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A learning system to meet the knowledge needs of a complex era
George Siemens, PhDJuly 17, 2013
edX
August 5, 1949
April 14, 1994
Assertions:
1. Knowledge needs are today defined by complexity and interconnectivity
2. Emerging employment opportunities are knowledge-based
3. The idea of a university is expanding (complexifying)
4. Knowledge institutions mirror the architecture of information
The Conference Board & McKinsey & Co
McKinsey Quarterly, 2012
Increasing diversity of student profiles
The U.S. is now in a position when less than half of students could be
considered fulltime students. In other words, students who can attend campus five days a week nine-to-five,
are now a minority.(Bates, 2013)
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2013
OECD 2013
The last decade, two defining trends:
1. Participatory culture and social/technical connectivity (Rise of the Individual)
2. Transparency and surveillance culture (Rise of Data and Analytics)
Expanding knowledge needs requires expanding learning opportunities
The process of learning/unlearning/knowledge development is still happening through legacy models that do not account for today’s nature of information and knowledge development.
When we create, it can be analyzed and new patterns can be discovered
(understood, evaluated, interrogated)
Information fragmentation…loss
of narratives of coherence
The problem: Once we’ve fragmented content and conversation,
we need to stitch them together again so we can act meaningfully
Knowledge in pieces
diSessa, 1993
Reducing the basic units of education:From courses/workshops/modules to competencies
Agents in a system possess only partial information
(Miller and Page 2007)
…to make sense and act meaningfully requires connections to be formed between agents
Coherence is an orientation about the meaning and value of information elements based on how they are connected, structured, and related
Antonovsky 1993
Networked information doesn’t have a center
So we (socially) create temporary centers:Shared sensemaking
So we (technologically) create temporary centers:content and conversation aggregation
Stitching things together:
Sensemaking and wayfinding through complex information flows and trends to extract what is important and relevant
“Learning and knowledge creation is often distributed across multiple media and sites in networked environments. Traces of such activity may be fragmented across multiple logs and may not match analytic needs. As a result, the coherence of distributed interaction and emergent phenomena are analytically cloaked”
Suthers, Rosen, 2011
What we are seeing is the complexification of higher education
Learning needs are complex, ongoing
Simple singular narrative won’t suffice going forward
The idea of the university is expanding and diversifying
Much of what MOOCs address is the shadow education system. They are not actual competition with the existing education system
https://sites.google.com/site/themoocguide/home
“Both student and teacher are unhappy when chained to curricula and syllabi, to tests and mediocre standards. An atmosphere of uninspired and uninspiring common sense may well produce satisfactory mastery of technical “know how” and testable factual information. Such an atmosphere, however, stifles genuine understanding and the spirit of adventure in research.”
Karl Jaspers, The Idea of the University 1959
MOOCs/DS106: Changed relationship between teacher/learner
Distributed, chaotic, emergent.
Learners expected to create, grow, expand domain and share personal sensemaking through artifact-creation
An education system that fails to emulate the characteristics information in an era is
doomed to fail. Information today is:
OpenDistributedScalableSocialGenerativeNetworkedSelf-organizedAdaptiveGlobal
Participatory Pedagogies(Collis & Moonen, 2008)
(Askins, 2008)(Harvard Law School, 2008)
Distributed content and conversations
State of Wisconsin, 2012
Anderson, T. & Dron, J. (2011). Three Generations of Distance Education Pedagogy, International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning 12(3), 80-97, http://goo.gl/j3mRF
Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105.
Group work in MOOCs
Kuhn: accumulation of anomalies, create “phase changes” (sorry, hate the ‘p’ word):
dramatic change, alteration of core premises, development of a framework to account for sub-changes
Carlota Perez: techno-economic change
Education systems track the architecture of information of an era
7 Primary Tensions in open online courses
Automation vs. Creation
Social vs. Scripted
Structured vs. Self-Organized
University-based vs. Informal learning
Assessment/recognition vs. Personal growth
Functioning in existing system vs. Transforming existing system
Learner owned vs. Organization owned interaction spaces
Twitter/Gmail: gsiemens
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