I just listened to a presentation by Stephen Downes, called Web 2.0, E-learning 2.0, and Personal Learning Environments. (For now, it’s on his home page.) The recording is not particularly user-friendly, but I’ve summarized some of the great points that Professor Downes makes in it. As I listened I jotted down the notes below. I was struck by how his philosophy resonates with our own and how we actually do many of the things he talks about. Have a look at my notes and see what you think:
-‘Empowerment’ of the learner seems to be the predominant concept. We call it learner autonomy.
-Web 2.0 tools make learning more personal, social, and flexible.Yes.
- Traditional education was based on courses, schedules, and testing. These were driven by the needs of the institution, rather than the needs of the learner. By contrast, a ’small-pieces-loosely-joined’ approach, uses discrete but complimentary tools to support the creation of ad hoc learning communities. (Ad hoc sounds slightly negative to my mind, but I guess he means it in the literal sense of ‘coming together for a common purpose’.) We’re not about schedules, courses, and testing!
- A collection of personalized mash-up of applications outdoes the ‘one size fits none’ approach of the traditional curriculum. Mycourse, plus all the other resources our users choose to leverage.
- The PLE must give the user control and allow them to manage their own resources. The management of the learning then migrates from the institution to the learner, allowing him to produce and consume the resources.
- ‘Communities of practice’ - learners immerse themselves in a network, while practitioners model the skills for them. A learning activity as a conversation (including words, images, videos, more). Practitioners in the audio, for example, and communities of practice on the forums.
- Community, not as adjunct to an online course. Traditional learning communities owe their existence to the start/finish date of the program. Yep.
- Most human learning occurs outside the classroom. How about on the iPod, on the PC.
- The PLE is a personal hub. My Course again?
- The traditional role of the teacher: Content and Distribution, Mentor and Coach, Role model, Exemplar. However, these are being split - the virtual community can provide much of the first two, for example.
- The era of ‘working more openly’ - the Channel 9 pilots, for example. We do this by openly discussing pretty much everything on the blog - even things like our business strategy.
I think the parallels between what the professor says in this presentation and what we do are extraordinary. What do you think?
Ken Carroll
Ken,
This resonates very much with my feelings, and I think Cpod has a significant role to play for many a modern mandarin student.
I am already working on a few things and hope that next early next year (maybe March) I would have done enough to be considered a true Web2.0 student.
凯恩，
你好。我在这里写一点点汉字。
没有什么意思，就想练一些。好的。
The above hanzi doesn’t really say anything, I’ve just been saying to myself lately that my ratio of English blog writing is out-weighing my Chinese practice too much. So…I gotta work to balance it out a bit.
Does Cpod do much in the way of Web Analytics on it’s website? You know; page visits per visitor, number of pages, which pages, in what order do people click thru the site and such?
Are you really leveraging that information? Is it part of the process of development decisions and tuning? Can you publish the info? Is it too proprietary or would putting it out there actually feed the BigBrain?
I bring this up because I think of the old surveys on how was the course. Since most of the students are at that point leaving, it’s pretty much not much use to them…and the comments usually reflected this awareness. But on the web, in a digital world, you could really loop-back the input very quickly. Putting it out there openly makes you as Google would say ‘do no evil’ with it.
Is there a way to ‘look into’ the actual podcasts, maybe it will have to be the transcripts? If you could put up the transcripts in a way that that students interact with it, and could ‘look’ at how students interact, well — I just think there’s lots of ‘magic’ there to provide interaction.
I’m thinking things like games and such that over time ‘feed’ me words that I haven’t quite mastered. Like an intelligent flashcard system that I never have to build myself. More like mom telling me to ‘clean my room’ a billion times until I figure out that what she means is that clothes all over the floor doesn’t mean ‘tidy’.
You know that old computer program that just made up questions and dialogue to keep you interacting. Why not one that does this with Chinese characters that it knows you already know, then it incrementally adds and provides timed re-outputs to lock it into our long term memory. Kinda like an online Dear Abby that I could talk too after listening to the podcasts.
Maybe then that game, automated conversational partner could then tap into the Cpod lexicon and bank of taped words and phrases and produce for me an additional personalized podcast that gets feeded to my iTunes automatically. A rolling, individualized conversational partner that knows me. Freaky–>but probably great for learning.
How about tools on Chinesepod that help me create my own customized learning materials. Like a good teacher that finds interesting materials to spark interest in students, why can’t Cpod give me a homepage that daily pops up interesting websites and Chinese content that suits my level?
You know, a filter that could say cull the day’s news items and select a few paragraphs at particular ability levels or with word content that matches to a certain percentage words that have been introduced in Cpod podcasts. In other words material that is fresh, at an appropriate level, and personalized.
This kind of service/tool also is a good business because it is automated and scalable, unlike finding everyone their own Aggie or Jenny to talk with each day.
Maybe, some things for the new person coming on-board!
我做梦呀，下次在说吧
Small point Ken, but I don’t believe he is a professor. And I think I remember him once saying he never completed his Doctorate in philosophy. His moderate anti-academic bias (get out of your ivory towers guys) is one of the reasons I like him.
I’ve been reading Downes for four years and one of the reasons that drew me to Chinesepod is the degree to which you realize many of his better ideas. Oh, he also fits in with your avalanche of Canadians.
Lantian,
Yes, we pay great attention to optimization. We use Google analytics. I’m not sure I could put the data into the public sphere as it might peeve some members of the team - actually I know it would. You have some good ideas there, but I’m not smart enough to figure out how we would do them - I’ll discuss them with the team.
Michael,
You’re right. Stephen actually corrected me on this point in an email. I like his ideas. I’ve only been reading him for some months, but again, I think that somehow we embody many of them. Is that what Jung called syncronicity?
Ken Carroll
check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity for background on synchronicity, but a more deterministic reading is Laplace’s law: same causes, same effects.
Anyway, I quite like Lantian’s stimulating vision. Also, whatever you can bring to our fingertips, any time, any place, any device.
I’m posting this from my smartphone, if I could access or be accessed by all my learning portfolio on the go, that would really be the ultimate (dont mind carrying the full podcast archive on a separate mp3 player though, with all other tools at hand.)
Yv
Yes, I think if there is a moment when we can really see what “collective unconsciouns” is. There are so many great and correlate ideas poping up syncronically. Well, I have read Mr. Downes before too and I really liked some of the intuitions chris gave us, specially the one about having some chinese websites related to our level for visiting. For me finding other chinese content is a rare experience, I guess the blogs could be a source to this kind o content.
Anyways Ken, I think you are totally right, I´ve been with chinesepod since the first months and I must give you the credts for the visionary aproach to education. It seams you really found a way to do not only “no evil” but really good stuff, although I still think that most people which are not really into tecnologies right now, have no clue about what is going on. So there is a long way to go on this road but you guys are really opening new an unexplored territories in education.
For me, as I posted before, I love the videos and I would like to have more and better ones, may be with some grammar… I personally have not liked the flash animation with the grammar lessons.
Well, that is it I love you bring this kind of discussions to the blog.
Meet you by accident, your discussions are great.
I wonder that how does E-learning 2.0 like?