Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

Recent Items
 
Education: What Does Student-Centric Look Like?
 
Seattle: Through New Eyes
 
What did you do in the electoral wars of 2004, Daddy?
 
Dave's Welcome to Rain City
 
Urban Zoology: Will Work for Cherries
 
Education: It's About the Students
 
BloggerBuzz: Blogger Support Appreciation Day
 
Serious Hand-Wringing: The Borrow-Spend Death Spiral
 
Honey, Where'd You Put the Bloggo?
 
Simple Geek Pleasures

Dave's Welcome to Rain City

Scripting News: Seattle Kicks My Ass.  Dave Winer is driving around Seattle after having motored across Canada to here.  We've changed seasons since Dave's last visit (during a seductive break from the Washington State Annual Rain Festival, January 1 - December 31 according to a T-shirt that I gave away to a homesick Puget Sounder a few years ago).

Last night I went to bed early and naturally woke up at 4am thinking about things.  One of those things was Dave's struggle driving in the rain and how nothing about the local highways, road markings, or anything else is designed for people who don't already know where they are going.  My theory is that it is a progression of student projects in the University of Washington school of Traffic Engineering, led by some demented Robert Moses disciple.  (Two blocks from my house, there is one of two surviving scramble walks in the city.  Do you know what it is like to be a pedestrian at a scramble walk where neither the motorists nor the pedestrians have a clue what is going on?)  Seattle is some sort of intergalactic museum of different things that have been tried at least once, which is as good an explanation for the motley of architectural styles as any.

By 5am I am thinking of more profound ways in which Dave and I are related.  We both are of an age where we know a lot of people with quadruple bypasses, emphysemia, and (as John Wayne put it) the big C.  Dave is in fact one of those people in the bypass category while I keep taking my Lipitor, kvetching about weight gain, and knocking wood.  I am also touched by Dave's reaction to President Clinton's recent surgery.

But the most profound way that Dave and I are related is how we behave when lost.  I keep maps and I am always planning routes with Microsoft Streets (from the days when it was bundled with everything) and, these days, the local transit maps.  It would never occur to me to call someone on my cellular phone and be talked into my destination.  Yet that is how people keep appointments these days.  I rarely carry my cellular phone, and I don't make calls while driving.  For example, I was on foot (carrying my Nokia 9001 too) searching for Chez Scobleizer and I could not find that half-block-long suburban street where the address was hidden.  It was one of those it has to be here, but where does it connect with a street that I can find by circumnavigating from the bus stop?  Whatever the sins of the Seattle/King-County grid system (it is, I think, um, 5 grids notched and butted together), suburban development and metropolitan sprawl, along with the struggle for identity of neighboring communities plunked on the King County grid, have made a hash of it.  And any street with "Place" in its name seems to be an alley or subdivision that introduces a street where the grid doesn't allow for one. You know, "Hey it's easy, (North East) Flotsam Place is that short street half way up the block on Jetsam Terrace (North East)."  Right.

But hey, Dave is going to be among us for a while.  Neat-O.  Welcome to the center of the Universe, Dave.  Yes, you should change your datelines to Pacific Daylight Time.  It goes with the place, you know?  And it honors us that you're here.

What else?  Well, there's a great Barnes & Noble in the University Village, but then you might as well go to the University District and all of the used bookstores plus the University Bookstore itself, a college community and fascinating restaurants.  Scott is right, people in the know can get everywhere without hardly ever stepping onto the Interstates which is where the other people park and use their cell phones to lobby for more, wider, smoother roads from the taxes they vote to cut.  You thought Boston politics was interesting?  Be prepared for a gentle introduction to paralysis by initiative.  (The monorail project somehow snuck past folks who expected it to fail and now they can't figure out how to sabotage it.)  You're staying inside the free-fare zone and the within-Seattle transit system works quite well, no matter what Alex Steffen says.  Have fun.  It's a funky place and many people refuse to be anywhere else.

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"Rain City" was the imaginative name given to Seattle as an alternate-universe location for a weirdly-interesting flick with Kris Kristofferson, Keith Carradine, and a wonderful French actress whose name I never remember. posted by orcmid at 9/13/2004 09:32:40 AM

Urban Zoology: Will Work for Cherries

2004 July 3.  One July morning in 2003, I walked out onto our West Seattle front porch to find out what all the rustling noises were.  Across the fence in the neighbor's yard, I could see the swaying branches in their cherry tree.  As I watched, I saw this sumo-proportioned raccoon struggling out the branches in search of the ripest cherries.  I wasn't sure whether the raccoon would win or the branch would give way and deposit her largeness on the neighbor's lawn.

This year, as our oldest son, Doug, was visiting, I was called to the back yard of our house to see who was visiting our cherry tree.  This little fellow was learning how to work the cherry crop while keeping a wary eye on the curious human below.  We left the timidly-determined character alone to feast in solitude.

Although West Seattle is a mature neighborhood in the vicinity of the original European settlement at Alki point and the Native American settlements before them, there are now tree-lined streets, park lands, and natural areas strewn among the semi-urban constructions of the past century.  It is easy to forget that we are plopped down on Nature's territory and her creatures have not vanished, merely accomodated themselves to the disruptions of the unruly newcomers.  It's true for the squirrels and crows, it might as well be for larger folk.  Sometimes, in the quiet of the day, I will observe one of the landlord's creatures on some furtive errand.  And then there are these brazen fellows to remind us that we don't really own the place and it would be good if we took better care of it while we're the major tenants.

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This event occured after I had just upgraded to a long macro lens and a better flash unit, although I am not now and was not then practiced with it.  I haven't given up on film, but I have started obtaining CD-ROMs instead of prints. posted by orcmid at 9/12/2004 05:37:54 PM

Education: It's About the Students

I see that I have some pent-up notes on education and these will go alongside the ones on peer-to-peer technology.  There are other gleanings on elements of distributed computing and tools for collaboration and coordinated activities.  I'll organize those later.  This one has enough mass to post now.

What A Student Wants

Joho the Blog: [foo] Designing shared ontologies.  I continue to be bemused about the bottom-up flavor of the creations at Foo (and of the comments triggered by this David Weinberger post), while I also marvel at the vitality and creativity that emerges with it.

Although I snort about technical ontologies altogether, the meta-context here is heart-warming:

"Jason Cole [led] a session on how to design a tool he wants to build.  He says most academic technology is aimed at teachers.  How do we build tools that support learning?  His wife just started grad school and wants a tool that will build a personal knowledge base.  But it should work with her friends' bases.  And you'd like to find others working on the same issues.  That means merging disparate ontologies."

Well no, that means just what it says.  Man, we dive into solution space at the drop of a requirement.  Maybe we should live in the problem space just a little longer.

This reminds me of the degree to which education in the U.S. seems to be all about the teachers, starting around kindergarten.  If you look at how distance-learning software is chosen to facilitate on-line programs, you'll see that the packages are organized for the delivery organization -- teachers and administration -- not the students, and that the package-selection (and -marketing) decision process is fundamentally based around administrative and faculty concerns.  Some of these are also about academic integrity, but there is a lot of magical thinking about how the students will be served.

I suppose it is not much different than software generally, since a lot of of it is designed by geeks and UI-fascisti pretending badly to be users.  (I am a card-carrying member of both organizations.)

As an adult (dare I say "mature learner") in an M.Sc in IT program that is delivered entirely on-line, I find it quite remarkable how well it works and how much the delivery of the program is accomplished by the interactions of the students, with near-invisible instructors and faculty.  And there is a highly-structured delivery process, with tight, disciplined weekly progressions.  For example, in my last module, the seminar-week ended on Wednesday at local midnight and I found my marks waiting for me Thursday morning, with feedback that I could apply in the just-begun week.  (This is extraordinary even for this program, my best previous experience being marks by Saturday afternoon, but I gather it is the benchmark and I have seen the existence proof for its achievability.)  In the post-course feedback surveys, I always go back and read the learning-outcomes of the syllabus so I can affirm whether they were achieved.  It is startling to see how rare it is for there to be any deviation, and I am beginning to think this aspect of academic regimentation around learning outcomes has a lot going for it.  When I commence my final module in mid-October there will be two new practices in place:

1. There are going to be more-detailed course descriptions so that students can be more informed about what to expect and what the approach will be in a given module, week-by-week.  I know about this because as a recent student in two of the M.ScIT modules I was invited to review the new descriptions for accuracy based on my own experience.
2. At the commencement of each module, students are required to attest to their reading and acceptance of the student charter and the rules of conduct and academic honesty, with attention to the virtual nature of our classrooms.  This last is to remind us how to avoid plagiarism and inappropriate collaboration while encouraging development of our own voices, something that the students are concerned about in assuring the integrity of this novel form of collegiate achievement.

Also in October, the program will be conducting its second semi-annual staff-student forum.  Students here are as preoccupied with the immediate as elsewhere, and few take the time to step up and examine meta-issues.  Just the same, the faculty and staff are amazingly responsive, compiling a report to the academic board on the student recommendations and reporting to the students on the actions that will be taken based on their recommendations and requests.  In other efforts to cultivate transparency and accountability, there have been published summaries of the student feedback on courses along with explanations of questioned practices as well as initiatives taken in response to the feedback.  This is all public, and we can be as plugged into the discussions and recommendations as we can stand.

The current delivery system is not as student-centric as Jason Cole and his wife would like to have it.  I expect to see that, although not in a way that destabilizes the fundamentals that seem to make these systems work from the institution's perspective.  It is also important not to jerk around the students who, where I study, are clearly valued as customers.  That shows up in the attitude of the organization and of the program faculty:

Paul Leng, Professor of elearning at the University of Liverpool, says elearning course developers need to stop concentrating on IT and start thinking about their users.

'Developers are seduced by the potential of technology,' he said.

'Users want online learning because they want to study online.  They're not there because they want an exciting experience.'

I don't fear to predict that there can and will be blending of student-centric collaboration tools into future generations of the delivery technology, once the fundamentals are fully secured.  In line with my own assertions about the focus on students, I don't think these tools will show up so much as educational "technology" but as the way we become able to collaborate and coordinate, generally and informally, everywhere.

Is Learning Something to Manage?

ACM News Service: Learning Management Systems - Are We There Yet?.  Here's more on the OKI project and its successor, the Sakai project, to create a fully-functional learning-management system.  It is open-source and extensible.  One part of the effort is going to be around construction of learning objects and it may involve the MIT OpenCourseWare project and others.

I am curious about how this is positioned to be drivable by the recipients and participants more than the delivery angle.  I need to read deeper.  The Syllabus Magazine interview with Ira Fuchs is very helpful, with extensive links.

This August 16 blurb is about IT for Higher Education, so there is a strong academic-institution perspective.  I think this is a proper venue for blended technologies, too, and there may be a great opportunity in this space.  It would be interesting to see how much components with horizontal functions can be used to integrate around this vertical pillar, reducing the amount of unique content in learning management while expanding the ease of integration into the participating learner's kit of collaborative tools.

Course Management as Blended Collaboration?

Here's earlier distant thunder on learning-management and the imperatives that have led to sharing the development.

ACM Technews: Universities to Release Free Course-Management Software.  Course management systems and their employment in distance learning provide a rich case for blended collaborative components, and that fascinates me for several reasons.  One is for the opportunity to make a contribution in this area.  Another is because of the prominence of interoperability and coherence in this setting, especially when there are conflicting intentions and views for a course management system, depending on whether you are a student, instructor, author, or administrator (of courseware and of educational delivery and records keeping).

This blurb emphasizes the motivation of some major US universities to create an open, shared course management system that can be deployed by the next (2005-2006) academic year and mitigate the dependency on commercial delivery services that are becoming increasingly expensive.  The importance of making Sakai customizable and interoperable with commercial offerings also appears fruitful.  There may also be greater attention to accessibility in an institutionally-funded effort.

The 2004-07-15 Jeffrey R. Young article in The Chronicle of Higher Education expands considerably, providing insight to the naming of the Sakei Project and some related background links. The project web site is here.

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I avoid reposting just to clean up the odd typo and grammargoof unless I do it quickly before too many people (that's 2 out of the 3 subscribers) have downloaded the original.  But I draw the line at getting David Weinberger's name wrong and must put in the fix no matter what [; posted by orcmid at 9/12/2004 11:42:43 AM

Comments:

I'm probably going to be teaching a couple of university courses over the next few months. And I got quite interested at the beginning of this story by the idea of "student oriented courses".

But then I found I couldn't quite figure out what you meant.

Clearly there are practical reasons for organizing a lot of things around lecturers - limited lecturer time means all students need to be in the same room at the same time, read the same material and do exercises and exam questions drawn from the same group. I guess this constrains a lot of the "packages" you are talking about.

The other things I understand from your examples are faster feedback, and publishing more detailed descriptions of the aims and objectives of the course. But these seem to me to be more tightening up the execution of the existing way of organizing than really re-organizing.

So are there other things you were thinking of, or can you suggest anything else which could make a course better organized around students?

# posted by phil: 9/20/2004 08:52:32 PM

 

Thanks for your question, Phil.  I have responded in a new entry, "Education: What Does Student-Centric Look Like?"  I would love to know what you see that could have a student-centric feel in your on-the-ground courses.  Are you able to set up communication and electronic discussion between the physical class meetings?  One reason for my being in this program is so that I can qualify myself as an on-the-ground lecturer!  I would like to participate in on-line delivery too, but I think being directly with students has its own quality and I want to contribute that way too.

# posted by orcmid: 9/21/2004 04:28:11 PM

 

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