How to Keynote an Unconference

A while back, I had the privilege of being the keynote speaker at the NERCOMP LMS Unconference. I had never attended an unconference before, nevermind keynoting one, and I found the prospect to be fascinating and exciting. And nerve-wracking. On the surface, a keynote appears to be the antithesis of the unconference spirit. I needed to do something different than the usual fare in order to make it work. I needed to do an unkeynote. And yet, Stephen Downes had warned me that he, Brian Lamb, and D’Arcy Norman had tried giving an unkeynote before and, in his words, “They almost lynched us. They were not happy to receive an unkeynote.” (D’Arcy’s post-mortem of their effort is definitely worthwhile reading.) So, what to do?

The approach I tried seemed to work, judging by the feedback I got from the attendees and, to a lesser degree, by the influence of the presentation that I was able to observe on the rest of the unconference. I had intended to blog about the experience a while ago but it fell off my to-do list. However, prompted by the good folks of the NERCOMP LMS SIG, I am now returning to the topic.

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Posted in Educational Pattern Languages | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

The Search for Differentiated and Engaging Student Experience

One of the trends I highlighted last summer was that the LMS or learning platform market was overlapping the educational content market.

The lines are blurring between content delivery systems (e.g. Cengage MindTap, Pearson MyLabs, etc) and LMS.  Content delivery and ability to keep students engaged within the content will drive much of the broader ed tech market.  This integration of markets is being seen as a strategically important issue for institutions, particularly for online programs.

While I feel quite confident in having made that description, I did not have a model, or explanation, of what was driving the trend. Nine months later, I believe the trend has proven itself empirically, as more examples emerge: Apples iBooks2 / iTunesU App, Online Education Service Providers such as 2tor combining online programs with custom learning platforms, Pearson OpenClass, MOOC startups with custom platforms such Coursera, Udacity, etc.

Last week Roger McNamee, co-founder and managing director with venture capital firm Elevation Partners, gave a presentation to the Mashable Connect conference titled “How to Revive the Web”. The presentation described how Apple won big by betting against the web and its prevailing culture (Mashable post here and Roger’s full presentation here). Roger’s theory is that Apple’s strategy was to move away from commoditized content, which most of the PC-based web (HTML4) assumed,  by delivering content in a differentiated, elegant manner – tightly combining content and the delivery mechanism. Furthermore, as HTML5 emerges, this move will accelerate.

If this theory is correct, I think it helps explain the trend of the LMS market combining and blurring with the educational content market.

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Posted in Blogging, Guest Bloggers, Higher Education, Instructional Design, Notable Posts, Openness, Usability and Human Factors | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

If You Are Having Trouble Accessing the Site…

A handful of you have let me know that you are getting 403 errors when you try to access e-Literate. There seem to be some residual caching issues from an anti-spam plugin that I deleted. I have cleared the cache on the server, and most folks have been reporting to me that when they clear their browser cache, the site loads just fine.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

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What Is Machine Learning Good For?

A few weeks ago, Audrey Watters wrote a great piece on her concerns about robo-grading of essays. (I tend to take a lot of inspiration from the things that annoy Audrey, in part because they usually annoy me too.) Here’s the crux of her argument:

According to Steve Kolowich’s Inside Higher Ed story, [educational researcher Mark] Shermis “acknowledges that [Automated Essay Scoring] software has not yet been able to replicate human intuition when it comes to identifying creativity. But while fostering original, nuanced expression is a good goal for a creative writing instructor, many instructors might settle for an easier way to make sure their students know how to write direct, effective sentences and paragraphs. ‘If you go to a business school or an engineering school, they’re not looking for creative writers,’ Shermis says. ‘They’re looking for people who can communicate ideas. And that’s what the technology is best at’ evaluating.”

Why are nuance and originality just the purview of the creative writing department? Why are those things seen here as indirect or ineffective? Why do we think creativity is opposed to communication?  Is writing then just regurgitation?

What sorts of essays gain high marks among the SAT graders – human now or robot in the future? Are these the sorts of essays that students will be expected to write in college? Is this the sort of writing that a citizen/worker/grown-up will be expected to produce?  Or, for the sake of speed and cost effectiveness, in Vander Ark’s formulation, are we promoting one mode of writing for standardized assessments at the K–12 level, only to realize when students get to college and to the job market that, alas, they still don’t know how to write?

How can we get students to write more? How can we help them find their voice and hone their craft? How do we create authentic writing assignments and experiences – ones that appeal to real issues and real discourse communities, not just to robot graders? How do we encourage students to find something to say and to write that something well?  Is that by telling them that their work will be assessed by an automaton?

How do we support the instructors who have to read student papers and offer them thinking and writing guidance? When we talk about saving time and money here, whose bottom line are we really looking out for?  Who’s really interested in this robot grader technology?  And why? [Emphasis added.]

This is a classic case of a market gone awry. Machine learning is sold as an “efficiency” tool, because there is money in squeezing cost out of education. In and of itself, there’s nothing wrong with wanting education to be cost-effective. David Wiley’s formulation of “standard deviations per dollar” has both a numerator and a denominator. You can attack either number and still affect the ratio. The problem with obsessing over the denominator is that you start forgetting that “cost-effective” has to be effective. If you want to know what the ongoing industrialization of education looks like in the post-industrial world, robo-grading is it. We are reducing the evaluation to the least common denominator, where the denomination is in dollars.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. What if we looked at machine learning (the technology that makes robo-grading possible) from the perspective of trying to raise the numerator, i.e., effectiveness, while keeping cost the same? How could the technology be used as a force multiplier for good teachers, helping them to focus on what they do best in roughly the same way that flipping the classroom is supposed to do? If the goal is teaching better rather than just teaching cheaper, then what is machine learning good for?

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Posted in Build This, Please, Educational Pattern Languages, Higher Education | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

What Are Ed Tech Entrepreneurs Good For?

The recent ASU Education Innovation Summit, which brought together venture capitalists with aspiring ed tech entrepreneurs, created quite a stir in the edublogosphere and the edutwitterverse. A lot of the reaction came from people who were watching from a distance via video. Audrey Watters, for example, wrote an epic rant on her frustrations. There were many angry tweets from a number of quarters. First-hand reporting was relatively scarce, though. George Siemens, who attended the conference live, wrote a thoughtful and nuanced post on the topic. The question of how entrepreneurs can productively play a role in educational progress, innovation, and reform is a topic that I think about a lot. In fact, I already had a post planned in my backblog from an interview I did with the Instructure founders and CEO on this very topic. So now that e-Literate has successfully migrated to a new host, and before Blackboard buying somebody else forces me to write another post series, I’d like to take some time to lay out my thoughts on the topic.

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Posted in Higher Education | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments