Jon, to suggest  an analogy, perhaps viewing a play live in a theatre vs. watching a live stream of the same play from your couch.

Perhaps a music concert is an even better comparison. Say being at a live concert vs. watching a DVD (or live stream) of the exact same concert at home.

In the live venu, you can watch what/who you want to watch. If you want to focus on the drummer, or the bass player, or a backup singer, you can. You can spend the entire concert watching what you want to watch.

On a DVD/stream, you can only watch what some other person has decided you will watch. Be that a producer or editor, you see what everyone who watches that stream/DVD sees. If they spend most of the concert on the "star", then that's all you get.

What is odd  however, is that when you toss this analogy at education, you get the direct opposite effect - real classroom vs. ideal on-line learning.

As you've so often pointed out, the best on-line learning experience puts the learner in control of the situation. They decide what to view, how often, where to go next, etc.

Contrast the classroom. You sit, bum in seat, for X minutes, listening to an educator drone on about whatever THEY think is the important thing in the lesson guide. Again, in a perfect world the lecturer would be captivating and engaging, even interacting with the class to create a unique experience. But reality is that most classroom sessions are pure stodge.

The biggest problem with the classroom is not so much the lecture per se (although that's a truly terrible way to impart most kinds of knowledge), but that we make students attend it. Even when we teach using smarter techniques (see my recent talk at https://jondron.ca/dtl2018-spotlight-presentation-the-teaching-gestalt/ for a list of examples) the external regulation remains a vicious hobble.  It would be like being forced to attend a concert by the same singer every week, with the threat looming over you that, once the series of concerts was over, if you couldn't repeat which songs had been played and which witty asides had been made in every week, you would be made to suffer for the rest of your life. Even if it were not so life-changing, how would it affect your experience of the concert if you knew there were a test at the end?

My point, though, was not so much that a single event is better or worse than another single event, but that the person viewing a movie at home has (as you suggest) a vast amount more control, and a vastly greater range of choices, in a host of different ways, at a host of different times, than the person sitting in a cinema seat (or theatre, concert venue, whatever). Among those choices are ones that very closely resemble the experience of the cinema-goer, but they are a tiny subset of the whole. Among the whole, many would be highly superior. It's about comparing ways of learning, not instances of teaching.

On the whole I'd still often like to attend a live concert performance from time to time because there are many ways it can be very meaningful, at a deep, tribal, visceral level. The rituals of attendance are powerful. The simple acts of making arrangements to be there and paying exorbitant ticket prices add great salience. Even the fact that it is difficult to be somewhere at a specific place and time, no matter how you feel or what the conditions might be, makes it matter more. And, even when Paul McCartney is a speck in the distance seen from behind with big-hatted people standing in front of you blocking most of the view and farting, it's still Paul McCartney and, wow, he was a Beatle, and that's much bigger than just the music.  But I love the Beatles because of radio, TV, cinema, books, magazines, and repeated playing of records, tapes, CDs, and, now, the web, online video and audio streaming. And, though I would kill to go back in time and attend an actual Beatles concert, their movies were really great and could not be replicated in person. Inverting your analogy, would you rather see Yellow Submarine as the original movie, or performed live on stage?

would you rather see Yellow Submarine as the original movie, or performed live on stage?

Easy one. YS was an animated (99.99%) movie that defined psychedelia (almost) for a generation.

Performed live, it's some deriviative P.O.S. "written" by some hack who usually thinks they know better than the original creators.

I'd take the "real deal" (movie) over some interpretation every time.

Of course, then there's the original Monty Python Skits, or even the move "... Holy Grail", vs. "Spamalot". Now there's a more difficult choice, as the creators had a hand in all of the above. ;-)

Thanks Gerald

Part of my point is exactly that - in both physical and online classrooms we can and do find ways to largely restore that lost autonomy (especially) and we try to cater for different levels and needs for competence.  Maybe not totally, but in a very large part, that's pretty much what we mean by 'good pedagogy'. I guess my really big question is really whether such pedagogies are necessary, sufficient, or appropriate when we take the hobbles away. They solve problems that we shouldn't actually have any more, but that we recreate for ourselves when we replicate the form and dynamics of traditional in-person teaching online. It's really hard to shake off that mindset completely!

Jon

ps - I will try to remember to record it. It can be followed online 11:30am-12:20pm PDT today (8th August 2018) at https://tinyurl.com/jondronwebinar

Jon,

Thanks for sharing the information about the webinar. I will try to attend.

And, I agree that there is something inherently problematic about trying to work around conditions that are remnants of an old, out of date model.

Your topic seems to be echoed by your North American compatriot :

Joh,

I really appreciated your detailed response to this paper,especially your comments on this study employing a behaviorist model, as well your discussion the experiences connected with mindfulness.

Thanks.

Gerald

 "GDPR  is more bad than goood.."  -- amadeus :} 

- Amadeus

Copyright regulations is about author who did iT or own it -- as for fair dealing  - it is temporary own to have a sheep :)  

- m

That's way the besstet answer so far!
- Colonel

>>...because it is very rare for two people to be at the same point and working at the same pace. 

Ah that makes sense with my experience so far as well as it's not just students having different start times, but also some may do five courses a semester taking 4-6 months whereas some may try to complete one course every month or two.

>>If students are doing things that interest them and are not being too overtly manipulated, rewarded or punished (which is death to intrinsic motivation)...

So agreed. I really enjoyed Daniel Pink's talks years ago on the limits of carrot and stick motivation as well as a couple of his books I read during a post grad certificate in Career Development.

And likewise, I've especially been enjoying project-based courses such as COMP444 and your COMP266. Being able to choose a project and focus of research/learning (providing we map to the learning objectives) is much more satisfying and engaging than, for example, courses where the exams are 100% multiple choice requiring regurgitating facts rather than applying knowledge or doing any real thinking.

Also, thank you for the links. I have bookmarked them for now, but will surely read them once I've made more progress on COMP266. :)

Thanks Jennifer. Daniel Pink uses self-determination theory a lot in his writing. My personal favourite writer and speaker on the topic is Alfie Kohn. His book 'Punished by Rewards' should be required reading for all parents, teachers and educational administrators, I think, but virtually all his work is brilliant.

Nice. I recognize some of those book titles/topics, but don't believe I've read any of them as of yet. Thank you for the suggestion -- it's really thoughtful of you. :)

And now I'm trying to decide whether next to take COMP306 (as I'm currently doing a Lynda.com course on C++) or get Punished by Rewards and take EDPY200 Educational Psych for my Learning Tech minor.

(C++ will probably win out due to timing...unless I go with a 3rd option and work on some core CIS courses. hehe)

Edit: I'm going to sign up for that C++ course now. As I'm already working on the Lynda.com course, it will be nice to have the assignments for COMP306 to work on at the same time. :)

Hi Jon,

I am having the same problem with the file.

Terrible network problems, sorry - if this fails, try https://t.co/lPcC8U73Qq - works for me.

Jon,

I was able to access thepresentation at last.

I really enjoyed it and appreciated the informal nature of the presentation, which seemed really appropriate to talking about a learning environment that learns.

I found this piece  earlier this week. I was struck by (and related to) the description of teachers has typically very little autonomy. 

Thank you for sharing the article, Jon.

I agree on your points on Facebook.  Though I still use Facebook, it is more of a observational standpoint now.  It is interesting to see the developments of news and opinions through the lens of Facebook.  For example, I find it interesting how certain population of my friends on Facebook have specific viewpoints that strongly go against other segments of my friends (i.e. left vs. right wing political viewpoints).  There doesn't seem to be any middle ground for the most part; you are either on one side or the other.  Moderates are drowned out.  Its the formation of social media bubbles.

I find Reddit running into this issue now too, as people seem to only congregate into their favourite subreddits.  Subreddits are like specific factions now in a sense, as sometimes these subreddits 'brigade' other subreddits.  There is more polarization, too.

Interesting times we are in.

Cheers,

Viet

One thing that bothers me a bit about TBL's stance is that such clustering will occur no matter how open and distributed the network - it's built into the very nature of the web that he designed. Subreddits are functionally equivalent to websites or, for that matter, newsgroups of old in that regard. When we get to choose what we see and who we interact with, echo chambers are inevitable. Nothing new here apart from scale and the length of the long tail.

Filter bubbles, on the other hand, are far from inevitable. Where I think he is right to be worried is that the perspective you see on Facebook and, in principle, might see via Google, depending on the degree of 'personalization' (I greatly dislike use of the term to mean something done to somebody rather than by somebody) you let it get away with, is determined not by individuals but by secret algorithms. This means that, especially in the case of Facebook (that knows and ruthlessly exploits the value of polarization in driving engagement) your view of what your 'friends' are saying is not necessarily determined by the natural spread of opinion among them but by the system's deliberate manipulation of what you see which, thanks to FB's largely repulsive algorithms, represents a tiny fraction of the whole.

One part of the answer might lie in making those algorithms scrutable. This opens up a can of worms inasmuch as it makes it easier for evil-doers to exploit them but, much as open source can be more secure than closed source because people can spot and fix the bugs (only works when there is much ongoing active development), it would certainly encourage the perpetrators to tread more carefully. Another part lies in making them not just scrutable but personalizable (in the true sense of the word). Unfortunately, as Judy Kay (and I, for that matter, in a slightly different way) found a decade or two ago, the chances of people even understanding the effects of changes to weightings, let alone actually applying them, are slim. Most will simply accept defaults. The more you force it on them, the more sophisticated the filtering you enable, the less usable (and used) the system will be. There is almost certainly at least a partial answer to this problem - it's a design problem that can in principle be solved by a sufficiently inventive technology  - but I've yet to find it.

Another part of the solution - which speaks more to echo chambers than filter bubbles - lies in culture and literacy. It is natural to be drawn to others that share interests or other commonalities with you, and for those that are not part of your sets to be considered as other, with all the bad things that entails. Escaping these traps means making an active decision to do so. If we, as individuals, put greater value on diversity - for instance, we actively seek things that conflict with our views, that are not in our comfort zones, that are not among our self-decided interests, that are randomly chosen, or serendipitous - and try to understand them, then there's a much better chance that the world will become a better place. One of the big reasons that Canada is a better place to live than most others in the world is that, as a culture, we celebrate and embrace such diversity. The same can and should be true of our online lives.

This is actually the best way to explain algorithms. I was thinking about it this week. I was wondering why don’t text books include as much models and figures or these kind of drawings to explain a problem solving method. I do find images helpful to understand a new concept, maybe because I learn this way better than reading boring paragraphs.