Educational Insanity

The three articles to which I link below all came across my radar (Twitter?) screen today.  I don’t see how anyone in academia can swish these three stories around in her/his mouth for a bit and not experience an entirely new taste.

Newspapers fold as readers defect and economy sours

(CNN) — The Rocky Mountain News, gone. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, gone…At least 120 newspapers in the U.S. have shut down since January 2008, according to Paper Cuts, a Web site tracking the newspaper industry. More than 21,000 jobs at 67 newspapers have vaporized in that time, according to the site.

Farewell to the Printed Monograph

The University of Michigan Press is announcing today that it will shift its scholarly publishing from being primarily a traditional print operation to one that is primarily digital…Michigan officials say that their move reflects a belief that it’s time to stop trying to make the old economics of scholarly publishing work. “I have been increasingly convinced that the business model based on printed monograph was not merely failing but broken,” said Phil Pochoda, director of the Michigan press. “Why try to fight your way through this? Why try to remain in territory you know is doomed? Scholarly presses will be primarily digital in a decade. Why not seize the opportunity to do it now?”

MIT makes research available on the web

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) faculty voted unanimously March 18 to make the school’s scholarly research available for free on the internet, joining other noted universities that hope to encourage more scholarship and expand researchers’ audiences…The open-access movement aims to put peer-reviewed research and literature on the internet for free and remove most copyright restrictions. Advocates believe this will invigorate more research across academia.

DIGITAL + OPEN = a different world for academic publishing.

I am part of a team of professors facilitating the learning in an Ed.D. program for a group of sitting school administrators in a local school division.  I am currently leading a module on decision-making and resource allocation within the realm of educational technology.  This Saturday, I have a pretty unique opportunity (for me at least).  To better inform the larger conversations, I’m going to take our meeting time (3-4 hours) to try to “make a case.”  What case?

Well, good question; I’m glad I asked.  What I knew when I first began planning this module was that I wanted to spend some time with the students talking about all that I’ve been talking and thinking about over the last year or so within the ed. tech. community/network.  The problem is, I haven’t quite wrapped my head around what “it” is that I’ve been talking/writing/thinking about.  “It” is about learning, technology, reform, etc.

The beauty of this Saturday is that it has provided me an opportunity to synthesize and summarize my thinking and learning.  Here are the points that will comprise the logic of the argument (i.e. “the case”) I’ll be making on Saturday (in no particular order yet).  The students will have (hopefully) read the referenced articles ahead of time:

• connectivism as a new theory of learning (Siemens, 2005)
• ubiquitous computing affords ubiquitous learning (Cope & Kalantzis, 2007)
• Rhizomatic education: advances in networking technologies render obsolete any theory of learning that involves the individual construction of knowledge and that bounds learning by place and/or time (Cormier, 2008).

With those foundational points in place, I will demonstrate a number of the technologies.  In other words, I will show the students how I “do” networked learning. I fully intend to overwhelm them.  I am, after all, trying to “make the case.”

[NOTE: I intend to "broadcast" the event via Wimba Live Classroom.  If you want to stop by (in the virtual sense), leave me a comment so I can send you the URL.]

photo credit: Ben+Sam

I attended CoSN’s annual conference in Austin, TX this week.  I’m glad I went, though my impressions from the conference are mixed.

What I liked about the CoSN conference:

• Serious - the overall tone/climate of the event is, IMHO, very serious.  I mean that in a good way.  The tone stands in stark contrast to some of the larger conventions that long ago crossed the line of professionalism.  There were  no costumes or gaudy theme decorations at this conference, thankfully.
• Location – the weather in Austin sucked.  That said, I’d always wanted to go to Austin and the little of it I saw was appealing.  I’m sick of the Orlando, SF, New Orleans conference scenes.  This was a nice change for me.
• Focus – there were a few sessions that were about tech. tools and/or pedagogy, but there was definitely more of a focus on bigger policy issues.  I’m cool with that.
• Opening keynote – though he seemed a bit cranky, I thought Don Tapscott’s presentation worked.  I’ve not read any of his books, but I like that he writes and speaks from evidence.  He’s done the research necessary to make the claims that he does. [NOTE: I had to leave before the Christenson/Horn keynote, so I don't know how that went.]

And, here’s what I didn’t like:

• Facility – the conference used the 4th and 6th floors of a Hilton hotel.  That was fine, but there were very few spaces to sit outside of the rooms.  The hallways were long and wide spaces that didn’t lend themselves to convening and chatting.  It just felt cold and lonely in the facility.   Also, without an air card, wireless Internet access cost $10.95/day.  Not a huge expense, but tech. conferences should freely open the cloud to the attendees.
• Sessions – nothing meaningful can happen in 45-minutes. Just about every session I attended had to end abruptly and lacked speaker/audience interaction because the speakers took the whole time.
• Lack of diversity – this continues to infuriate me.  The attendees at this conference made the NECC crowd look like a rainbow and that doesn’t say much.
• Cost – this was an expensive event to attend.  On top of that, it seemed like there was a lot of nickle-and-diming going on.  When I heard that CoSN would be making the final keynote available on the Web on a pay-per-view basis, I nearly choked to death.

As usual these days, the real value of the conference was in the face-to-face conversations that happened before, between and after the sessions.  I met some of the folks in my Twitter network and a host of new educators.  And, most importantly, I had some real Texas BBQ!