Transformation and Autonomy with a twist: from information to learning – Critical Reflection INF530

It’s been quite a ride this INF530, and as they say “it ain’t over until it’s over”, I have yet to complete my digital essay and enter that huge time warp black hole of combining words with media and images in such a way that it enhances rather than distracts, compels rather than confuses.

INF530 key words Looking back on the topic headings I decided to make a wordle, to see things with a little visual perspective. What jumped out was “information” and “learning” and I had to think back to previous courses where the nuances of data, information, knowledge, wisdom were picked over in meticulous detail (Barrett, Cappleman, Shoib, & Walsham, 2004; Hecker, 2012; Pantzar, 2000; UNESCO, 2005) or the role of the teacher or school or librarian is discussed, particularly in the light of information literacy (Eisenberg, 2008; Mihailidis, 2012; O’Connell, 2008; Sheng & Sun, 2007; Wallis, 2003). Yes these are all part of the picture, but the words that I’d like to contribute and focus on are not there, because they are implicit and essential rather than explicit. Integral to information and learning are transformation and autonomy.

Firstly transformation, it’s synonyms (conversion, metamorphosis, renewal, revolution, shift, alteration) and its’ derivatives:

the doing – to transform,
the process – transformation,
the subject and the state – transformed, and
the agent – transformer.

And the twist, because in education we are simultaneously the agent and the subject, the initiator, the process and the end state. We cannot “do” without “being”. And that is the value of plunging into a distance-learning course that takes one beyond the mundane and everyday into personally being transformed and feeling the simultaneous discomfort and thrill of not always being in control of the process or the outcome. Sometimes the truth is found in the antonym – stagnation and sameness. The resistance to change that saps energy rather than re-energises as transformation does.

Conole (2013, p. 61) stated “We have to accept that it is impossible to keep up with all the changes, so we need to develop coping strategies which enable individuals to create their own personal digital environment of supporting tools and networks to facilitate access to and use of relevant information for their needs.” That is part of the solution, the other is finding one’s place in digital and physical learning ecologies (O’Connell, 2014; Vasiliou, Ioannou, & Zaphiris, 2014; Wang, Guo, Yang, Chen, & Zhang, 2015). Yes ecologies, because we are, and our students and children will be “shape shifting portfolio people” (Gee & Hayes, 2011) whether we want to acknowledge and embrace the fact or not.

Which brings me to the second of “my” take-away words. Autonomy. It is autonomy with a difference – autonomy within communities and networks of our own and others’ making. As Downes (2012, bk. Connectivism and Connective Knowledge) puts it “knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, … learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks”.

However without the aforementioned transformation we can’t have the autonomy. It is an autonomy hard won, through dint of our own efforts, the pushing and pulling and attraction of our teachers, mentors, peers and heroes. Autonomy feeds off motivation and self-regulatory control (Kormos & Csizér, 2014). The latter including commitment, meta-cognitive, satiation, emotion and environmental control (Tseng, Dörnyei, & Schmitt, 2006). Ironically we need others to attain autonomy. Autonomy is not independence but interdependence, not being on your own, but being part of a larger community of learners all together on individual journeys. It’s the forums, blogs, comments, feedback and Facebook posts. The emojis, irrelevant and irreverent tweets; words of encouragement and critique, ideas and suggestions that propel us forward and backward and around in circles – but ever expanding circles and cycles of improvement and transformation.

Thank-you to my peers, my course co-ordinator Judy, those who went before us and those who will come after us may we transform and be transformed, gain autonomy and enable others do so too in this journey of life-long learning.

What you are speaks so loud I can not hear what you say - Original Quote by Emerson — What you are speaks so loud I can not hear what you say – Original Quote by Emerson

References

Barrett, M., Cappleman, S., Shoib, G., & Walsham, G. (2004). Learning in knowledge communities. European Management Journal, 22(1), 1–11. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2003.11.019

Conole, G. (2013). Open, social and participatory media. In Designing for learning in an open world (pp. 47–63). New York ; Heidelberg: Springer.

Downes, S. (2012). My eBooks [Web Log]. Retrieved April 19, 2015, from http://www.downes.ca/me/mybooks.htm

Eisenberg, M. B. (2008). Information literacy: Essential skills for the information age. DESIDOC Journal of Library & Information Technology, 28(2), 39–47. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.csu.edu.au/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lih&AN=51198131&site=ehost-live

Gee, J. P., & Hayes, E. (2011). Language and learning in the digital age (1st ed). New York, NY: Routledge.

Hecker, A. (2012). Knowledge beyond the individual? Making sense of a notion of collective knowledge in organization theory. Organization Studies, 33(3), 423–445. http://doi.org/10.1177/0170840611433995

Kormos, J., & Csizér, K. (2014). The interaction of motivation, self-regulatory strategies, and autonomous learning behavior in different learner groups. TESOL Quarterly, 48(2), 275–299. http://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.129

Mihailidis, P. (2012). Media literacy and learning commons in the digital age: Toward a knowledge model for successful integration into the 21st century school library. The Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults, 2. Retrieved from http://www.yalsa.ala.org/jrlya/2012/04/media-literacy-and-learning-commons-in-the-digital-age-toward-a-knowledge-model-for-successful-integration-into-the-21st-century-school-library/

O’Connell, J. (2008). School library 2.0 : new skills, new knowledge, new futures. In P. Godwin & J. Parker (Eds.), Information literacy meets Library 2.0 (pp. 51–62). London: Facet.

O’Connell, J. (2014, July 19). Information ecology at the heart of knowledge [Web Log]. Retrieved March 28, 2015, from http://judyoconnell.com/2014/07/19/information-ecology-at-the-heart-of-knowledge/

Pantzar, E. (2000). Knowledge and wisdom in the information society. Foresight, 2(2), 230–236.

Sheng, X., & Sun, L. (2007). Developing knowledge innovation culture of libraries. Library Management, 28(1/2), 36–52. http://doi.org/10.1108/01435120710723536

Tseng, W.-T., Dörnyei, Z., & Schmitt, N. (2006). A new approach to assessing strategic learning: The case of self-regulation in vocabulary acquisition. Applied Linguistics, 27(1), 78–102. http://doi.org/10.1093/applin/ami046

UNESCO. (2005). Towards knowledge societies. Retrieved fromhttp://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001418/141843e.pdf

Vasiliou, C., Ioannou, A., & Zaphiris, P. (2014). Understanding collaborative learning activities in an information ecology: A distributed cognition account. Computers in Human Behavior, 41(0), 544–553. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.09.057

Wallis, J. (2003). Information-saturated yet ignorant: information mediation as social empowerment in the knowledge economy. Library Review, 52(8), 369–372. http://doi.org/10.1108/00242530310493770

Wang, X., Guo, Y., Yang, M., Chen, Y., & Zhang, W. (2015). Information ecology research: past, present, and future. Information Technology and Management, 1–13. http://doi.org/10.1007/s10799-015-0219-3

Academic honesty should never be ambiguous

Ok, I know I have a somewhat ambivalent stance on what constitutes plagiarism and the value of collaborative and cooperative learning but one thing I’m clear on is academic honesty. If you used something that someone else made just say that you did that. And depending on your age and level a simple copy and paste of the link is sufficient.I recently went around our G5’s exhibition project and was thoroughly impressed at their work. I did sneakily ask a few for their sources and most could point to at least a page of attribution as to where they’d got their numbers and facts. Well done (here is a great video of it by the way).

G5 Exhibition Video 2015 from UWC South East Asia on Vimeo.

Fast forward to early this morning. I’m putting the washing in the machine and the kids are getting ready for school and finally my daughter lets me see the video she’s been working on for the last 4 days – one holidays and festivals in the middle ages. It’s a great video with her narrating the festivals of the year with lovely pictures and music from the middle ages in the background. And then at the end “Thank you for watching” and black screen.

I told her I thought it was great, but that she didn’t have to thank anyone at the end, and instead a list of attribution for the images and music would be good. “Our teacher said we didn’t have to do it” was her reply. I told her that she knew that I expected it of her, and she then showed me that she had in fact made a list of the URLs but hadn’t put it into EasyBib to get into MLA format. I asked why not, and she came with some story about how citations / attribution hadn’t been in the original assignment nor in the rubric and the teacher didn’t want to add it on afterwards. I was a little annoyed at this. I said she could at least put it at the end of her video, but she didn’t think that would be “fair” on the others who didn’t. Fair? How about the fairness of the people to whom the images belonged? OK they’re all long dead now, and perhaps most of the images are in common domain, but still, it’s the principal.

I was annoyed at myself being annoyed at her, when actually I should be annoyed at the school. How can they go from being citation semi-stars in primary school to not having it expected at middle school. This is not the first instance, it is one of many, many, many in both my children’s grades across all subjects – academic honesty really does need to be institutionalised and inside every single assignment across the board! I’m at least glad my ranting has had an effect on my kids and they’re at now keeping lists to show me – but if it’s only for me for how long will my influence last?

Activity and Paralysis

Reading, reading, reading. I know I should start trying to write, but I’m in a kind of simultaneous paralysis and activity. Each new reading I do, I discover a whole field of knowledge and information that I know way too little about. Today I discovered the LEA (language experience approach) to teaching reading and writing. And the relevant (for me) “cousin” D-LEA (i.e. with digital). I’m sure every single teacher in the world is totally familiar with this and today was the first time I’d encountered it – academically at least. I’m pretty sure it’s what they do at school and that my kids experienced it, I just didn’t know the name. Duh. So this has kicked off a new round of activity – frantically learning more about it and how it relates to my topic; and paralysis – not being able to start writing my assignment yet.

Slow progress is still progress

I guess that will have to be my mantra for now. I spent from Friday to Sunday at the UWCSEA Multilingual Conference (#mlconf2015 if you want to follow the tweets – although not many people tweeting besides yours truly and a few others). Besides the fact that I was giving two sharing sessions, as you know it’s both a topic close to my heart and close to my digital essay theme!

After working all day yesterday it’s back to reality today, and since Mindmeister kindly reminded me that one of my old Mindmaps created with some colleagues was “trending” I thought I’d try and map my readings and knowledge up to now in Mindmeister. It’s not the perfect tool, but it sure beats pen and paper and having to scratch things out and NEVER having a piece of paper big enough. I also don’t really have a space of my own that’s uninterrupted and not shared by multiple family members or bits of digital debris, (plus it’s so darn hot here, so the fan is on full blast scattering paper everywhere) so using lots of little post it notes like the TED talk below wasn’t really an option.

https://embed-ssl.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_got_a_wicked_problem_first_tell_me_how_you_make_toast.html

Anyway, as of now, this is the status from 3 of the readings I’ve summarised. I have about 47 to go, but I’m already seeing the same themes repeated (yay, fill up that reference list – woah did I just say that?)

https://www.mindmeister.com/maps/public_map_shell/543060246/language-learning-in-a-digital-information-ecology?width=600&height=400&z=auto

And I missed yesterday’s deadline for blog post 4 … not to mention several other things I was supposed to attend to in my personal and professional life…. slipping up.

Does academic equity even exist?

I’ve just finished reading through Yvette Slaughter’s PhD thesis: The study of Asian languages in two Australian states: considerations for language-in-education policy and planning and what an eye-opener it was. And not for the reasons I thought it would be.

I’m really interested in language-learning ecology/(ies) and since hers mentioned this, I decided to take the plunge and wade through the 372 pages. And what I found was rather interesting. Aside from all the detailed analysis, the most interesting chapter was on “Is Asian Language Study Equitable” – she has written a paper on it, which unfortunately doesn’t seem to be easily accessible (i). (Just tried to find her on twitter to see where I can get a copy…)…. read more

Hygiene factors that annoy …

After my last post got a pop up that my theme is retiring in 57 days and would I like to choose a new theme. No I wouldn’t but I’d better. And I’d better do it now as I don’t like to revisit that type of decision/action twice. Choosing themes for me is like choosing clothes and I like the Obama / Zuckerberg approach, sort it out once and then just mindlessly go on with it forever so your brain space is available for more interesting things. I have the same approach to most aspects of my life, including online grocery shopping (I’ve told one online retailer here if they didn’t sort out the fact that I couldn’t buy my meat / fish with one click and make it intuitive I’m gone as a customer – they didn’t see it, so I’ve moved on). I so wish that Palm Pilot’s 3 click minimisation could be more widely adopted. We cycle through the same menu for a year at a time, when school starts in August it’s up for negotiation again (Monday white fish, Tuesday chicken, Wednesday Salmon, Thursday mince in some form, Friday beef or lamb, Saturday/Sunday BBQ) with variation on salads and vegetables and carbs that are also relatively fixed. I hate cooking and grocery shopping. I hate discussions. I love school uniforms. My brain is too small to have to think about all that boring detail.

That’s why I love Evernote and Zotero. Set it up, sort it out once and you’re freed up to spend your time reading and writing and having interesting conversations about reading and writing.

Anyone else with that approach?

Deep research Diving

I’m going to either become very quiet or very noisy in the next few weeks as I dive into my next research topic for my last (yikes, how fast did that go) assignment for INF530.

This is my research proposal:

===============================================

1. Proposal Topic

Language learning and the new digital information ecology

2. Proposed digital tools and/or spaces to be used

iBooks

This is a tool I’ve wanted to experiment with for a while, and I think it can be used to encompass all the multi-media affordances required for this essay. Eventually I’d like to expand on it and turn it into a resource for our students, educators and families.

3. Rationale

Previous research has indicated that successful language acquisition is the result of the combination of optimising factors relating to the child (student), family, school and community. These can be considered to operate in inter-relationships in a knowledge ecology.

The affordances of digital technology in education combined with global connectedness allow unprecendented opportunities to leverage the connected learning principles of

production centered
openly networked
shared purpose

within language learning, however the current structures of education may ignore or limit these opportunities due to institutional (or familial) fear, ignorance or perceived loss of control.

This essay will look at the work of Seely, Hatie, Bawden, Ng, Siemans, Downes, Ford, Perrault etal. to examine learning design and the information environment and discuss how the learning systems and constituents allow for zones of intervention within the language learning ecology to leverage learning – sychronous and asynchronous, local and global and allow students and their families a greater locus of control over language learning.

A particular focus will be mother tongue learning, an area often neglected by schools, who state they unable to justify supporting a large number of minority languages formally. I will argue this may be the result a failure of imagination and the application of digital technology and collaborative learning rather than a lack of resources.

===================================

Unfair advantage

Following the release of the results of our first assignment, there has been some soul searching and discussion on how better results can be attained and what went wrong etc. I’ve seen this on various Facebook groups I’m a member of too. I’ve referred earlier to the whole privilege thing, and I’ll say it again. No one mentioned it, but of course some of us (myself included) had an unfair advantage. When I write “the whole privilege thing” and then so easily reference the exact article, it’s because I’ve read it, and stored it on Evernote, and can easily access it.

Sichuan peppers at dinner in Chengdu last night

Let me ‘fess up on where my starting line was when this course started. I’m not doing this to brag, but to give courage. I started at ground zero in August 2012 and I too had the shock of getting back grades from assignments and not only beginning to understand where I’d gone wrong. My starting line this time around:

* A collection of 3,350 academic, professional and lay articles on Evernote, to which I’ve added 269 articles since I started this course in this course’s notebook. I can only find 5 articles for my first course (in electronic form), because then I was still printing it all out. And I threw out all the printouts in my last house move. I don’t even have the course overview or modules. That’s how bad it all was. In fact it’s even worse. I naively thought that Interact was forever so I didn’t even save my marked assignments! So I don’t even have a hard copy of that. I cringe when I thought how stupid I was. How little I knew, how I bumbled through the first year. How scared I was to ask for help. How I didn’t even know who to ask for help.

* A Zotero library of 1,697 references to articles I’ve read (the difference with Evernote above is I only put articles in that I’ve used in assignments, and Evernote has a lot of my “life” in it, not just academic life). Most (but not all) of those references are “clean” i.e. I’ve sorted out the metadata and added the fields I need to make my referencing better. I also have the email of people at Zotero if I find it behaving strangely and not doing things the ‘correct’ APA way.

* I’ve passed 14 subjects at CSU. If I wasn’t starting to get the hang of things by now I’d have dropped out a while ago.

* I’ve discovered the APA blog, and experienced first hand their 24 hour or less (sometimes less than an hour) response time to queries if you can’t find the answer you need. I’m a regular at OWL Purdue (I even know what OWL means!). I also have just been through an exercise at work whereby I’ve been making reference posters for our students. There I had to make 6 posters each for APA, MLA and Chicago, which are the referencing styles we use. That sure was an education on referencing! Even after weeks of tweaking things and getting it ‘right’ after we put it out in the open (this link is the first version – so not all correct! first link is the latest version), we kept getting comments and corrections from people with more knowledge and experience – talk about crowd-sourcing!

* I’d been blogging privately since 2006 and had written 1,931 blog posts with nearly 200,000 page views by the time I stopped in 2013. When I started this course I’d done about 100 blog posts professionally. I also re-started blogging reluctantly, and totally intimidated by those older and wiser and more experienced than myself and then was forced to by my courses, and now find it a way of releasing pent up thoughts and organising my jumbled thoughts on what I’m reading and experiencing. The community is not the same as 9 years ago, I’m not getting the steady stream of comments and encouragement that I had in the past – so it is less motivating if one speaks of external motivation. But it is still a learning tool for me, and the more I write, the more I can write and the easier it becomes.

* I work with a terrific person. Katie Day (googleplus link) is the best boss a starting out TL could wish to have. She pushes me when I want to hold back, she challenges my naive and unformed and uniformed thoughts. She throws articles and books and websites and blogs and names at me when I get stuck. She takes me out of my comfort zone and encourages me and supports me when I have self-doubt. And most importantly she knows her S***. Whether it’s on the literature front, the technical front, the digital front, the teaching front, the working with teachers and students front.

* My family is supportive. We’ve just come back from a weekend in Chengdu – but we haven’t had many weekends off in the last 2.5 years, where I’ve not been tied to my laptop or iPad reading articles or writing assignments. And to be completely honest, the fact that I wasn’t this weekend is only because the wifi was so unbearably slow it was better to just give up and quit trying to study than to keep battling it. My 12 year old daughter reads through my assignments and picks out bad grammar and discusses where things don’t make sense. My husband reads through my assignments and tells me if I’m becoming too academic. Neither of them always know what on earth I’m writing about, but they do make me a better writer, since if I can’t write well enough for them to at least understand the gist of what I’m saying, I’m doing something wrong.My 11 year old son gives me hugs and moral support. And reminds me that everyone learns in their own way and at their own pace.

Of course my privilege didn’t start there. As Gee would point out, I had parents who spoke to me and read to me. I grew up in a bilingual environment. English is my mother tongue. I had a tertiary education. I am surrounded by intelligent people who read and write and discuss things.

While writing this I’m just humbled by what a long journey this learning thing is, and if anything each of us should have a handicap that we start with, like golf, to make it a little fairer and more equitable. But on the other hand, looking back I can say there is hope and it does get better. A lot better and a lot easier. I also both care a lot more and a lot less. That may sound strange. On the one hand I’ve become very passionate about learning (care more) but on the other I’m a lot less scared of making mistakes and putting myself out there (care less). All these processes take time. A lot of time. And while I may be a few metres past the starting line compared to some, I’m nowhere near others, and I can’t even see the finishing line. And that is life. And that is fine.

Open, social and Participatory Media in Education

In this week’s module we were posed the following questions:

How would curriculum change if our priority approach was on critical, creative, and collaborative thinking?
What does the reality of the modern age of information– this age of Google –suggest that we “teach”?
Can we simply “update” things as we go, or is it time for rethinking of our collective practice?

I was forwarded this very provocative article from the Atlantic by my boss this week = “The deconstruction of the K-12 teacher” It ties in quite nicely with the theme of this module, but it also turns the questions on their heads.

how would the curriculum change if they were in the hands of learners and not educators?
What does the reality of the modern age of information suggest as to who should be teaching?
Will “updating things as we go” enhance or delay the obsolescence of the current collective practice?

Or at least these could be the questions IF and only IF all the glory day assumptions on technology and education were true. As so many of my cohort have pointed out, the reality on the ground is very different from the theory and assumptions made up in ivory or silicon towers. There are brilliant teachers who don’t touch technology and will never need to and their students are not any the poorer for it. There are physical tools that are just as effective or more so than technological tools (see this great blog by Buffy Hamilton on writeable tables). There are pathetic teachers who wow and woo with their technical powess, and there are self-absorbed #SoMe educators who p*** the hell out of their colleagues and students. There are teachers who are genuinely passionate and engaged with their students AND technology and how the combination can optimise learning and reach students in ways that traditional teaching may not be able to. There are those who have experimented and been rewarded and feel empowered to continue and those who have tried and failed or tried had had their fingers smacked by threatened superiors or administrators or frightened parents.

There are children who are naturally curious and respond to any and every stimulus be it text or video, paper or screen and dive right into everything and those who hang back, those who are scared of failing. Those who’ve seen it all, can do it all and more and those that need a lot of help. A LOT OF HELP. Will technology be the panacea?

I’m not sure that education has ever moved forward by revolution (and it is usually at the behest of entrenched power structures that it does so). Rather it seems to have fits and starts and intermittant warfare (remember the reading/phonics wars?)

The question I think is really, in whose interest is it that education changes, and do they have the power and control to institute those changes? And this is where it gets interesting. Coming back to the Atlantic article – it would appear to make economic sense to only have “super teachers” and to gain economies of scale, so that would benefit local / state governments wanting to save money. It may even be attractive to those wanting to pay less tax. It’s certainly interesting for commercial educational interests (Pearson etal. the most hated kid on the block it seems) to support this.

Who is driving this bus? I get the feeling that many educators are feeling like passengers, some willingly paid for the ride, some were forced to embark, some think they’re the conductor or the ticket collector, But who has set the itinerary, and is there a driver or is it a unmanned ground or cloud vehicle?

I see the changes benefiting students as they can delve deeper and go further than the curriculum would allow. Go beyond the geographical and age limitations set by traditional classrooms. I also see some of them them drowning in content without being able to absorb, internalise or think about it before moving on. I see them learning to use fabulous tools and I see them being sucked into a time-blackhole where the tool and the look of the product becomes more important than the content, the analysis, the thinking or the learning.

I don’t have answers, I just have observations and thoughts and questions right now.

References

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