complete and incomplete combustion in an incinerator.

The Virtual Incinerator mimics the conditions of a real incinerator. It permits the learner to play about with it and make such observations as necessary to learn about complete combustion, with a certain level of safety.

The suck-it-and-see-approach:

Drawing scientific graphs is a skill that science learners need to acquire sooner or later. While a suck-it-and-see approach is used in this resource, some learner direction may be required before the resource is accessed by the learner. Provided the learner hasn’t used this resource previously, it can be used as an excellent revision tool for drawing graphs.

Punnett Squares:

Simple genetics can be fun. This resource introduces drawing Punnett squares, showing the outcomes of genetic crosses. It is a module that would form part of a course in genetics. Several methods are used to provide helpful feedback to the learner on example genetic crosses.

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Need More Memory? Graphene's The Answer

Memory chips have been increasing in size since they were first made. Each new development meant that larger chips could be manufactured.

But there’s a limit to the useful size of a standard silicon chip. In recent years, big chips just haven’t been able to keep up with demands as far as speed and a few other properties are concerned.

Electrical resistance:

The reason for these limitations is because of a significant resistance to the flow of electrical current in a large chip, putting a limit on the speed at which signals can be transmitted within a chip. But this physical restriction may well be lifted through the use of thin layers of carbon known as graphene.

Astonishing properties:

Towards the end of last century, nanotubes and buckyballs - tiny structures made out of arrays of carbon atoms - were well known to have astonishing properties of strength, flexibility and ability to conduct electrical current. The single layers of carbon atoms that make graphene have similar properties to these nanostructures.

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have discovered a way to make best use of the amazing properties of this form of carbon. The recent breakthrough, using a chemical process, permits sheets of graphene to be made, far larger than ever before.

Graphene sheets so produced have a lower resistance, by several orders of magnitude, than similar sheets produced by other methods.

Memory chips of the future could well have huge storage capacity. It’s all to do with the property of carbon in thin layers to conduct an electrical current extremely easily. This permits individual parts of a chip to be made far more compact.

On-off power ratio:

Power consumption is a key feature of this future technology. The on-off power ratio of a graphene chip is huge – a million to one. Graphene has other useful advantages of being able to operate at extremes of temperature.

In the near future, mobile phones, cameras and laptops could have unbelievable memory capacity using the graphene chip.

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Anyone For Tennis?

Michele Martin has recently coined a wonderful word: now-ness.

It means the burden of present day communications technology used by those who wish to communicate with you - all at once. Not unlike infowhelm, and very much in your face, it's amplified many-fold by present day communications tools.

I empathise with Michele, and others like her in this reasoned plight. Now-ness can be stressful. I sometimes find stress to be unpleasant and I have to find ways of controlling the stressors for myself. I left a comment on Michele’s great post, The Tyranny of Now. It went something like this:

I was discussing this idea in the workplace recently. Someone said glibly that it's just like playing tennis. “You return the ball from whichever direction it comes - that's the skill.”

Multi-tennis:

But it's more than just that. It's like playing tennis with several players, all of them on the other side of the net. And all are serving with a different ball. Sometimes it seems as if there are several dozen balls coming towards you all at once. Which do you hit?

For a satisfactory return that leads to something useful, one has to simply ignore certain serves, and find ways of doing this. It's not easy. That way, however, you have prioritised your interactions. You are then in control. You can also have a win-win situation.

Use whatever means, when necessary, to freeze that incoming ball in mid-air, while you return the previous one, otherwise you end up missing both.

Who is serving?

Email, the phone, text-on-mobile and your RSS reader are your servants. You're certainly not theirs. You could treat them like that. But you may end up serving few and usually none.

I watch colleagues sprinting across the office to grab their ringing phones. Sometimes they make it, without a broken ankle. Other times they don’t make it before the ring-tone stops.

I have voicemail. I use it, but I also clear it regularly. I have seen other people ignoring the voicemail they receive. Later, they complain that it takes too long to clear it all. Hmmm.

Love all:

I let voicemail kick in, if I'm having a face-to-face conversation with a colleague and the phone rings. It's just common courtesy. It also saves stress. When it's convenient, and as soon as it's convenient, I check my voicemail.

I clear my email regularly too, but I don't use email alerts. They just distract me while I attend to other things - the phones are (bad) enough. Only family have my mobile number and they know to text me first - I've got my ring-tones on near silent, mainly out of courtesy to my work colleagues.

There are other measures I take. They are as simple.

When I discuss these things with work-colleagues, they throw their hands up in disgust. All I hear are excuses and complaints that they don't like leaving voicemail messages, so why should they expect others to. It’s then that I recall what they said about the time they took to clear their voicemail. I think of the people who took the time to leave them a message.

Slicing an ace:

My reaction is, get real! This is the twenty-first century. We built all this technology to help take the sweat out of life, not to get ourselves into a sweatball.

Technology is a tool. We invented it to assist us, not hinder us. We have to learn to use the technology at our disposal.

Otherwise, we invent a fine knife to cut our food, and end up slicing our fingers with it.

Your serve.

Having Saved the Baby

Having saved the baby, conserved the bathwater and rinsed out the bath, I should get real, and properly address Tony Karrer’s question which was, ‘what did I learn in 2008’.

In May:

I learnt to blog. Here’s the summary.

In doing that, I learnt that there’s a heck-of-a-lot of people out there who (obviously) enjoy reading blogs, but who don’t blog and who don’t comment much. I’ve had that confirmed a few times since then, while studying Google Analytics and AideRSS.

In June:

I learnt that the age-old rivals, training and education, were still as nebulously and controversially defined as ever.

In July:

I got an inkling that a lot of people who visited my blog were very interested in blogging as such. They were interested in the analysis and also the personalities depicted in blogs. My inkling was confirmed by a series of experiments that concluded in August.

In September:

I learnt that people have all sorts of wonderful ideas, models, metaphors and analogies for learning and how it’s done.

Also that month, I gathered more evidence that, in my commentsphere, there were a lot of people with strong ideas about commenting and the written and unwritten rules and regulations about that.

In October:

I learnt that there existed a whole spectrum of what people believed was necessary preparation for getting into elearning.

Coupled with that, in the same month, I found that there was a range of ideas around the blogosphere on the usefulness and effectiveness of commenting as a means for learning.

In November:

I discovered that bloggers in my commentsphere are keenly interested in the analysis of their own writing persona, even if just for fun.

I also had it confirmed what a joy it could be to blog and participate in blogging.

And it is a joy! Good will to all!

The Baby, The Bath and The Bathwater

Tony Karrer’s Big Question for the month of December is, ‘What did you learn about learning in 2008?’

This has certainly been a year of learning for me. I was involved in several projects, not all of them employment related. But they were all to do with teaching and learning.

The long and the short of it all is, that I’ve learnt so much about learning this year; I can’t possibly cover it all in one post. So I’ve prioritised my list down to one item.

Bookshops as big as supermarkets:

Fifteen years ago, I listened to a soliloquy from a work colleague, at a meeting on learning resources. The proclamation was that books would be out of date in 5 to 10 years. I wondered about this idea. At the time, I couldn’t easily imagine the book being surpassed, and eventually replaced, by digital equivalents.

Well, it didn’t happen. Instead, bookstalls became bookshops, and now we have bookshops like supermarkets. During most of this year, my older daughter has worked part-time in Borders, New Zealand. It is a huge new bookstore - easily one of the biggest shops of its type in Wellington.

The demise of the textbook:

But I was reminded of the prediction of the disappearance of books when I came across Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach’s post in September this year, and listened to her video. She spoke of the demise of the textbook.

I reflected on the meaningful consequences of getting rid of books, and all resources like them, to do with content. This is what Sheryl is proposing as a panacea for enabling learning in the twenty-first century. She posits that what we have to do is ‘to unlearn’, for ‘learning doesn’t work that way anymore’. There is merit in some of what she says.

Meaningful, authentic, passion-based scholarship:

She speaks of ‘meaningful, authentic, passion-based scholarship’ while talking about preparing learners for an age that isn’t here yet. And again, I wonder.

I speculate, as she does, on what it is that we should be teaching our students, if we don’t really know what they will need in the future. But I also wonder about the long-term consequences of eschewing content.

Closely related to this theme are my experiences with some new projects that I have been involved with this year. These projects have not gone according to plan, for the plan involved dismissing previous experience and knowledge as past history.

The accumulated experience and knowledge - the content - that could have assisted some of these projects, if only by consideration of what didn’t work, was simply not permitted to happen. The projects were all to do with learning. In particular, some were to do with elearning.

Leaky buildings:

I won’t be specific here, though I’m willing to discuss this fully in a different forum. But it’s all too much like the so-called leaky building syndrome that struck the property industry in New Zealand earlier this century.

Through the introduction of new standards and materials, and by discarding established building practices – content – the building industry in New Zealand plunged itself into crisis. Houses were constructed that simply rotted from the inside, due to a number of unforeseen conditions that were fostered within the wall cavities of the buildings.

Examination of the old standards, and consideration of why they had been established in the first place, showed that many fundamental portions of knowledge had been overlooked when introducing the new standards and construction methods. Implementing the use of a combination of new building materials, and new, untested building standards, caused a minor disaster in that industry that’s still being cleared up today.

Leaky pipes:

A minor crisis also occurred in New Zealand, near the end of last century, when unleaded automobile fuel was formulated and commercially introduced to the public.

Insufficient testing, of a fundamental nature, led to several instances of fuel hose erosion resulting in the withdrawal and reformulating of some newly introduced automobile fuels. This came about through a similar lack of consideration of what had gone before.

Learning to read:

Some twenty years ago in New Zealand, phonetics as a method used in teaching reading, was removed from the curriculum, in favour of so-called word-recognition. My oldest daughter would have been severely affected through this curricular move, had I not given her necessary coaching, using phonetics.

Luckily, I had enough common sense to help her myself, when I eventually found she was having difficulty learning to read. Phonetics is now being re-introduced as one of the methods for teaching reading in schools.

Postmodernism?

It is as if it is part of a growing culture – some say it’s a manifestation of postmodernism – that infuses the thinking like mycelia, whenever innovation is called upon. Innovation is a wonderful thing if it works.

Simply discarding past experience and knowledge in the name of replacing those with some new and seemingly innovative idea, may not withstand the test of time.

What we teach learners today, and what they learn, must withstand the test of time. This applies, whether it is process or content.

This year, I wondered if throwing out the baby with the bath and the bathwater is a useful technique for achieving progress in learning.