Rick West

I don’t know what else to title this post. What I am referring to is not the traditional digital divide that is about access to digital technologies, i.e. some have the tools and some do not. What I am referring to instead is a digital divide related to creative use of the tools, about why some people are creatively using their access to Internet technologies and why others are not.

What started me thinking about this is a new report from the Pew Internet and American Life project, reported by Andy Carvin on June 1st. Carvin quotes the report as stating that 42% of American adults now have broadband access. OK, that’s still not the majority, but it does represent 84 million people, which is a lot. Whites (42%) continue to have broadband access more than African Americans (31%), but English-speaking Latinos are right up there too (41%). Education and income still provide big barriers, with 2/3rds of those families earning more than $75,000 or having a college degree having broadband, but only 1/5th of those families earning less than $30,000 or without a HS diploma having it.

However, Carvin argues that this is missing the point:

It’s not about access. It never was. It’s about what people do with that access.

Andy Carvin’s Waste of Bandwidth: June 2006 Archives

On the one hand, I disagree. Access has to be there. From a distance education point of view, one of our greatest hindrances is still access. We can’t teach those folks that we can’t reach through the Internet. And if learning is about meaningful interactions, which I believe it is, then we need faster Internet connections so we can employ technologies that allow for more meaningful interactions.

So access is still a problem and needs to be addressed.

But on the other hand, Carvin has a point. Eventually we want to get beyond access and push people to do something on the Internet — to create rather than simply consume. The Pew report has some details on this as well. In the study, they asked people if they had created their own web page or blog, or uploaded something they had created themselves, such as a story or video. Here, the numbers are different:

Not surprisingly, young people were much more likely to say yes. While 43% of respondents ages 18-29 said they had done one of these online publishing activities, only 29% of 50- to 64-year olds said yes, while just 18% of those 65 and older said yes. Meanwhile, race appeared to be a small factor, but in a rather counter-intuitive way: while 32 percent of whites said they had done one of these online publishing activities, 39% of African Americans and 42% of English-speaking Latinos had done so as well. So while whites may continue to use broadband in higher numbers, a higher percentage of African American and Latino broadband users are taking advantage of their access as content publishers. Similarly, income and education gaps are relatively minimal in terms of content production: 32% of users without a high school diploma versus 38% of those with a college degree, and 32% of users earning less than $30,000 a year versus 41% of those making $75,000 or more.

Andy Carvin’s Waste of Bandwidth: June 2006 Archives

It is interesting that there is still a huge age divide, but a much smaller difference due to race, education, or income. This seems to indicate that WHEN people have access, the digital divide is less of an issue because all types of folks will use the Internet for creative activities. The Internet does, as Carvin suggests, become a democratizing bridge.

Politically, this makes me want to push for lawmakers to work out plans to give free high-speed access to everyone, so we can more quickly cross these digital divides. Educationally, it makes me think a little more about something David Wiley said once … that it might be more important to study how to help more people learn, than to help those few who have access to learning to learn better.

Personally it makes me wonder how to cross that darned age divide when it comes to web creativity, and specifically how to get my parents and grandparents to create a blog and Flickr account!

technorati tags:blogtracks, AECT2006, creativity, digital, divide, pew, carvin, broadband

Blogged with Flock

Converge Online Magazine has an article by James Schultz describing how challenging it will be in the near future for America to keep pace with other nations for jobs, innovations, and economic growth. As is typically done, the finger is pointed at U.S. schools for not preparing students with enough creativity and “skills” to compete.

<aside> Why do we always blame schools first? What about blaming other sociocultural factors? As much as I believe education — and educators–can make a difference, I am enough of a realist to know that there are often bigger issues at play then whether a kindergarten teacher spends too much time doing lecture or rote memorization. It’s usually just easier to blame schools, which is why we do it. But, I’m an educator, and this is an education blog, so I’ll go back to discussing what education might offer to match these challenges </aside>

So, back to school-bashing. Schultz states

Retiring baby boomers are creating a vacuum that is not likely to be filled with the students currently being educated in American schools. Why? Because the American educational system, having hit its stride in the 19th century, is finding it difficult to maintain a sure footing in the 21st. Meanwhile, despite a dire need for their presence, business remains largely absent from most U.S. classrooms.

The Global Race

Yes, but what can we do about this? How can we regain our “sure footing”? Later, Schultz quotes William Hunter, director of the Office of International Students and Scholars at Lehigh University as writing that students need to be globally competent, not just domestically competent.

“U.S. students entering the workforce cannot be effective if they are only domestically competent … The problem sounds easy to solve: just hone up on global competencies and you’ll be able to meet the needs of a globalized job market. Not so fast. There is currently no agreed upon definition of what it means to be globally competent or how to obtain such worldwide savvy.”

The Global Race

I think he’s right. If you take a functionalist view of education, that the purpose of education is to function as a preparation for the economic marketplace, then we have focused for too long on preparing students for the American marketplace. All of the testing that students take to decide what their careers should be, and all the talk about what they’ll do as they grow up revolves around domestic careers and issues. There is rarely talk of the global nature of business, economics, politics, and work besides a required entry-level language course or social studies course. Do students leave our schools understanding the global economy they will be entering? Do they think about anything beyond our sea to shining sea?

The real question, of course, is what do they need to be (note that I said be, not learn) in order to be able to compete in a global economy? Stephanie Powers of the Association of Workforce Boards says in the article that we need to help students become more innovative, creative and flexible in how they work and learn.

“We’re exiting an age of conformity. That’s culturally ingrained in us,” Powers said. “The goals used to be for accuracy, routine, conformity … We have to have a creative workforce. We need to get teachers and administrators talking to the business community to see what’s really going on behind the doors of industry.”

The Global Race

This is one of the challenging issues about current educational accountability requirements. The appropriate desire to have quality education for each child has led to a stifling environment where what matters is memorizing answers for a test rather than exploring, creating, and constructing. At one time in our history it may have been important to memorize a lot of facts, but with Wikipedia at our fingertips, it may be more important now to develop other attributes and skills … such as creativity. And creativity is not memorized or filled in on bubble sheets. It is explored in a studio by trial and error and nurtured by mentoring and encouragement.

So how does this fit in with distance education? I don’t know, except to hope that new technologies may necessitate new pedagogies which may serve as catalysts for new educational systems. The easiest answer is that perhaps DE as an unbounded medium for learning can break down the domestic walls and help us consider learning and working from a global perspective.

technorati tags:AECT2006, BlogTracks, DE, Distance, education, global, economy

Blogged with Flock

Michael brings up a question I have thought about a lot recently, mainly whether Marc Prensky’s belief is true that children today are actually wired radically differently in their heads from previous generations. Michael wonders whether this may not be just the common difference in generations, or whether it is something more.

This is a very hot debate, and I know people feel strongly one way or the other. For myself, I don’t know yet what side of the fence I sit on. For me, I wonder if it is a chicken and the egg kind of situation. Are kids wired differently, therefore we should create a society to meet their new needs, or did we create a society that wired the kids differently? And since education is part of society, and a large part of it for K-12 kids, should educational systems be designed to accomodate digital native learning, or will we only exacerbate the problem by doing so? And is it really a problem? To bring it closer to home, should I continue to read to my own children novels with linear storylines and without pictures, or should I develop their nonlinear capabilities by encouraging them to engage in multimedia gaming? Which will prepare them most to enjoy life?
I’m not sure how I feel about this, and I think I feel a little bit of pull on both sides. Yes kids are receiving a lot of graphical, gaming, simulated, high-energy stimulation out of school, but does that mean school needs to be just like that? If we make school as exciting as kids’ video games, will kids ever learn to be able to reflect, write, read, think, discuss, and maintain their attention on linear, logical thoughts? I’m not saying Digital Immigrant styles of learning (text-based, linear) are the most important, but I’m also not sure that Digital Native styles of learning (graphic-based, non-linear) are more important. Just like we should develop both sides of our brain, shouldn’t we also develop fluency in Digital Native AND Digital Immigrant styles of learning, talking, and living?

My point to all this is that I think schools should be more engaging and relevant to kids’ lives than they are now. But I also think we should not be too quick to dispose of everything related to “old” styles of learning. Lecture, textbooks, and linearity are WAY overused in schools, I admit. But they can still be important styles of instruction and of learning.

But I’m still puzzling this through in my head. What do you think?

Tag: AECT 2006

If there is one thing we love as instructional designers, it would be models for developing instruction. I’m not often one to promote the need for another ID development model, but that is sort of what Brian Crosby of Learning is Messy calls for. In his post, he asks what we can do to promote effective learning using Web 2.0 tools:

“Do we continue to blog about it? Absolutely! The conversation is the point! What is missing are the models – the working, breathing, reproducible, intriguing models. We need ongoing models of all the power of what this looks like or we get nowhere.”

Brian calls for models of people using/teaching/learning with Web 2.0 tools, but I could see that if Web 2.0 is really that much different from Web 1.0, and even more from pre-Internet instruction, then perhaps we could also benefit from a Web 2.0 instructional design model. For example, perhaps a few elements of this model would be:

• How do we conduct learner analysis on the web … on learners whom we can’t see or know?
• How do we determine outcomes when much of Web 2.0 is learner-driven rather than instructor-driven?
• How do we know if learning is occurring? How do we evaluate the success of Web 2.0 learning when we are not sure what learners have engaged with, and to what extent, the Web 2.0 tools/environments?

I’m sure there are many other questions and elements of Web 2.0 instructional design that I’m blanking on right now. Feel free to add them to the comments, and I’ll think about it more myself.

Tag: AECT 2006

We got together as members of the BlogTracks team to talk about all the different blogs that we are maintaining for this presentation. If you are new to any of our blogs (listed on my blogroll), for the next few months we are blogging about online education as part of a new AECT presentation format … the BlogTrack. There is very little guidance from AECT about how to do a successful BlogTrack because it’s never been done.

So here are some of the questions we discussed today:

1. Who is our audience right now? Each other? AECT community? The WWW? Should we be trying to attract more  readers? Or should we just be low-key and low maintenance until the convention in October?

2. How much blogging should we do at this point? We tentatively thought of a post every other week or so.

3. What is our writing style? Long and formal, but less frequent, in a more typical “academic” style, or short, informal, and more frequent in a more blogging style?

If anyone in or outside of our group has any suggestions about how to make this BlogTracks effective, share your ideas! I think it is great that AECT is considering other presentation formats different from the roundtable, poster, paper formats, but now we need to consider what we want those new formats (like a BlogTracks) to be like.

As the title of this post came through your aggregator, it caught your eye didn’t it? You are probably only reading this post to see what in the world I have to say about research that would make it sexy, huh? Are you reading this post because you are interested in distance learning research (and other members of the BlogTracks group don’t count!) or because my title was interesting?

Exactly.

We have an inherent weakness as human beings of attending to or focusing on what is interesting, rather than what is important, or credible. As much as we would like to believe that this is not true in the area of educational research, it unfortunately is true. This was driven home for me this last year at AECT in Orlando. I had two main papers that I presented individually. One was a year-long project with a large qualitative data set and very rigorous, collaborative analysis. The findings of this study were published in a well-read publication, and the project built the foundation for future projects and papers.

How many people came to my presentation of this study at AECT? One! There were issues involved, such as the hour of the presentation and the day. But still — just one person!

Contrast this with the other presentation I gave, which presented findings from a quick project thrown together in spare time. This second study used much weaker methods, was thinner on the theoretical/analytical foundation, and was more contextualized instead of generalizable.

How many people came to this presentation? About 40. The room was full, and there were many questions and much interaction.

What was the difference between these two presentations? The second study had a much more interesting title. More than that, I think, it was a study of sexy, new, interesting technologies: Blogs and wikis. The first study, attended by only one person, discussed the integration of more general technologies. I joked with a friend of mine after the presentation that I need to create a new, sexy word for a new, fun technology so that I can have another packed presentation next year. We would call the technology, “Sblogs” or “super-blogs” and fill the seats, regardless of what we said about this imagined tool!

This scenario has happened to me a couple of times. In fact it happened again this year at AERA, where 80 people attended the presentation of a paper that has been rejected by two journals, and the paper currently in press was attended by one. Oye! As a researcher, it worries me that the more significant research might be unseen, unread, and unapplied. We need to try harder to not let ourselves be distracted by sexy titles about fun, exciting (but largely untested) technologies).

We also need to focus more on research that will be more useful, and have a larger impact, and this is really the point to this long post. What is the single most-used educational technology in higher education today, other than common office software? Course management systems. Over 95% of higher education institutions use a CMS (1), which trumps almost any other kind of technology out there. However, there is a disturbing lack of research about CMS technologies. I recently completed a project about Blackboard at Brigham Young University, and in my review of the literature found 164 published articles that mentioned course management systems, Blackboard, WebCT, Moodle, CMS, or other similar terms in the abstracts. Almost all of these, however, were “rah, rah” articles without a basis in data, or else quickie studies that consisted of a post-course evaluation of small sample sizes.Less than 10 studies attempted a more general evaluation of the impact from using a CMS over multiple contexts, such as multiple university departments.

I wondered if I had not reviewed the literature correctly. Was I missing some keyword that reveal where all the good CMS research is hiding? Apparently not. While presenting this research at AERA today, another doctoral student, interested in doing a dissertation about CMSs, confirmed that she also could not find much in the literature that used any substantial amounts of data. She also could not find almost any presentations at AERA, other than my own, about CMSs.

I know studying CMS technologies is not as exciting as studying blogs, or wikis, or simulations, or MMOGs, or MUVEs, or (fill in the blank). But this is work that still needs to be done. How could a technology sneak in and grab such a stranglehold on higher education without being properly studied and analyzed? All of our research now will be post-implementation, and if our findings are negative, will it matter, because institutions are now committed to using a CMS? Have we failed as educational technology researchers to not thoroughly investigate a new technology before it became so widely adopted?

It seems that this is a hole in the literature, and a hole in our research, and this applies to our thinking about online learning since, often unfortunately, most courses are placed online through the assistance of a CMS. More importantly, we need to consider what this means in a more general sense. How much does the choice of what we research hinge on how interesting and popular a technology is, compared with what its potential impact might be to improve or impede learning?

References

(1) Pollack, T. A. (2003). Using a course management system to improve instruction. Paper     presented at the annual conference of the Association of Small Computer Users in     Education, held at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Tag: AECT 2006