Impact of the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web emerged about 16 years ago, and has had an enormous impact on institutions and economies around the globe. So, how is it affecting education and training?

Wow, asking how the WWW is affecting education and training is like asking how the discovery of fire affected mankind. We aren’t stuck eating cold raw food, for one thing! But along with that discovery came a whole science that developed over time. How not to burn down your cave, for example. What fuels worked better than others, how to control the temperature, how to create it at will, portable tools and techniques for creating it.

The first thing that the WWW has done for education is made it accessible to anyone with digital access. If we consider education as both formal and informal experiences, simply being able to access Google search, ask.com or Wikipedia results in an immediate increase in knowledge. Meta tags and search codes enable you to find information on the most remote and obscure topics. Thanks to towns and communities digitizing old records you can search for that illusive ancestor, thanks to Google earth you can “fly” to an address and scope out the property. Accessing knowledge in many forms, from written, to symbols to pictorial, has become ubiquitous.

Another impact is the commercialization of education and training. Before the web, we relied on local institutions to provide us with an education. They were responsible for fulfilling society’s need for enlightenment. If you wanted to pursue a degree in an area not offered by your local college or university, you physically traveled to another state and enrolled, or if available, you might take a correspondence course. Well known universities developed reputations that became magnets for certain types of students: MIT, Harvard, and UC Berkeley as examples.

The WWW has changed all of that. There are more institutions offering online learning, giving the student options to attend classes from all over the world without the physical stress and expense of traveling. Candidates for higher education who could not pursue it due to job and family conflicts can now manage to attend class by cashing on the flexibility of asynchronous learning. The exchange of perspectives brought about by the influence of other cultures and the diversity of global exchange has caused us who use a western approach to learning to question and perhaps rethink education. Established academic institutions must now compete for student enrollments rather than the student hoping and praying for acceptance. Add to the mix nonacademic for profit organizations like the University of Phoenix…this has created cloudy areas of accreditation and reputation.

The web is often said to be a “disruptive technology.”

In his podcast, Kevin observes that “disruptive technology” is technology that upsets established patterns of businesses. Clayton Christensen talks about the innovative dilemma here:

http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2000/teradyne/clay.html

 Businesses use “sustaining” technologies to continually improve their products and stabilize their market share. They make the product that their customer wants. “Disruptive” technologies are innovations that if applied to this established product would decrease quality for a time.  Since pleasing the customer means more profit, no company wants to do something that might lower customer satisfaction.  It’s a vicious cycle – over time the disruptive technology – insert WWW here – will result in a far better product. But the current business model resists innovation for the reasons just mentioned.  Unfortunately, those companies who are unable to incorporate or adapt to new technologies may end up going out of business entirely.

“As the above graph shows, disruptive technologies cause problems because they do not initially satisfy the demands of even the high end of the market.  Because of that, large companies choose to overlook disruptive technologies until they become more attractive profit-wise.  Disruptive technologies, however, eventually surpass sustaining technologies in satisfying market demand with lower costs.  When this happens, large companies who did not invest in the disruptive technology sooner are left behind.  This, according to Christensen, is the “Innovator’s Dilemma.”

A very clear example of the struggle to stay on top of disruptive technologies is to look at Apple and Microsoft. If you haven’t read “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson, I recommend it.

How is technology disrupting education?  Trying to transfer brick and mortar approaches to an online setting – YUK, it doesn’t work, and it makes me – the customer – unhappy. Come up with a new way to teach, a new learning environment using these new technologies – innovate – now you have a successful product.  Just look the growing pains suffered as we moved from correspondence courses to radio to TV to CD-ROMs to hybrid to fully online.  There have been some poor adaptations (MOOCs, perhaps?) and some brilliant ones.  I am very happy with my online education in OLIT.

How much do you use the WWW? What do you mostly use it for? Have you used it to learn something? What? Describe the experience and your reactions to it.

I no longer use a “telephone book” to look up a number or an address, I just search the web.  I never pick up a hard copy dictionary anymore either, or an encyclopedia for that matter, even though in K-12 I relied extensively on the family Funk and Wagnall’s.  I’m not totally giving up the past, however, I still like to browse printed catalogues and read paperback books.  But my kindle gets a fair amount of use as well, mainly because it is less expensive to download a digital book than buy the hard copy. However, I do not like not being able to riffle back through pages looking for something; the back click button is clunky.  I use the web daily to read my email, check out the daily stories on AOL, to search topics or words that I want to know more about.  While in school mode, most of my search and web use time is related to class.  When class is not in session, I’ll probably go back to spending more time on EBay.

When I first became interested in collecting costume jewelry from the 40’s and 50’s, I spent a lot of time online searching history and designers.  I found several “Groups” AKA Communities of Inquiry with similar interests.  I learned tons from these people and their resources.  Never had to worry about social presence because our shared interest in jewelry always kept everyone fired up, quick to share, and frequent participants.

 

 

Learning Management Systems and PLEs

Learning Management Systems – I spent about an hour looking at comparisons of what various systems offered, and must confess, I was ready to run screaming from the room. All of the catch phrases are there, in abundance: transformational, collaborative, innovative. Integrated! Learning analytics! It seems that now the big market push is for e Portfolios, so that lifelong learners have “the ability to document their learning journey, and share their achievements with peers and evaluators beyond their graduation date” (thanks to Desire2Learn).

This appears to be a response to what Dr. Brady has voiced: the restrictive environment of an institutionally bound LMS that “wipes the slate” at the end of the semester, so that students can no longer access their work. Implications: imagine beginning your diary as a child, but online as opposed to within a small key-locked book. Over the years you continue to write, journaling about your thoughts and experiences. To have access to who you were at that moment, years ago – being able to go back and revisit those thoughts and impressions. To have documented your life, your education, your very soul. Being able to link all of your online/digital products in one place where they remain accessible for as long as you need or desire almost hints at a state of immortality.

There are several articles that address how to choose the LMS that’s right for you and they tend to agree. List the functionalities that you need, prioritize them, and then compare systems. But even at that, there were over 120 Learning Management Systems listed at one comparison site (http://www.sharepointlms.com/compare/2.html).

We have an LMS at work, and I tried to figure out whose software it is. When I right clicked and looked at properties, I found http://www.W3.org. When I checked their site, however, I discovered that they are the World Wide Web Consortium, “an international community that develops open standards to ensure the long term growth of the web”. So I don’t really think they authored my LMS, but possibly provided the template that was used for the web page I obtained the properties from. I suspect that the system itself may be Sharepoint, as that is also what is used for our internal web sharing. I have found our “learning Portal” to be helpful in that it has made the need to compile and store hard copy training records obsolete. I can now print my entire training history of over 20 years with just a click.

As for features, the LMS provides searchability by topic or operational area. When I log on, it brings up my job title and a list of position qualifications that go with that title. Unfortunately, they all show me as “missing the qualification form my qualification profile”, and then when you click on that, it notes “you do not have this qualification”, followed by “There is currently no course offered that imparts this qualification”. ????? So the LMS tells me I am unqualified for my position and there is no training available to remedy that.

I like that I can book just about any course that I am interested in; I make the request and an email goes to my manager asking him to approve it. Once he does, I usually have 90 days to complete the course. Much of the courseware offered on my LMS are canned Skillsoft courses; these tend to be text-based PowerPoint type presentations. You advance through each slide while voice over reads the text. As you complete a module, you are tested by multiple choice or drag and drop options. Your test results are immediately scored and depending on the lower limit of acceptable, you might have to take the material again. I find this whole approach extremely tedious, plus, if it is complex information, I take a screen shot as I pass thru each slide so that I have a “text” that I can refer to. I do not believe that any training course should be offered without content resources available. Some of the courses border on “simulations”, such as one that taught about using Adobe Flash. I did find this approach helpful in learning a new procedure, such as the correct order of activities, but for the most part I think that I am more likely to do a google search on a topic and learn about it that way than depend on the content available to me in the system.

I think that technology all comes down to user friendliness. WebCT seemed workable enough; now that UNM has moved to Blackboard Learn, I am finding some frustrating issues, particularly as relates to the “settings” that are apparently selected by the instructor. For example, in one class I am not permitted to make an attachment to an in-class email. In the other class I can, but if I have more than one document I can attach only one, and have to complete another email for the other attachment. Same with the discussion threads; only one attachment allowed! I think I did find an in course blog that permitted me to do two attachments. A small thing, but frustrating. I also prefer to have links to the major course areas listed in the menu to the left. In one of my current courses you must click on a learning module to open yet another menu to access discussions related to that module (as opposed to just clicking on “discussions” at the left).

In sampling through some of the available LMSs out there, I did find that they were beginning to find ways to enable plug ins or access to the more popular social media sites such as You Tube. Desire2Learn offers “other social tools including instant messaging, email, blogging, and hundreds of third party integrations including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn©, Google, Microsoft Office, and many more integrations.”

I found the article on Personal Learning Environments to be intriguing. In a previous class with Dr. Grassberger we learned to develop Personal Learning Networks (PLNs), a compilation of resources (hardcopy, digital and human) that we would frequently turn to when researching or seeking information. As Sclater noted in his article, current LMS approaches encourage dependency rather than autonomy by restricting what is accessed and how it is used. So we, as adult learners, navigate back and forth between the LMS and our “outside” resources to accomplish our tasks. In this sense, we have each created our own personal learning environment – it just isn’t an integrated one.

It appears to me that developers are trying to respond to the needs of students and educators as well as to those of administrators. As we grow into digitally complex individuals who seek to come together for collaboration or just to share information, new ways to bring our personal tools into the mix, whether by way of a higher learning experience or just as a social aside, there needs to be a better means of integrating all of those digitalized pieces of ourselves together.

Psychology of Learning

Dear readers:  my apologies for being late with this post. My organization recently announced a significant change to our operations and that has required, and will continue to require, a huge amount of my attention and energy.

 

One of the issues brought out in the Cuban book Oversold and Underused, was that educators saw an opportunity to advance learning using technology. Unfortunately, there were no instructions on how to go about this, and many administrators were disappointed with the lack of return for their investment in equipment and access. Many teachers simply used computers to replicate the typical approach to pedagogy. Radio, TV and eventually the computer were merely used as alternative ways to transmit knowledge. In Harasim’s discussion of the epistemologies of knowledge, she notes that objectivists believe that knowledge is a set of facts, principles and theories, so that knowledge exists outside of the mind, and may be placed into the mind, as a teacher gives this knowledge to the student. This approach to education is the framework for lectures, for the talking head, the guru in the know.  Students came to believe that the teacher was the one who held all of the answers.

It is only recently that alternative theories of teaching and learning are impacting the use of technology. In the constructivist approach to learning, the learner participates directly in building and constructing meaning. Teaching approaches that capitalize on this are active learning, learning-by-doing, scaffolding, and collaborative learning (Harasim, p.68).  All of these approaches are student centered, requiring them to participate in finding new knowledge as opposed to passively receiving new knowledge. Examples of pedagogical approaches include problem-based learning, and distributed problem based learning.  Immersion in a real life problem or project enables the simultaneous understanding and application of new ways of thinking and perceiving, with context giving meaning as knowledge is constructed. 

Social constructivism expands on this. The student experience will call for distributed problem solving, capitalizing on Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development to enhance the learning experience for all students, regardless of their individual level of expertise and skill. Harasim notes “learning takes place when learners solve problems…in collaboration with more capable peers” (p. 67). Functioning as a group, the sum of all participants will exceed the capability of the individual student.  Collaborative learning allows learners to gain access to tacit knowledge held by others, enhancing the formal curriculum of the course (Anderson, p. 57).  The knowledge no longer resides with just the teacher. 

This requires a change in mind set and approach.  Instructors now need to be moderators, facilitators, guides. Social media and collaborative tools permit learning by the student through exchange with other students.  UNM’s WisCom model builds on this approach to learning, making technology an important aspect of the learning experience.  

Anderson, T. (2008). The Theory and Practice of Online Learning, Second Edition. Athabasca, AB: Athabasca University.

Harasim, L. (2012). Learning Theory and Online Technologies. New York: Routledge Press.

WisCom:  http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02940929?LI=true