One of the saddest stories I ever heard was a blind chap who had to contend with laundromats that have gone digital. Before he could navigate by himself after a short tutorial by someone in charge. But when the machines went digital he suddenly had to have help for *everything*.

If they're developing the technology, I can see a large market for applications like this where the amount of information needed on the panel is quite straightforward.

Eve

I understand why such things happen - it does save a lot of time and money to wilfully ignore part of the population! 

On the bright side, the potential of 3D-printed technologies aside, slow but steady improvements in voice interfaces are helping a little, though I'm not sure I'd want to trust my laundry to the occasionally wild interpretations of Siri or Google speech recognition just yet.

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Very interesting - thank you Jon. This challenges me from several perspectives and possibly it is just a case of understandiong the language.

The Landing (Elgg) has opened my eyes to the beauty of a social networked learning environment and how the environment and the power of user-control within this environment allows not only for self-moderation but allows for persistant and permanent artefacts that offer value to learners/users past, present, and future. I do not quite understand how or where an LRS fits into this picture. I read some of what is on the Learning Locker site but again I think that language gets in my way.

I am not asking you to dumb this down but would you be able to provide an example of how you see an LRS fitting in to our existing systems?

Thanks Stuart -

An LRS is simply a means to record the learning process and results in a single repository, independently of the tools and methods used. Nothing more, nothing less. The fun part is in what you can do with that.

There are already TinCan plugins for Moodle (e.g. https://github.com/garemoko/moodle-mod_tincanlaunch and associated plugins for quizzes etc) that allow activities and outcomes of activities in Moodle to be stored in an LRS. Some work is already in progress for Elgg and Mahara plugins that will do much the same. It we happened to have any other systems (e.g. Blackboard, Sakai, Desire2Learn, Wordpress, Drupal, etc) they could do the same. There are also stand-alone apps and various learning tools including mobile apps and games that can record assertions to an LRS - the list is growing fast - see http://tincanapi.com/adopters/ for a small range of examples. Bookmarklets can be used to record some things from systems (mostly just reading web pages) even if they do not natively support xAPI.  This means that any activity deemed worthy of recording in any of these systems, from viewing a page to making a blog post to taking an assessment, can be recorded as an assertion - e.g. "x read y" or "x got 50% on this test" or "x commented on discussion post" or "x visited this museum" or "x participated in this Adobe Connect session" or "x completed this course" or "x got a GPA of 4.0 on this course" and can be read by any other system that supports the standard.  

The results can be displayed, aggregated and processed in many ways, both by the learner and by others with access to the LRS. There are already quite a few LRS viewing apps, query tools and plugins for many systems, including Moodle. I think that there is a good chance, or at least an opportunity, for LMSs to become nothing more than LRSs, with the various other functions now bundled with them disaggregated into much more flexible and open toolsets.

The information in the LRS might be useful to a learner, who can see his or her own progress, spot areas that are missing, assemble evidence for a portfolio, import competence information across institutions, etc. If aggregated, this might be useful in an adaptive system, letting learners make use of other learners' paths to suggest potential activities or content, or to point to issues with learning designs that allow developers to adapt them better. It might be useful to a teacher, who can see stats on how things are going at a class or individual level, and areas that need more effort. It might be useful to an institution to track who knows what, or to identify the pedagogies and processes used by the institution, or to spot holes in the catalogue. It might be integrated with open badges for accreditation or simply used as a place to store accreditation information. Note that, in all cases, this is independent of the tools or platforms being used as part of the learning process  - whether evidence comes from Moodle, the Landing, Mahara, a cellphone app or your own Wordpress blog, it all becomes part of the same stream, and can be used or analyzed in exactly the same way. Note too that it is in principle independent of institution so for things like credit transfer it might be a godsend.

The uses are really only limited by resources and imagination - an LRS is simply a bit of necessary plumbing that provides information about learning activities on top of which any number of tools can be built. Earlier attempts at standardizing this like SCORM and various IMS-supported initiatives were way too prescriptive and over-complex while at the same time missing things that might matter. The Experience API (xAPI) is both much simpler and much more expressive, which means it is far more likely to be used and far more likely to be useful - interoperability is a non-issue. Eventually, it is not impossible that most or all of the online learning tools we might use could make use of this standard.

I've written a little more about this over the past couple of years or so at Learning Locker and Project Tin Can that may be helpful.

Jon

Thank you - now to make sense of it in my context - I have reading to do

Thanks for the very significant mental and no doubt emotion energy expended in this debate. I confess some of went over my head, and I doubt the issue(s) between you and Stephen will ever be fully resolved or likley finished (I know how both of you dislike getting the the second last word in. ).  

I especially value the way that humans morph ideas to make them stretch to fit the multiple versions of the world we inhabit. Perhaps it is unfortunuate that education lacks the presecriptive language of some sciences, (Dewey's Progressive education, whole language, collaborative learning and many other terms come to mind) However, as you point out, the fuzziness allows us to use and apply these ideas in the many diverse contexts in which learning happens. And this is what makes good ideas, useful ideas.

Thanks Terry,

Yes, there are far more similarities between Stephen and I than differences. Not sure that this is a good thing but it makes for a fiery debate and later nights than I am used to.

I would love to find a genuinely useful descriptive and generative theory of learning that could be used in a richer context than those that are of value in training mice. I think there are plenty of small pieces of empirically verified theories here and there, in connectionist accounts, in spaced learning and a few other brain-based approaches, in some cognitivist models and even in behaviourism, as well as lots of examples of good practice at a broader level that tend to work better than others, but none that even come close to bridging the huge gaps from there to learning in a real-world social context. Given the complexity (in a formal and informal sense) my strong suspicion is that, unless or until the singularity happens, we never will have such a theory, any more than we will have such a theory that explains and predicts what will make great art or even great design (into the latter of which categories teaching and intentional learning fits rather well). We still can't even predict the weather very accurately, which is many orders of magnitude simpler (formally and informally) than the factors involved in the design of learning and teaching, and we know pretty much every factor involved in that process. With that in mind I was depressed by the recent meta-study 'proving' that lectures don't work as well as active learning which is being widely reported in the press. Much as I agree in principle that lectures are only a small part of the range of ways we can effectively teach and generally try to avoid them like the plague because they have very limited capabilities to support learning, as one of my favourite papers on the subject shows, this is yet another example of 'it ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it'. People tend to report on studies that work out well, and they are nearly always enacted by smart, passionate researchers with a strong background in pedagogy and a strong will to succeed, together with an intent to prove that lectures don't work very well. Small wonder that there are positive differences reported overall. While the researchers did apply some basic measures to try to control for such things, it was doomed from the start. Even if they could show genuine differences, they cannot account for the fact that good lectures can, some of the time, for some people, work well. Moreover, so can bad ones. This study, and those that fed it, give very few hints as to why that happens, and I see very little in connectivism that would address such disparities in outcomes (however these are measured - not just talking about intended and planned things here), even it it could explain the mechanisms.

So, engaging in continuing dialogue, reporting on what works, demonstrating ways that things can work, debating the issues, trying out new things, discovering what we can, and taking advantage of new opportunities all remain far more important than anything else in the field. Having both a common language to talk about such things and having some binding ideas to work with seems like a good idea. Connectivism provides a bit of that glue.

Jon

My four posts do not exhaust my discussion of the previous post and I'll continue with those before addressing this.

One small note: you write "Downes mentions misappropriations of evolutionary theory that he and I both agree are dangerous and that do not emerge in any way from my account. I’m not sure why he does that."

It is becomes some of the characterizations of evolutionary theory in my post may suggest a misinterpretation of evolutionary theory (specifically, interpretations of the form "Species x developed feature y because it needed to z" which suggest that evolutionary theory is teleological and value-laden) and I wanted to ensure that readers understood that this was not my understanding of evolutionary theory.

- Stephen Downes

Thanks Stephen - I agree, not my interpretation either, nor the meaning I intended to impart. We are talking about a mindless system of co-evolution through which order emerges and metastasis is achieved, not a purposive system with goals.

Jon

"All of this is nothing more than nit-picking if we simply accept that connectivism is a broad family of ideas and theories about how to learn in a networked society, all of which adopt a systems view, all of which recognize the distributed nature of knowledge, all of which embrace the role of mediating artefacts, all of which recognize that more is different, all of which adopt a systems perspective, all of which describe or proscribe ways to engage in this new ecology"

-I think this is probably as far as one needs to go in understanding/stating the case.

- Ken Anderson

@Ken - agreed, that's the big point. To call a shift to connectivist thinking a paradigm shift might be pushing it a bit far but there has definitely been a shift in emphasis over the past few decades from individual assimilation of knowledge to social construction of knowledge to distributed networks of connected knowledge. The older models do not die or lose their original value, but are augmented and enriched by those that follow. With that in mind I think it is useful that we can treat such diverse thinkers as Dewey, Vygotsky, Knowles, and Jonassen as working within the spectrum of social constructivist theories, just as it is useful to think of Saloman, Wenger, Siemens, Downes, Cormier (and me) as working within the spectrum of connectivist theories. It allows us to see patterns and commonalities, make associations and highlight differences more easily than were we to treat each as a simply an independent theorist with antecedent influences. This helps to give an emergent shape and shared purpose to an otherwise complex collection of overlapping and connected ideas, and that is useful.

Really excellent presentation slides. Would not mind having the presentation video'd.

Next step: The loneliness of the long-distance academic. Equally necessary, even more 'left out of the loop', IMO. ;-)

Thanks Richard! Alas, no video - it was a three-hour workshop and would have needed the skill of Werner Herzog to make that stay interesting :-)