<div>Dear Folks:</div><div><br></div><div>I too have been enjoying this
discussion, and perhaps my own experiences might shed some light on the issues
at stake with</div><div>collaborative learning environments. I had been
involved in the Alliance for Computers and Writing since 1989, and
developed</div><div>with Thomas I. Ellis The RHIZOME Project, which modeled
creative and analytic invention heuristics for writing both
fiction</div><div>and arguments. While this has been in development at
various points for translation to the WWW (written originally in
hypercard), </div><div>I had gone on to teaching in local area network
conferencing software developed by my friends at Daedelus Inc. of Austin TX,
and then wide area networks and internet relay chat environments (IRC).
In 1996, I organized the first cross institution, expanded graduate
seminar, between Eastern Kentucky University and Texas Tech. University (with
Bruce Clarke), entitled "What Is Human About Intelligence in Science Fiction
and Film"-- meant to uncover the science behind science fiction with respect to
models of human cognition. We linked our graduate seminars with websites
that contained syllabii, primary and secondary reading lists with book reviews
by students eventually attached, posted seminar papers at the end, and a large
web library of links for resources on the topics addressed. In addition,
I had designed a cluster of virtual classrooms with multiple functionality at
the Media Lab Moo (more on that perhaps another time), as both classes met, in
computer classrooms large enough to accomodate every student at a terminal on
Monday evenings from 6-9pm, which meant, despite the time zone difference, two
hours overlapping. A number of times during the semester, authors of
secondary works were able to meet us at the Media Lab MOO to interact with our
students, who, at regional universities, would otherwise never have the
opportunity to interact with internationally known scholars (such as William R.
Paulson, David Porush, and Manuel Delanda). What made this course so
successful, in my opinion, was the fact that we linked online in real time only
for one of those two hours, after we had met in the classroom and began
exfoliating the topics for discussion ahead of time. SO, we designed the
interactive nature of the class to take advantage of both real and virtual
classrooms. I tried this approach a few more times, opening it once to
professors and students subscribed to H-NET, which was less successful because
of sporadic and inconsistent attendance, and once for a technical communication
course (after I had moved) between Kettering University and James Madison
University. A number of issues emerged from this: 1. the timing of the
linked courses had to be exquisite; 2. the syllabii for the two courses had to
be extremely close if not identical; 3. it was difficult to get permission for
linking up through those bean counter folks responsible for evaluating FTE
efficiency; 4. I don't think that any purely online course could ever offer the
depth, as well as breadth of discussion and concentrated effort, than hybrid
linked courses with two committed professors offering face-to-face guidance not
only on helping students master the learning curve with respect to the
technological features, but also in thinking through the specific pedagogical
tactics that would contribute rather than detract from the novel learning
environment; 5. elaborating on those tactics, we consciously tried to balance
top-down and bottom-up learning modalities as much as we could, because we
discovered that significant guidance was needed to ensure that the distributed,
bottom-up, collaborative projects stayed focused. This was years before
Blackboard and other store-bought virtual classroom management software, and
the use of the MOO, with all its functionality, remains superior to that
available through these store-bought systems.</div><div><br></div><div>Now I
gave a lecture on successes and difficulties of this model to the School of the
Future, Universidade de Sao Paolo, and they immediately adopted, and then
transformed this model to enable the linkage of high schools in every region of
Brazil, from the Barrios of Sao Paolo and Rio to far flung Amazon Basin
communities. This seems to continue, although the balance between real
and virtual classrooms remains an issue.</div><div><br></div><div>This year,
with Jondi Keane of Griffith University, Brisbane AU, we transformed this model
for a graduate seminar, accounting for new developments (since 1996!), and
applied it to a two week tradisciplinary academic conference on the avant-garde
visionary architects Arakawa and Gins. The conference ran from March
12-26, 2010. Here we coordinated a number of online elements that proved
quite successful, we feel: a website, containing both a place not only
documents, but 5 keynote video lectures (and introductions); 7 disciplinary
topic stream video lectures (and introductions); some sixty academic papers;
some forty creative textual and multimedia responses to Arakawa and Gins'
philosophy and works; video documentary/interviews with both Arakawa and
Madeline Gins; as well as the cumulative work of a graduate seminar at the
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology run by Russell Hughes and his
supervisor Pia Edni Brown, which generated 3D navigable models of Arakawa and
Gins' architecture and landscapes. This was entirely online, and while we
expected between 1-200 registered users, the total exceeded 370, and what was
most important, the quality of the work was remarkably high. We did have
concluding celebrations at Barnard College in NYC, and they proved
extraordiarily rich in amplifying the sense of community established by the
online conference (thought to be fair I should point out that this was the
third such international conference on these architects). But, the real
time events in NYC were not necessary to the ultimate success of the
conference. One factor that could have been applied to this online
conference from the graduate seminar attempted some 14 years earlier, was the
use of the multiple functionality of MOOs versus simple chats, but if one reads
the transcripts of the chats from the conference, they worked just fine, and
sections are indeed worthy of separate publication as exemplars of
collaborative invention. I would be happy to speak in greater detail
about the difference in functionality of MOOs versus Chats, but in any case,
Jondi and I are still pondering the successes and challenges of this project,
and would welcome any feedback with respect to design features, or with respect
to content and "pedagogy." You can find this online conference at:
http://ag3.griffith.edu.au and enter through the links to videos, papers
and chats; or to the creative contents.</div><div><br></div><div>Best
wishes.......mer<br><br>On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 04:53 AM, <b>Ian Condry
<condry@MIT.EDU></b> wrote:<br><blockquote id="quoted_response"
style="padding-left: 3px; padding-right: 0px; margin-left: 3px; margin-right:
0px; border-left: 1px solid #000;">
<pre>
Hello All,
I'm Ian Condry, a cultural anthropologist at MIT who works in
Comparatie Media Studies, and I've been enjoying this discussion as a
lurker. I wanted to comment on this:
> To succeed, however, the university will need to up its game and
> make its boundaries more porous by meaningfully integrating emerging
> ways of knowing and new social media (2).
I agree. The frustration many of us feel around classroom learning,
and the related issue of stultifying conferences (e.g, in Asian
studies, where I've spent some time), demands reform around the
processes of learning, something that many people have commented on
here with a variety of great ideas.
Collaborative learning is a keyword these days, and for me, this
suggests thinking of learning less as one-to-one relationship in a
group space (teacher to student in a classroom) and more as a
networked process of discovery and action. I'm quite taken by
Christakis and Fowler's book "Connected" and the idea that
"three
degrees of separation" tend to define our spheres of influence.
Following from that insight, we can view the "porous boundaries" of
the classroom not simply as a general call to "act in the world"
(a
noble but too-big goal), and rather to encourage us to ask, as
students and teachers, "who among our networks of people that we know
can help us solve the problem(s) at hand?"
It's vague in my mind, but I feel like there is something to be gained
from thinking in a more nuanced way beyond "individual/group/world"
towards three-degree social networks, and a kind of "pass along the
question" approach to problem-solving that uses classrooms as an
epicenter for activating larger social networks. For example, I
always viewed the Milgram experiment around 6-degrees of separation
as evidence that "the world is small." But the more important lesson
is that unsolvable problems (e.g., get this letter to someone you
don't know) can be tackled by passing along pieces of the problem to
people in our networks.
I think this goes beyond using social media, and hinges instead on
rethinking the way information is meaningful and valuable. What
matters are the social networks in which information is actionable.
Yet here too, I ask with Trebor, what are the best examples of showing
how this works? I think Wikipedia is only one among a multitude of
possible models . . .
All the best,
Ian
Ian Condry
Associate Director, Comparative Media Studies
Assoc. Professor, Foreign Languages and Literatures
Room 14N-314
MIT
Cambridge, MA 02139
http://iancondry.com
http://mitcooljapan.com
On Jun 21, 2010, at 11:18 AM, Trebor Scholz wrote:
> Education, caught up in a cost spiral, is in crisis. Tuition is on the
> rise and in the foreseeable future, higher education will be as
> unaffordable as a Prada bag. Anya Kamenetz' DIY U frames that well.
>
> The future lies neither solely in distance education nor in informal
> personal learning networks but rather in hybrid approaches. What we
> are
> witnessing now are dress rehearsals where "e.learning" is trying
on
> the
> role of the cash cow that can deliver it all and DIY universities
> sometimes make it sound as if they are the panacea. The reality is
> somewhere in between. In the years to come, the university will lose
> some of its centrality to informal learning projects (1) and
> variants of
> profit-driven courseware. Let's stop pretending that this is not
> happening. To succeed, however, the university will need to up its
> game
> and make its boundaries more porous by meaningfully integrating
> emerging
> ways of knowing and new social media (2).
>
> (1) Please send more examples of informal learning projects.
> The Public School (http://nyc.thepublicschool.org/)
> University of the People (http://www.uopeople.org/)
> University of Openess (http://uo.twenteenthcentury.com/)
> Copenhagen Free University
> (http://www.copenhagenfreeuniversity.dk/index.html)
> Manoa Free University (http://manoafreeuniversity.org/)
> EduFactory (http://www.edu-factory.org/)
> Radical Education Collective (http://radical.temp.si/)
> Free Slow University of Warsaw
(http://www.wuw2009.pl/index.php?lang=eng
> )
> Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry (http://www.tsci.ca/)
>
> (2) I suggest some implementations of social media in the
classroom in
> this slideshow: http://tinyurl.com/c2l6wy
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> (distributedcreativity.org)
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</pre></blockquote>Martin E.
Rosenberg<br>mer19@psu.edu<br>412-531-9651<br><br><br></div>