>>Throughout the text Dreyfus maintains the premise that distance learning can only 'pass on information'. Which is an extremely limited view.<<
>I agree.  But why?<

I think my whole point here started with the observation that Dreyfus opposes f2f and distance learning, where as, from a more pragmatic point of view, the difference is only gradual. In a sense, f2f learning has always had a distance component, simply when it comes to doing your homework for a course. When I read a text, that text is not 'passed on as information', I am trying to make sense of that text, trying to connect it with things I already know, and finding new points of view. In other words, there is not only 'information passing on', there is also 'information processing' going on. In fact, the whole idea of information passing on could be seen as a deliberate disembodiment of a student, where the student is seen as a vessel into which information is being poured. Which is obviously wrong.

>For the 7 stages, I think one of the issues is how Dreyfus views skills (is that the only product of learning?) and how he assumes skills are learned in f2f education.<

I am not sure what your trying to get at with your question. I simply wondered why nobody questioned the 7 stage model itself.

>I’m curious as to why you think Stage 7 could also be stage 0.  (I have some idea why, but I’d just like you to tease it out a bit more.)<

All of a sudden there is no more 'progression' in the model. Even the examples about how culture is transmitted by how different cultures care for their babies shows this. In the end, I think it is more a stage in the argument that Dreyfus has been developing. Like: these are the things that you could never learn in a distance course. And of course he's right, but he only is drawing out a rabbit he put in his hat himself.

>Good point re emotions and embodiment.  I wonder if it might be useful to think of how emotions are tied to social practices to and what that might imply for the issues of embodiment and risk as Dreyfus sees it.  I think you are doing this in some of your notes on pages 37-39, for instance, and with your kite anecdote, but it might be worth drawing these together more.<

I'm really not sure what you're trying to say here. My simple point of view is that body / mind, ratio / emotion, social / individual distinctions are only helpful to a certain extent. In the end, you and I are all of those things at the same time.

>>p. 44 about teaching assistants picking up their teacher's style: I question that.<<

>Why?<

Based on my own experience teaching economics for 5 years. If you try to imitate a style, your students will pick that up as not authentic at once. You need to develop your own style with which you are comfortable and only then can you connect with your students. (Teaching bodies could be a whole subject of its own.)

>It might be useful to move from the notes-style to trying to write posts on particular themes or concepts, drawing together the readings. E.g. making your own argument about embodiment and risk, drawing on the readings to support or counter your claims.<

I am not there yet. I see myself as being in a dialog with the readings for the moment. That might change as soon as I get some more perspective on the course as a whole.

>> I am still not sure what the authors exactly mean by the notion of 'embodied knowing'. It echoes things like tacit knowledge, learning-to-be, but that is as far as I get.<<

>I think that it is partly that, but it’s also an epistemological stance.  It’s saying the only way we can construct knowledge is *through* the body, it is the way in which we experience, and thus have knowledge about, the world.<

I think I was hinting at that when I said that mind / body distinctions &c. are only helpful to a certain extent.

And finally regarding Twitter:

>>There might be some worthwhile information there, but to distill it afterwards is simply to time consuming. Maybe the experience is / gets better when you're in the middle of the flow.<<

>Interestingly, I’ve had folk both argue for and against the ‘retrospective twittorial’.  Some, like you found it especially hard to follow, others found it a worthwhile detective experience, a puzzle to piece together that gave them further impetus for learning.<

I can imagine that some people like detective work. But I am more of a pragmatist, technology should help us achieving our goals more efficiently, if it gets in your way, than don't use it. I think I made a point a while ago that I gave up looking television years ago because the signal noise ratio was near to zero. I have a similar feeling here.

Again, I can see some scenarios where Twitter could work in teaching and learning.

>>…false sense of linearity. Here I can't find an angle to make it work for me, to have it make much sense to me. Or it could make sense, but like I said, it would simply be too much hassle for me.<<

>I wonder if this is also because time is different for each member of the discussion.  For instance, in Skype we are all on simultaneously and know that’s basically how each other is experiencing it (albeit with a bit of lag).  On the db, we know people are unlikely to beon at the exact same time as us and that they may read things in different order.  On Twitter, we might be online at the same time as some, and because of the unthreaded nature, cannot guess at how others might enter the stream when they do come online.  So perhaps this makes for an even more temporally strange experience?<

I don't think the experience is 'temporally strange', it's just another medium, and a medium which I think works best when you're in the middle of it, reconstructing it afterwards is too much work - although I could imagine you could write a script to condense such a stream so as to make it more readable (f.i. drop all the retweets but count them and put the number in front of the original tweet, do some tag cloud like things.)

Finally: I had the impression you were interested in the Power of Pull. I have added a file with my notes on that book to this blog post, but cannot discover how I can link to it from within this post.

After our Second Life Session I found myself comparing my perceptions of what had happened in that hour with the interaction during our Twitter and Skypechat tutorial. While the basic text-based exchange is common to all three the addition of visual information, such as seeing a person type on the keyboard, has had a regulatory effect on the communication flow. Our exchanges were more structured and there was a certain flow in the development of the discussion, which allowed to express and elaborate on a thought while it still was on the radar of all.

The impression of having an embodied entity in a dedicated environment contributed to my perception of a more ‘personal’ interaction between the various members of the course. It was interesting to see that the real life behaviours, such not more than two people sitting on a bench or keeping a certain distance to each other was the same in this virtual environment.

One aspect that distinguished us from other users seems to be that the main attractiveness for SL, its anonymity and freedom of behaviour and role choice, is not our main goal. We still seem to struggle with the anonymity of our bodily selves.

From a learning and teaching perspective I can see and think of a number of potential uses for SL, if the participants will buy into the technology part of it. I am still disoriented by the level of complexity of SL and if I were to use it, I would need more confidence and experience to support my learners in this environment. For me SL is not intuitive enough for a quick spin in and out of it.

I was away on vacation and without internet, so read the discussion board and tried to read the twitter stream only today.

Discussion board mainly about the use of twitter. At times it felt like a discussion between converts and non-converts, in group and out group, worlds apart.

So, on to http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/mscidel. Unfortunately, I can only see the 10 latest, and an export I can't seem to manage either. It's probably my stupidity, but if a tool is not really obvious I give up real quickly.

So, on to http://search.twitter.com/search?q=mscidel as an alternative. What do we get?

• Frequent time outs trying to wade my way towards 7 days ago, I would have liked to make it to 8 days ago, but that was not possible, so already stuff is vanishing.
• Some people use twitter names that don''t relate to their real names, yes, I can look them up on the who we are where we are page, but that's a hassle. Talk about 'embodiedness' ;-)
• Okay, from 7 days ago, I started wading forward, just to give up after going through one day of tweets. Why?
• A lot of solo tweets, that is: not part of a conversation. People quoting some line from some article. 140 characters is just not enough to get some context here.
• Hey, some conversations are going on that can be expanded in Twitter search. Lots of them are short, lots of retweets, I don't get the feeling that there's much discussion really going on.

There might be some worthwhile information there, but to distill it afterwards is simply to time consuming. Maybe the experience is / gets better when you're in the middle of the flow.

It also reminds me of the discussion we had in week 1 about a false sense of linearity. Here I can't find an angle to make it work for me, to have it make much sense to me. Or it could make sense, but like I said, it would simply be too much hassle for me.

Up until now I find Twitter useful to relay information that might be interesting (have done a few times with the #mscel hashtag); when at a conference and people add information (other than retweeting the slides), or being used as a backchannel. I still don't like the tool very much.

My take on the secondary readings for week 3.

Blake, N. (2002) 'Hubert Dreyfus on Distance Education: relays of educational embodiment', Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 34, No. 4

His description of how he sets up an online course on p. 381 makes all the more sense now that I have seen it in action at this IDEL course.

My main takeaway from this article is the following quote:

'Even insofar as the electronic message is literally disembodied, its content no less than its form must draw on the writer’s embodied experience of other embodied persons, at least in terms of generalisations and often with regard to specific occasions; and the success of the communication will partly depend on the quality of this experience and the skill with which the writer draws on it.' (p. 383)

This, for me, explains my whole uneasyness with the concept of (dis)embodiedness I had with the core readings. In online interactions I cannot think away my body or (even?) the body of the person(s) I am interacting with.

Dall'Alba, G. and Barnacle, R. (2005) Embodied knowing in online environments, Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol 37(5), pp.719-744

I found the first part of the article, up till page 727 hard to digest, I am still not sure what the authors exactly mean by the notion of 'embodied knowing'. It echoes things like tacit knowledge, learning-to-be, but that is as far as I get.

In the middle part of the article there are some great observations:

p. 727 "For example, Marion Coomey and John Stephenson (2001) reviewed 100 research reports and journal articles published between 1998 and 2000 on web-based online learning. They identified four features of online learning essential to good practice, as follows: incorporation of dialogue; active involvement of learners with learning materials or activities; provision of support; and enabling learners to take appropriate control over their learning. These conditions for promoting learning are similar to those identified in much recent literature on learning in environments that are not online (e.g. Brockbank & McGill, 1998; Brown & Glasner, 1999; Ramsden, 2003; Walker, 2001), as Coomey and Stephenson acknowledge.

p. 727 "For instance, Geraldine Torrisi-Steele (2002) argues that a desired approach to integrating ICTs ‘does not
focus primarily on technology but instead directs focus on learner needs, discipline requirements, learning outcomes and reflection on teaching practices’."

p. 728 "In a review of studies about online learning, Barry Jackson and Kyriaki Anagnostopoulou point out that ‘where effectiveness is demonstrated, it can often be attributed to a pedagogical improvement rather than to the use of the technology itself ’ (2001, p. 61)."

p. 729 "‘The potential for rich learning experiences online is mostly exploited by teachers whose conceptions of learning and teaching predispose them to consider deeply and continuously the needs of the learners in
any situation, regardless of technology’ (2001, p. 61)."

p. 729 "(Laurrilard) argues that ‘design has to be generated from the learning objectives and the aspirations of the course, rather than from the capabilities of the technology’ (2002a, p. 22)."

p. 730 "Alexander and Boud (2001) argue that the current higher education context and usage of ICTs do, indeed, primarily extend rather than transform conventional pedagogies." BTW, WebCT is a prime example of this.

All these remarks also correspond with some of the observations we made in discussing the net generation. The focus needs to be on engaging pedagogy and how ICTs can help there.

Than, in the final section the article goes real bad when they online the 'opportunities being offered through the use of ICTs' (p. 735). A lot of conjectures here.

I like the conclusion: "Instead, the issue is recognition and design: recognising the nature of humantechnology
relations in the design of learning activities and models." (p. 740)

Clark, A. (2003) Natural born cyborgs: minds, technologies and the future of human intelligence, Oxford: OUP chapter 1, 'Cyborgs unplugged', pp.13-34

A very refreshing read!

(p. 26) "In each case, the real problem-solving engine was the larger, biotechnological matrix compirising (in the case at hand) the brain, the stacked papers, the previous marginalia, the electronic files, the operations of search provided by the Mac software, and so on, and so on. What the human brain is best at is learning to be a team player in a problem-solving field populated by an incredible variety of nonbiological props, scaffoldings, instruments and resources."

And p. 27, "My goal is to dispel this illusion, and to show how a complex matrix of brain, body and technology can actuallt constitute the problem-solving machine that we should properly identify as ourselves." p. 31 humans as "natural-born cyborgs".

It is no longer about disembodiedness, rather it is about embodiedness-plus.

No anecdotes to begin with, but one crossed my mind during reading, see below. Actually, this whole debate is new to me. Obviously did not make it into the 'practitioners' literature . 

Dreyfus, H.L. (2001), On the Internet, chapter 2, 'How Far is Distance Learning from Education'

(Unfortunately, the e-book version is crippled with DRM, can only be downloaded for one day and the pdf version wants to connect to the publisher's site, so not fit for downloading to my Sony wifi-less e-reader, and anyway, I seem to be without internet in this tiny fishermen's village on the east coast of beautiful Fuerteventura, Canary Islands.)

Some general thoughts after going over Dreyfus' text twice.

Dreyfus uses a trick generally in use with American writers to kick off his discussion: choose a few hilarious, maybe even ridiculous quotes to oppose against. This goes for the Perelman quote opening the chapter and the Reed Hundt quotes discussed during the opening pages. There is also an opening quote by Agre which could be seen as supportive to Dreyfus' argument. Yet, Twigg (Carol A. Twigg (2001), Innovations in online learning. Moving beyond no significant difference, Center for Academic Transformation, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, http://www.center.rpi.edu/pewsym/Mono4.pdf (link broken - October 12, 2010), and Carol A. Twigg (2003), Improving learning and reducing costs: lessons learned from round I of the Pew Grant Program in course redesign, Center for Academic Transformation, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, http://www.center.rpi.edu/PewGrant/Rd1intro.pdf (link broken - October 12, 2010)) has made the same observation and turns the point into favour of e-learning. Her argument is that when you add technology to an otherwise unchanged educational concept, the technology will only be 'added to'. Cuban makes a similar point (Larry Cuban (2001), Oversold and underused. Computers in the classoom, Harvard University Press), technology has not changed anything in schools (how could it, by itself?). Twigg argues for redesign of education in order to make technology work.

Dreyfus also uses another rhetorical trick: complete opposition of distance learning vs education, and so forces us into an either / or mode of thinking which is not very helpful when it comes to understanding the dynamics of both modes of learning, let alone how one mode could complement the other.

Throughout the text Dreyfus maintains the premise that distance learning can only 'pass on information'. Which is an extremely limited view.

The seven stage model seems an attractive way of viewing education as a process through which students evolve. Yet the model has a few shortcomings:

• It's way to generalized. Of course I would not undergo surgery from a student who comes fresh out of a distance learning course in surgery, but many skills can be learned that do not ask for going through expensive apprenticeship models. Dreyfus sort of admits this when he says that distance learning can get you to stage three, competence. The examples that he chooses in the advanced stages 5 and 6 -- he does not mention car driving in stage 6 any more, by the way -- suggest that these describe graduate and postgraduate levels, a stage that is simply not relevant for the majority of the world's workforce.
• Stage 7 does not seem to fit in the model of ever progressing, but might just as well be stage 0.
• Throughout the stages model, emotions are connected to embodiment. While I think that emotions are crucial in learning (learning should at the very least be fun, in my view), these emotions can also be experienced when learning alone: the joy of having read a good novel; the joy of solving a mathematical problem; the joy of solving a sudoku puzzle without ever having learned anything formally about the puzzle; the joy of developing scenarios for strategic development. One can add many examples.

Page by page remarks.

p. 30. 'What proposed change in the <<method of education>> generates all the excitement?' Exactly, see the remark about Twigg's work above.

p. 32. Ends with the question whether the stages model can be 'implemented and encouraged on the Web?' So the stages model is pertinent to the whole argument. Of course, one can question the limits of the model. For some reason the model also reminds me of the whole concept of levels that we find in so many computer games.

p. 37 'If we were disembodied beings, pure minds free of our messy emotions, our responses to our successes and failures would lack this seriousness and excitement.' Well, we are not disembodied beings, are we? Emotions might show easier in groups, relations, but we also have emotions when we are alone, don't we? How good can it feel to master another level in a computer game you're playing alone?

p. 38 introduces imitation as a way of learning. Usually imitation is seen as a very early stage of learning, here it is introduced in stage three, competence, curious.

p. 39 'at home in front of his or her terminal, there is no place for such risky involvement'. Yes, if learning would be simply passing on information. No, if there is real feedback from either a tutor or from fellow students. This line of thinking is repeated on the same page where Dreyfus talks about anonymous students without a 'class before which the student can shine and also risk making a fool of himself'. Yet a little but further he seems to remark that online environments can be 'much less intimidating'.

Also p. 39, Dreyfus finishes the stage 3 discussion with the remark that 'the absence of face to face learning - may well leave students stuck at competence'. For many students, and maybe for many professions this might be more than enough.

p. 40 'positive and negative emotional experiences will strengthen successful responses and inhibit unsuccessful ones', somehow this reminds me of Skinner.

The whole stage 4 discussion does not seem to discuss the classroom experience, which I find very odd. So, could we conclude that stage 4 can also be reached in absence of face to face?

p. 43 about learning by watching reminded me of John Seely Brown's et. al. latest book The Power of Pull. It tells the story of kids on Hawaii learning how to surf in the absence of teachers. They shoot videos of themselves while surfing and in the evening watch and discuss these videos together. These kids made it into the professional surfing circuits. And this reminded me again of TVI where a class of students watch a canned lecture and every now and then stop the tape to discuss the lecture. Very embodied, again, as in the surfers example, but the absence of a teacher in both examples seems to add, rather than subtract from the learning experience.

p. 44 about teaching assistants picking up their teacher's style: I question that.

p. 46 When it introduces practical wisdom it reminded me of Prensky's digital wisdom. And later in the discussion of that stage it occurred to me that online communities develop a culture of their own, however disembodied that culture might be.

p. 47 On the issue of disintermediating universities I need to check Brown and Duguid's The Social Life of Information where they discuss this issue in one of the final chapters. As to the question: 'can the bodily presence required for acquiring skills in various domains and for acquiring mastery of one's culture be delivered by means of the Internet?', my answer would be it depends when it comes to skills, not sure about the culture mastery part.

And in the end, it's all bodies behind terminals anyway. I do need to follow up on the Twigg reference. Her point is that convential, today's university education is essentially a standardized product, from the student's point of view, whereas e-learning could offer the option of more flexible offerings, accommodating different learning styles.

Yet another anecdote to round this Dfreyfus reading of. I once got into an argument on a Dutch usenet group devoted to power kites. Something I had written was completely misinterpreted and a flame war was about to ensue. I countered with the argument that on fields where kiters meet the atmosphere was much more friendly and helpful (culture on and offline compared). We, that's me, my wife, and the guy I got into an argument with, ended up writing a (web) manual for a power kite design program developed by a Canadian together, a short version of that manual was even published in a Dutch printed kite magazine, truly amazing. Even more amazing, we never met f2f. I am, sure I learned a lot about kite design in the process -- okay, maybe to the level of advanced beginner, but still. And I learned about how cultural norms can be set either on and offline.

Burbules, N. (2002) 'Like a version: playing with online identities', Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 387 - 393

Nice play on the Madonna song, the title, although the article really doesn't go all that deep into the identity thing as the title seems to make one to expect.

Obviously there is much more nuance to Dreyfus' book than was obvious from chapter 2 alone. Burbules has the same observations about the rhetorical style of Dreyfus that I had.

p. 388 'We need to raise the level of discussion by framing it in new terms.' Somehow I have the feeling Burbules does not achieve this goal. My own take is that this whole talk about embodiedness is just not very helpful to understand what's going, and what could be going on in online learning / e-learning, the same feeling I had about the whole net generation discussion in the week before. And hey:

p. 389 'Indeed, it's arguable that the Internet can foster and support modes of pedagogy that are more engaging, more intellectually stimulating, and foster more teacher-student interaction than the actual experience in many existing educational institutions.'

p. 390 echoes my earlier observation: 'for many students and subject matters, why is competence not adequate?' I'd like to add the observation that Burbules does not even question the whole validity of the seven stages model. On the same page, I like the following sentence: 'So now we arrive at the interesting questions: Where and how can these technologies be used to support particular educational purposes, and where can they not be?' Pretty much sums up my expectation for the MScEL program.

p. 391, the quote from Dreyfus about trust near the end of the page strikes me as completely weird. You have to remember that terms like 'trust' and also 'disintermediation' were used quite heavily ten years ago in debates about the merits of the internet / the web when compared to how things were done before the advent of those technologies.

p. 392 in the Dreyfus quote: 'If our body goes, so does relevance, skill, reality, and meaning.' It made me want to shout at Dreyfus: But the body does not go at all! I don't recognize this whole idea about disembodiedness. For the past five years the technology enabled me to stay in touch with my 400 kilometers away family, to do job interviews with people across the ocean, and I could give more examples. It just adds to the options we have of interacting with people. What does it add when it comes to education?

A few comments on comments  by Clara:

>
It did get me wondering if it’s not jut about the tech preferences students might have but about the implications technology has for the roles of teachers and students.  E.g. moving from traditional transmissive model of learning to a more collaborative, coproduced one where students have to take more responsibility for their learning (which might seem like taking on the teacher role, losing the authority of a subject matter expert etc).
>

Exactly my line of thinking. In my view the technological options should be chosen carefully in order to make such a collaborative pedagogy possible. One example I came along a while ago was were Open Journal Systems (software to enable the publishing of electronic journals) was used in a class project. Students could take on several roles: write articles, review articles, (copy)edit articles, publishing articles. The product of the project were several issues of a journal being published (openly) on the web, adding yet another realistic twist.

>
I’m amazed you have done all the reading.  You know, you only need to do the core reading and one or two secondary readings.  :)
>

I like reading, the more you read on a subject, the more it makes sense to you.

>
So, having read so copiously, how would you draw the literature together?  What kind of overarching argument might you make about the nature of online students?
>

There is no overarching argument one can make about the nature of online students, so one should be careful with assumptions. ICTs are only enablers to achieve pedagogic goals. Good teachers work backwards from these goals to design challenging learning environments and choose technologies carefully.

Skypechatting was really interesting last night. Fast, fun and a little unstructured it felt like being in a classroom, where everyone finally gets a chance to talk and being listened to and answered immediately. By skyping the perceived isolation and asynchronous communication and interaction was finally broken and it felt like a community.

As a teaching tool I would see it as an opportunity to let people vent their ideas, emotions and opinions in a collaborative environment with immediate response. It could also serve as a channel to collect ideas, make provocative statements and brainstorm on them. If we compare it to a real classroom, it is more like a moment of liberation, where everyone has a voice that is heard and reacted to in real time.

The risk is that at the end there is no real listening and it is a little hard to follow the flow and the understanding of each other. On the other hand coming up with many different ideas concurrently it is an excellent stepping stone for further discussion and thought.

 (Dear Clara: You probably did not see my first post in this week, because I had set it private instead of restricted, sorry, do read that one first though, please.)

 Having read all the articles for this week, not just the core two, I am simply amazed, and also amazed at the discussion in the discussion board. Nine years ago, Prensky coins a pair of terms: digital natives vs immigrants, and we have net generation and millennials (why do the British write millenial - only one n?) as well, and gosh the educational literature is still all over the guy. It was a metaphor to make a point, a simple rhetorical trick. Now, nine years later, time and again it has been proven that there is not much to the whole idea of digital natives, the data doesn't support the claims about the skills of digital natives. So please can we close the discussion and move on to a more interesting subject?

Below a short review of the articles. Apologies for not quoting correctly, I am in a hurry.

Jones, Ramanau, Cross, Healing / Net generation or Digital Natives

When reviewing the literature they already come to the conclusion that there is much evidence against the claims, still we get another survey. "Despite the growth of this evidence base the arguments about a new Net generation or Digital Natives persists (sic) in a popular discourse which is replicated in policy and practitioner literatures." (p. 724) In my own experience from reading the 'policy and practitioner literature', interest in the methaphor has waned in the past few years. A quick search im some selected databases would give a clue as to who is right. I don't have the time for that now. Interestingly enough, I find that there is a disconnect being introduced here between educational theorists and policy makers and practitioners. Not really smart when you set out to criticize a (perceived) disconnect between natives and immigrants.

Table 5 (p. 729) has a real whopper of a typo: "Contributed to a block". Wow, to me it seems the authors don't even know what a blog is.

Table 6 (p. 730) shows that self reported skills of under 25 are consistently higher than those of over 25. My statistics knowledge is to rusty to delve deeper into this.

Main takeaway: none, just another survey confirming what we already know.

Bayne,  Ross / 'Digital native' and 'digital immigrant' discourses: a critique

Second page: "Our view is that this is a discourse which - despite its clear limitations - is becoming internalised by many in higher education (...)". See my remark above regarding my experience that the the interest in the metaphor is waning.

Fourth page: "Any argument can be dismissed if it is spoken in the accent of an immigrant." I think this is stretching the metaphor a bit.

Sixth page: "The terms 'digital immigrant' and 'digital native' are now in such common usage that it is easy to forget they are metaphors (...)." I did a Google (.com, .uk may yield different results) search and found 20,100 hits on the first phrase and 80,100 on the second phrase. Somehow this indicates to me that the phrases are not all that common and that the emphasis is on the natives rather than the immigrants.

Sixth page: colonists and missionaries are introduced, again, the metaphor is stretched and almost becomes ridiculous. Where do these words all of a sudden come from, am I missing a reference?

Main takeaway: take care when using metaphors.

Sharon Stoerger / The digital melting pot

" (...) over time, [metaphors] become inaccurate and dangerous." (p.1 in the abstract). Couldn't she just have left it at that instead of introducing yet another metaphor. Reviews a lot of literature but I miss synthesis.

Main takeaway: none

Bennet, Maton, Kervin / The digital natives debate

Solid article, well written and structured. Mentions Larry Cuban's book 'Oversold and underused: computers in the classroom'. A book I enjoyed reading and from which I learned that you can learn more about e-learning by reading critical texts than by reading the evangelists.

Main takeaway: Prensky accidentally found a way to create a 'moral panic'. Question is: isn't the panic over by now?

Prensky / Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, part I and II (wasn't on the list)

Part I. Ah, page 2, that's where Bayne and Ross got the immigrant's accent. In that same paragraph, it is quite funny to see how outdated the examples are for recognizing immigrants (turning to the internet for information second, reading a manual).

It's a pamphlet, very well written.

Part II Mainly about neuroplasticity. Interesting read.

Main takeaway: you can also read Prensky's text (part I) as a case for game based learning.

Prensky  / ... Digital Wisdom

See? "(...) we need to imagine a new set of distinctions." (first page) The guy just loves oppositions, a strong rhetorical device indeed. Nothing much new here, yes technology can be a powerful ally to enhance our abilities.

Main takeaway: this metaphor hasn't catched on, I don't think it will.

Kennedy, Judd, Churchward, Gray, Krause / First year students' experiences with technology: Are the really digital natives?

No, they're not, but we knew that already, didn't we? Amused to see that they asked about PDAs (table 1), but hey, the survey is from 2006 (in digital terms the nineteenth century). Smartphones with mobile access to the web are rapidly on the rise now. Amazed that 38.5 percent had no games console (table 2), probably much lower now. 62.9 percent did not use a social networking site (table 4), just goes to show how quickly things change.

Main takeaway: none, it confirms what we knew from the ECAR studies.

Pew / Millennials will make online sharing in networks a lifelong habit.

I only read the overview. I think they are making a mistake when they interpret social networking as 'broadcasting'. it's really 'narrowcasting'.

Main takeaway: none.

Spiegel Online / The internet generation prefers the real world

I liked this one, even though it uncritically repeats stupid examples (multitasking, 'I found it on Google'). It confirms what I earlier said about Schulmeister's meta-analysis (up to 70 now), and the guy is even quoted. I am amazed that young people still watch over two hours television per day (I gave that medium up 5 years ago, signal noise ratio is near zero). What I really like is near the end the teacher who uses web 2.0 in his teaching. That's what the debate should focus on.

Main takeaway: "So instead of tech-savvy young netizens challenging the school, the school itself is painstakingly teaching them how to benefit from the online medium." (p.5, at least on my printout). Yes, and probably making school a lot more interesting at the same time.

And that also indicates what I think would be a much more interesting discussion.

Sorry, long post. See you tomorrow in the chat.

I'll be off next week for my vacation. Will download the literature for next week and read and think about it on the beach and come back with a blog post October 11 or 12, will review discussion board and TWitter archive after that and write a second blogpost about next week's subject. Okay?

Although the plural of anecdote is not evidence, I'd like to share some personal observations on the whole net generation discussion. One important didactical principle is that you prepare the ground for learning new things in finding connections with what you already know.

A large part of this post is based on a column I wrote in January 2009 on http://www.surfspace.nl, SURF can be seen as the Dutch counterpart of JISC. The column had the title 'Net Generation bestaat niet' (The net generation doesn't exist - http://www.surfspace.nl/nl/Columns/Pages/NetGenerationbestaatniet.aspx).

Anecdote 1

One of the things I have been trying to do at Jacobs University is to use web 2.0 technology to bring the library experience closer to where the users are, rather than having our patrons come to the library homepage and sort it out from there. To that end we developed a catalog widget that you could put on any web page you like, or put on your desktop in an app dock. When we demonstrated a first iteration of this catalog widget to some of our students, they liked it. However, when we asked them whether they would also like this widget as a Facebook app (practically all of our students are on Facebook), their faces went blank. Drilling down, it turned out that none of them knew exactly what a Facebook app is. They might be playing Farmville, but the concept of an app was foreign to them. To them, Facebook basically is the wall, where you post messages and pictures. So much for their supposed (or assumed) technological avant gardism.

Anecdote 2

Jacobs University has a spamming tradition. There are numerous lists and staff, students and faculty really don't care to how many lists they send a message, even though it might be about selling a 10 euro railroad ticket. The worst list is jacobs-talk which can generate tens of thousands of mails, sometimes bringing our mailservers down. In order to relieve our burdened mail servers, we proposed to move some of the lists to Confluence, our enterprise wiki / blog solution. With most modern mail clients having RSS readers built in, we could only see advantages. Our students didn't even know what RSS was, and couldn't be convinced to move away from spamming.

Anecdote 3

Similar to anecdote 2. Jacobs hasn't much of a learning strategy, let alone an e-learning strategy, so should be very careful when it comes to investing in a LMS. We had outdated discussion boards supporting learning and teaching. We created an alternative in Confluence were we automagically created course workspaces based on data in our student / course management system. Students hate Confluence, faculty hardly use it, when they use it, it's for uploading Powerpoint files of their lecture slides.

Anyway, these experiences concurred with what I was reading at the time. One was a huge metastudy by Rolf Schulmeister, Germany's e-learning guru. who is also quoted in the Spiegel article that is on the reading list for this week IDEL. He, Schulmeister, looked at circa 46 studies to conclude that, yes there are new media, but if you look at media use by young people it's mainly for entertainment purposes and for keeping in touch with there friends. (Rolf Schulmeister (2008), Gibt es eine "Net Generation'? (Is there a net generation?), http://www.zhw.uni-hamburg.de/pdfs/Schulmeister_Netzgeneration.pdf (accessed September 28, 2010). Schulmeister also gives the important warning that rather than focus on a minority group of students, the differences in learning styles of students are probably much more important. To me, accommodating different learning styles could be one of the strong points of e-learning, because the technology, in principle, offers flexibility.

The other thing I was reading at the time was the 2008 ECAR study of undergraduate technology use (http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/EKF/ekf0808.pdf, accesses September 28, 2010). The ECAR studies are also frequently mentioned in the special issue on net generation of the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning that I went through last week. The same picture emerges, the majority of students prefer traditional teachers / teaching, only a minority is into web 2.0 as an active user.

The more important discussion is what the implications of such findings are for the e-learning debate. Of course it is fun to dismiss Tapscott, Prensky, and Oblinger, but their stories, apparantly not based on strong evidence. or rather no evidence at all, do have an important message. And that message is that we are teaching in a centuries old fashion to a world that has changed considerably. Just to use myself as an example, oops yet another anecdote, when I had obtained my economics degree in 1982, I vowed to myself that I would never pursue another degree. And yet, here I am enrolled in the MScEL program. What I meant in 1982: please no more boring lectures, workgroups with uninterested fellow students, based on core reading alone. I like learning, but the average university setting is an impediment to learning for people like me. E-learning, and that's the message I took from Oblinger and Tapscott (I have yet to read Prensky) can make learning more engaging and fun and, like, real world like.

Just so I don't forget, will get back later to the comments on Clara's latest comments. No, I think we're done for week 1. Anyway, two thoughts on 'a false sense of linearity'.

1. IIRC, Google Wave has the option of 'replaying' a wave, so you might be able to see how an asynchronous online discussion truly develops in time. Alas, Google will be discontinuing Wave by the end of the year, although the source code has been released. But I don't think Blackboard will incorporate any open source code in its very proprietary product.
2. In the end, if I'd like to check out the results of an online asynchronous discussion, am I really interested in how the discussion developed over time? Or am I much more interested in the 'harvest' of the discussion, the arguments pro and contra different ways of handling a case, and whether any conclusions were reached? Actually, one could see the summary ('harvest') of such a discussion as a (collaborative) learning result.

Oh well, the old process versus product discussion.