Vanessa Vaile's List: teaching

• British journal, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education involving the use of something called interactive cover sheets. First-year students in an outdoor studies degree program took a two-semester, six module course which required preparation of a number of written assignments. After preparing their papers, students attached an interactive cover sheet on which they raised questions about the paper they had just completed, thereby identifying the specific areas for feedback.
• The goal was to overcome the one-way communication that occurs when teachers write comments on student papers
• Students also tell stories about feedback received on their papers
• Does this idea of having students frame questions about their papers and writing offer a solution? The faculty who tried the approach found that students struggled mightily with the task
• It’s pretty easy to understand why students would find this task challenging. Most (especially beginning students) have little or no experience assessing their own work and then to have to frame a question that would elicit feedback helpful to improving your next paper—that’s a pretty complicated task. But it’s such a good one.
• that’s a really useful skill
• I wonder if there might be some ways to reframe the task that would make it easier initially. Maybe students need guidelines early on: Identify the part of the paper you had the most trouble with and ask a question about it. Identify the part of the paper you think turned out best and explain why you feel good about it
• a potentially promising idea with the dual benefits of developing a great self-assessment skill and directing feedback
• The 5 questions that I ask are: 1) What are you trying to say here (what's the thesis/main point)? 2) Why is what you are trying to say important? 3) What is working in the piece and why? 4) What is not working in the piece and why? 5) What questions do you have for me?
• If students feel that they are graded on the writers that they currently are rather than the writer that they are trying to be, many will be hesitant to open an honest dialogue.
• dialogical cover sheet dates back to the expressivist movement in composition studies in the 1980s. I first came across it through Peter Elbow's writing
• scaffolding the feedback process by offering students the opportunity to identify aspects of the paper or parts of the paper they would like their instructor to respond to is empowering pedagogy
• The challenge is making the cover sheet simple enough

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• Designing a MOOC: using social media tools
• depending on your target audience a MOOC can look quite different in design
• If you do not know your MOOC participants upfront, you might want to think about using the most accessible communication tools available. Choosing those tools that will allow the most optimal (= most fluent, easiest, low technological threshold) learning experience is essential if you want to include less tech savvy audiences as well.
• overview of some of the options that are out there and that have been tested in previous MOOC’s
• Google groups or another, similar list-serve
• online tool uses e-mail to keep everyone informed
• works very well for discussions
• Twitter or another micro-blogging site
• allow the group to share short messages with one another. This can be of great use to share not only ideas, but also relevant content from other sources
• works very well for quick item and idea exchange
• Extra bonus: by using hashtags (a hashtag looks like this: #wordX , so incorporating both the # symbol and the word following it) , you can filter all the tweets
• make use of paper.li or other tweet and hashtag based online ‘papers’.
• Backchannels: tweets can also be used as backchannels (real-time online chats between participants to share ideas on synchronous events that are happening).
• A collaborative bookmarking tool, e.g. delicious.com
• to allow everyone to find bookmarked items all gathered in one place.
• A Wiki or any accessible and editable online page
• Other great tools to use:
• Google docs or similar documents that are in the cloud
• An RSS tool
• Virtual synchronous classroom
• And of course also all the well-known Web2.0 tools: Google sites (putting up content in a central website), YouTube (movies), Flickr (picture sharing), netvibes or iGoogle (to put all the resources in one dashboard), Facebook (for social networking),…
• Apart from these possible course resources, the participants must be free to generate content spaces of their own, allowing them to both increase their Personal Learning Environment, as well as share their experiences with both the other MOOC participants as well as their own Personal Learning Network. A MOOC is all about connecting to others to strengthen learning and knowledge creation/exchange.

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• two major concepts
• first, the connectivist theory of online learning, which views learning as a network process
• second, the massive open online course, or MOOC, which is an instantiation of that process
• series of 'generations' of e-learning
• growth and development of our idea of online learning, or as it is sometimes called, e-learning.
• These generations span more than a 20-year period.
• This generation is characterized by systems such as Plato, and represents the very idea of placing learning content online. This includes not only text but also images, audio, video and animations. It also represents, to a degree, the idea of programmed learning. This is the idea that computers can present us with content and activities in a sequence determined by our choices and by the results of online interactions, such as tests and quizzes. We have never wandered far from this foundational idea,
• 'generation one' consists of the idea of the network itself.
• bulletin board system
• using email
• The process of connecting was involved and complex, requiring the use of modems and special software
• personal computer became a tool anyone could use to create and store their own content
• Content could be created in novel ways
• next generation takes place in the early 1990s
• application of computer games to online learning
• text-based and very simple. But they brought with them some radical changes to the idea of learning itself.
• One key development was the idea that multiple people could occupy the same online 'space' and communicate and interact with each other.
• creation of IRC
• real time communication with multiple people around the world
• Another key idea was the design of the gaming space itself
• The third element was the technology developed to enable that which we today call object oriented programming.
• independent entities - objects - that interacted with each other
• consolidation of computer-based software and content, and the commercialization of the network
• Computers became mainstream, and became important business (and learning) tools
• the world of networks began to commercialize
• the first local internet service providers came into being
• Networking became the way important people connected
• Through the first three generations, a familiar process of innovation occurs: first the development and piloting of the technology (which is also when the open source community springs up around it), then the commercialization of the technology, then the consolidation of that commercial market as large players eliminate weaker competitors.
• You can begin to see a pattern developing here.
• The next generation sees the development of the content management system, and in learning, the learning management system.
• Both of these are applications developed in order to apply the functionality developed in generation zero - content production and management - to the platform developed in generation one - the world wide web.
• Early learning management systems were very easy to define. They consisted of a set of documents which could be merged with a list of registered users for delivery. They also supported some of the major functions of networks: bulletin boards, where these users could post messages to each other, chat rooms, where they could occupy the same online space together, and online quizzes and activities, where they could interact with the documents and other resources.
• the major debates about online learning around this time centered on whether online learning would be mostly about online content - that is, reflective of generation zero - or mostly about online interaction - that is, reflective of generation one
• Learning management systems drew a great deal from distance learning
• And a very standard model emerged: present objectives, present content, discuss, test.
• The Holy Grail of the day was adaptive learning
• the learning management system brought some important developments to the field.
• the idea that learning content could be modularized, or 'chunked'
• the idea that these content modules or chunks were sharable
• the idea of communication and content in the same online environment
• core elements of learning management technology,
• Around this time as well an ambitious program began in an effort to apply some of the generation two principles to learning management systems (and to content management in general).
• 'learning objects'
• the core of the program was an attempt to introduce second generation technology - interactive objects - to learning and content management
• it didn't take hold. To this day, the learning management system is designed essentially to present content and support discussion and activities around that content.
• By the time learning management systems were developed, operating systems and application programs, along with the content they supported, were enterprise software
• massive centralized distributions
• 'Content' became synonymous with 'documents' and these documents - not something fuzzy like 'objects' - were what would be created and published and shared.
  
• The network was by this time well into the process of becoming consolidated. Completely gone was the system of individual bulletin board services
• The same vendors that sold these tools - companies like Microsoft and Adobe - sold web production and viewing tools.
• the most interesting developments of all at the time were happening outside the LMS environment entirely
• he best efforts of developers to incorporate aspects of gaming - from object oriented learning design to simulations and gaming environments to multi-user interactions - were of limited utility in learning management systems. LMSs were firmly entrenched in the world of content production, and to a lesser extent the world of networked communication.
  
• This leads us next to the fourth generation, paradoxically called web 2.0 - and in the field of online learning, e-learning 2.0.
• But two major phenomena describe web 2.0 - first, the rise of social networks, and second, the creation of content and services that can interact with those networks
• networking being applied to data (or perhaps data being applied to networking).
• The core technology of web 2.0 is social software
• think for a moment about what social software is, it is essentially the migration of some of your personal data - like your mailing list - to a content management system on the web
• E-learning 2.0 is the same idea applied to e-learning content.
• treat learning resources as data
• each individual would have available online the same sort of content authoring and distribution capabilities previously available only to major publishers
• E-learning 2.0 brings several important developments to the table.
• the list of people you send content to, and the list of people who send you content, and everyone else's list, all in one big table
• the social graph
• a massive communications network in which people, rather than computers, are the interconnected nodes
• the idea of personal publishing.
• The beginning of web 2.0 is arguably the development of blogging software, which allowed people to easily create web content
• syndication formats such as RSS
• the idea of interoperability
• form or application programming interfaces
• the idea of platform-independence
• mobile computing
• social software
• maturation of generation 0, web content and applications
• What made web 2.0 possible?
• as enterprises became global, these two become global, and emerged out of the enterprise to become cloud and mobile contents and applications
• Some of the major social networking sites are actually cloud storage sites
• cloud services developed as a result of enterprise networking
• consolidation of core gaming technologies
• pen-ended online environment led to massive multiplayer online games
• emergence of major simulation developers such as CAE and conferencing systems
• dominant in the delivery of online seminars and classes.
• Content management services, meanwhile, were increasingly commercialized
• even the world of open source systems came to be dominated by quasi-commercial enterprises
• major technologies have been commercialized and are moving rapidly toward commodification and enterprise adoption
• Today, of course, social networking is ubiquitous
• This is the beginning of the sixth generation, a generation characterized by commercialized web 2.0 services, a consolidation of the CMS/LMS market, the development of enterprise conferencing and simulation technology, cloud networking and - at last - open content and open operating systems.
• there have always been open operating systems
• domain of innovators, enthusiasts and hobbyists. Not mainstream
• the history of online learning through five generations, but it is also a listing of the major technologies that form the foundation for sixth-generation e-learning, which I would characterized by the Massive Open Online Course
• the development of the MOOC model
• we were not setting out to create a MOOC
• we had very clear ideas of where we wanted to go
• two major influences
• beginning of open online courses
• What made these courses important was that they invoked the idea of including outsiders into university courses in some way. The course was no longer bounded by the institution.
• emergence of massive online conferences
• what made the format work was that the conference was open.
• What made CCK08 different was that we both decided at the outset that it would be designed along explicitly connectivist lines, whatever those were
• demands of a formal course offered by a traditional institution
• But beyond that, the course was non-traditional. Because when you make a claim like the central claim of connectivism, that the knowledge is found in the connections between people with each other and that learning is the development and traversal of those connections, then you can't just offer a body of content in an LMS and call it a course
• This seems to entail offering a course without content
• That there is no core of content that everyone must learn does not entail that there is zero content
• there is a surplus of content
• each week devoted to a different topic
• mitigate to some degree the effects an undifferentiated torrent of content
• a minimal structure, but one that seemed to be a minimal requirement for any sort of coherence at all
• what connectivism meant in a networked information environment, and resulted in the definition of a key feature of MOOCs
• Learning in a MOOC, we advised, is in the first instance a matter of learning how to select content.
• By navigating the content environment, and selecting content that is relevant to your own personal preferences and context, you are creating an individual view or perspective
• first creating connections between contents with each other and with your own background and experience
• does not involve learning or remembering the content
• to engage in a process of creation and sharing
• conversation that brings these perspectives together
• In the case of CCK08, there is no core body of knowledge. Connectivism is a theory in development
• identifying and highlighting some core principles of connectivism would undermine what it was we thought connectivism was
• in order to teach connectivism, we found it necessary for people to immerse themselves in a connectivist teaching environment
• The content is the material that we work with
• as we develop the actual learning, the finely grained and nuanced understanding of learning in a network environment that develops as a result of our working within a networked environment.
• In order to support this aspect of the learning, we decided to make the course as much of a network as possible
• people would use their own environments, whatever they were, and make connections between each other (and each other's content) in these environments
• we encouraged each person to create his or her own online presence
• heir nodes in the course networks
• RSS feeds from these and aggregated them into a single thread, which became the course newsletter
• Moodle discussion forum
• Second Life communities
• Google Groups forum
• in addition to gaining experience making connections between people and ideas, participants were making connections between different systems and places
• a theory describing how we live and grow together
• the challenge to more traditional theories becomes evident.
• what the MOOC is drawing from the previous generations, and what the MOOC brings that is new.
• review:
• Generation 0 brings us the idea of documents and other learning content
• created and managed using application programs
• emerged into the world of widespread free and open online documents and application programs
• ability to read and write educational content, to record audio and make video, is now open to everybody
• fundamental underlying feature of a connectivist course is the network
• makes use of enterprise 'game' technology
• most specifically the conferencing system
• explicit use of content management systems
• makes a lot of use of commercial social networking services
• the MOOC adds two major elements to the mix, and that it is these elements that bear the most investigation and exploration.
• the idea of distributed technology
• just one nexus of connected sites
• the idea of distributed knowledge that is introduced by the MOOC again, and the means of learning is really involved with this idea
• It is the process of pattern recognition that we want to develop, and not the remembering of facts.
• the second element the MOOC brings to the mix revolves around the theory of effective networks
• four major principles of effective distributed systems
• autonomy, diversity, openness and interactivity
• better to obtain many points of view than one
• knowledge of a collection of people is greater than just the sum of each person’s knowledge
• free exchange of knowledge and ideas
• Consider 'learning analytics', for example, which is an attempt to learn about the learning process by examining a large body of data.
• We are just now as a community beginning to understand what it means to say this
• overall trends or patterns
• What is learned, in other words, emerges from the data
• From my perspective, the first three generations of e-learning (and the web generally) represent a focus on documents
• the second three represent a focus on data
• Data does not stand alone, the way documents do
• the second three generations are those very same things thought of as data
• if the first three generations are contents, networks and objects respectively
• what comes after data
• to a certain degree knowable, because it will have something to do with content, the network, and the environment.
• The next three generations of web and learning technology will be based on the idea of flow.
• Flow is what happens when your content and your data becomes unmanageable
• all you can do is watch it as it goes by
• cease to think of things like contents and communications and even people and environments as things and start thinking of them as (for lack of a better word) media - like the water in a river, like the electricity in our pipes, like the air in the sky
• flow will be the outputs of learning (and other) analytics
• always changing, always adapting, always fluid
• the idea of comprehending the interactions between these distributed systems in a learning network is an important first step

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• MOOC, Massively Open Online Courses. I see two major manifestations
• a rigorous curriculum of content and assessments, in technical fields like AI and programming. The goal is to ensure a high quality learning experience to anyone with sufficient technical ability and access to the Internet. Currently, the experience does support a discussion board, but otherwise the experience is, effectively, solo.
• Stanford model
• connectivist MOOCs, on the other hand, are highly social
• content presented by a lecturer, and then dialog via social media, where the contributions of the participants are shared. Assessment comes from participation and reflection, without explicit contextualized practice
• the courses really require effective self-learners
• learning is about making the connections oneself
• don’t think that effective self-learning skills is a safe assumption
• The problem with the former is that learners are largely dependent on the instructors
• learners aren’t seeing how other learners conceptualize the information and consequently developing a richer understanding
• he success will live and die on the quality of the assessments,  until the social aspect is engaged
• Cognitive Apprenticeship
• From the Cognitive Apprenticeship perspective, learners need motivating and meaningful tasks around which to organize their collective learning
• more social interaction will be wrapped around the Stanford environment
• learners will be expected to take on the responsibility to make it meaningful but will be scaffolded in that
• connectivist MOOCs

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• This article isn't a review of any particular massive open online course, as they are all quite different—each iteration tends to evolve from the previous one.
• the first-person perspective of two learners and their experiences with different MOOCs.
• a MOOC integrates the connectivity of social networking, the facilitation of an acknowledged expert in a ?eld of study, and a collection of freely accessible online resources
• Usually, all the work within the course is shared with everyone else: readings, discussions, repurposing of material, etc. The idea is that the more you engage within the course, with other participants, and with the distributed content, the more you will learn.
• Most MOOCs to date have revolved around educational technology or learning theory topics
• like the wild frontier with MOOCs requiring the facilitator and learners to be early adopters, researchers, as well as self-directed
• MOOCs aren't for every learner
• Participation is open to anyone…
• A student in a local college class a student might interact with classmates living in the same city, while most online courses are primarily filled with regionally-based students. In a MOOC, however, learners get to hear from a global voice.
• It's important, though, to follow a diverse cross-section to tap into as many different points of view as possible.
• The number of people in a course can be overwhelming!
• How does a learner even begin to make sense of all those voices adding commentary, questions, and posts?
• How does a learner get instructor feedback
• The size of the MOOC size, while impressive, might work against the "connectedness" the facilitators and participants often seek.
• Distributed learning…
• Gathering and sharing our own learning material was interesting and proved more informative than some of the course-related material provided by the instructors
• participants help each other interpret the material, seek out different or related sources, and use social networking to share
• navigating the MOOC waters frustrating
• not difficult to find the course material and a few other participants, but where was everything else?
• Synchronous forums—hosted during the run of the MOOC—are also prone to limited participation, while many blog posts lack comments.
• problems with architecture and tools
• Since some participants are simply using the labor of previous learners to clarify difficult topics, are current learners getting as much out of the topic as they should?
• The credit vs. no credit wall…
• Having to invest more effort into completing the course for credit actually helped our own participation.
• Con: Although MOOCs are heralded for being open and free, those who choose to pay are at a greater advantage.
• Commitment…
• Participating in a MOOC for credit, in our experience, makes a learner more committed.
• MOOC learners already struggle with feeling connected because of the distributed style of information and discussions.
• lack of incentives makes it too easy to not show up
• Facilitation
• Pro: In our experience, the facilitation for many MOOCs surpasses traditional online college coursework.
• Con: With so many participants, it is difficult for the lost or struggling learner to directly interact with facilitators
• It is also difficult to interact with the guest speakers, making the experience similar to listening to a podcast.
• The jury is still out on the effectiveness of MOOCs for learning and the existing research presents some interesting paradoxes
• course style has a vocal contingent of support
• MOOCs have its detractors (albeit much less vocal) in the form of extremely high dropout rates
• methodology may work for more independent learners but may be too extreme for less prepared learners

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• now that I know a little more about MOOCs, I'm starting to "get it".
• You don't have to read everything.
• Join a conversation.
• Start a conversation
• Ask questions that promote responses from different perspectives

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• An overly simplified version of the discussion so far
• What we are trying to do with a MOOC is to create an environment where people who are more advanced reasoners, thinkers, motivators, arguers, and educators can practice their skills in a public way by interacting with each other. In such an environment, people can learn by watching and joining in. 
• MOOCs as a new form of continuing adult education
• They are different in many ways to anything that has gone before, particularly in their scale, and the fact they they are free.
• they belong to an honorable and well established tradition of continuing adult education that has been offered by universities since the turn of the 19th century. They belong philosophically within the context of thinkers such as R. H. Tawney, Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire, who believed strongly in self-education, as part of their broader socialist views on equality, the need to open access to knowledge, and to educate the workers in order to break the existing hegemony,
• not well done by most universities. MOOCs are an important development that supports lifelong learning.
• MOOCs and MITx are more a threat to current university continuing education departments than they are to the traditional credit programs
• MOOCs themselves are highly dependent, as Stephen acknowledges, on students already having a high level of understanding and an ability to learn independently, and to think critically.
• the socialist thinkers that spawned the adult education movement.
• A new educational paradigm? MOOCs are totally open for everyone who has access to the internet and enough time to participate.
• The courses silently separate the elite from the mass. It looks like democracy but is quite the opposite of [real] teaching.
• they provide a very useful purpose
• unduly harsh
• they are playing a different game
• don’t see them as a replacement for formal education

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• file under unlearning too. It is also not preconception but also ongoing misunderstanding. You cannot be sure students are understand material as intended. Continual feedback helps as well as reinforcing and cultivating reflective learning, the meta thing as in learning journals and reflective blog posts. "Looks like a duck, walks like a duck" etc isn't enough. Standardized testing falls down here too. Big time. - Vanessa Vaile on 2012-03-12

• proportion of faculty appointments that are “contingent”—lacking the benefits and protections of tenure and a planned long-term relationship with an institution—has increased dramatically over the past few decades
• 75 percent of US faculty appointments were off the tenure track, and 60 percent were part-time.
• structures of faculty governance, however, as well as AAUP policies on the subject tend to assume a faculty that is employed primarily full time and on the tenure track.
• participation in institutional and departmental governance
• uneven, with some institutions encouraging it, some barring it, and others incorporating various groups of contingent faculty in different, sometimes token, ways.
• makes recommendations for the inclusion of faculty holding contingent appointments in campus governance structures.
• Recommendations include:
• responsibilities and opportunities in governance similar
• define as “faculty” and include in governance bodies at all levels individuals whose appointments consist primarily of teaching or research activities conducted at a professional level
• Eligibility for voting and holding office
• one person, one vote
• opportunity to contribute to the evaluation of contingent faculty
• explicitly protected by institutional policies from retaliation
• compensated in a way that takes into consideration the full range of their appointment responsibilities, which should include service
• • call for comments to Gwendolyn Bradley (gbradley@aaup.org) by September 10 but apparently not an open call since the report is embargoed, e.g. two AAUP committee standing committees producing the report and highered media writing about it. Cozy. Not those most likely to be directly affected by those recommendations

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• Higher education, by contrast, is what economists call an “experiential good” – you don’t really know what you’re getting until after you’ve gotten it. That's why students and their parents need robust consumer protection.
• government has a strong interest in ensuring that students get a high-quality education, particularly given the hundreds of billions of dollars in direct and indirect public subsidies
• Instead of taking responsibility for protecting students, the government has left the task in the hands of accreditors, an idiosyncratically organized group of voluntary associations that are funded and governed by colleges themselves
• like the bond rating agencies whose financial entanglement with sub-prime mortgage packagers almost caused the next Great Depression
• Southeastern University, a private non-profit college in Washington, DC, clung to accreditation through three decades of "obscurity, mediocrity, cronyism, and intermittent corruption"
• aid came with a condition: it could only be used to attend accredited schools
• high loan default rates. Graduation rates were paltry
• Middle States responded by sending strongly-worded letters and putting the university on various forms of probation. But it never took away the only thing that mattered: the accreditation seal. 
• mission of serving diverse and underserved student populations
• nonsensical
• Colleges that serve these students should be held to the highest standards,
• American higher education system is a ziggurat of escalating privilege, with institutional resources matching students’ financial and social capital
• a higher education system that operates under a polite fiction
• Over 250 four-year colleges had graduation rates below 33 percent in 2008. Every one of them is accredited.
• Leaving the evaluation of college quality to colleges themselves simply won't work
• sharp-edged work of shutting down chronically low-performing colleges and protecting the public interest should be done by the government, in the same way that independent, non-partisan federal agencies regulate other vital industries, like finance, energy, and communications.

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• • Good article on highered accreditation process and problems
• For years, for-profit colleges have pointed to the fact that they are accredited by independent agencies recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as proof
• accreditors have long had a dismal record of policing the proprietary schools they count as members.
• government may no longer tolerate such lax oversight
• IG called on the Department to consider terminating the authority of the nation's largest regional accrediting agency over its decision to accredit a major for-profit university despite knowing that the institution had potentially violated the law and harmed students
• Career Education Corporation’s American Intercontinental University (AIU)
• investigation of recruiting practices at the Los Angeles branch of AIU for The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2006, which you can read here
• the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools granted accreditation to AIU, which had previously been accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. 
• the IG’s alert memo is heavily redacted.
• commission’s leaders, as well as the higher education establishment in general, were outraged by the IG’s action.
• instead of attacking the IG, perhaps accreditation agency leaders should take a look in the mirror and determine whether they are really fulfilling the important mission that the Education Department has assigned them

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• 1.  Good Practice Encourages Contacts Between Students and Faculty
• The literature is full of stories  of students from different cultures opening up in and out of class when email became  available.
• 2.  Good Practice Develops Reciprocity and Cooperation Among Students
• Learning teams  helped themselves “learn the plumbing” and solve problems
• completed and exchanged Myers-Briggs Type Inventories,  surveys of their prior experience and level of computer expertise, and brief personal  introductions.
• 3.  Good Practice Uses Active Learning Techniques
• technologies that encourage active learning is staggering. Many fall into one of three  categories: tools and resources for learning by doing, time-delayed exchange, and  real-time conversation
• software (such as word processors) originally developed for  other purposes but now used for instruction, too.
• communication tools
• Apprentice-like learning
• 4.  Good Practice Gives Prompt Feedback
• 5.  Good Practice Emphasizes Time on Task
• 6.  Good Practice Communicates High Expectations
• 7.  Good Practice Respects Diverse Talents and Ways of Learning

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• “open source learning” — a variation on inquiry learning or passion-based learning –  is about helping students choose their own learning path
• classroom centers around the publication and maintenance of students’ personal blogs. The blogs themselves are a requirement, but the content and medium used in many student responses—be it text, video, audio, or some combination—are often the result of students’ own creative vision

• high test scores don’t provide a complete picture of students’ success,
• Countries that score highly, have students with lower confidence
• same results when he looked at students’ belief in their entrepreneurial capacity
• he measures we use to measure education outcomes, to view them as the best education systems in terms of test scores, do not result in the same kinds of things we might value otherwise
• most education systems start out by defining the outcomes.
• which skills will be important and promise that if students master those skills, they will succeed.
• a flawed approach because it forces everyone into a homogenous group
• Defining outcomes allows systems to measure results, but it stamps out individuality.
• Countries that score well on international exams, like Korea, have clearly defined outcomes, narrow curricula, and dictatorial systems with clear ranking and sorting systems
• in the process you have people who are either kicked out of the system or put down into a different school and they will lose confidence.”  By valuing what’s prescribed and assessed, the system creates a uniform group with little confidence in the individual’s unique contributions.
• local control in the U.S. educational system as both its savior and a contributing factor to its lower test scores

• [RELATED READING: Some Ask: What's the Value of Common Core State Standards?]

   
• education needs to start with the child. Not with the prescribed content
• giving students more autonomy over their learning and emphasizing the importance of making authentic products that solve problems. He also emphasizes a global learning community that can collaborate
• online education community called ObaWorld

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• a pattern I've seen over and over again in social software that supports large and long-lived groups. And that pattern is the pattern described in the title of this talk: "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy."
• one of the core challenges for designing large-scale social software
• definition of social software
• It's software that supports group interaction.
• although that's a fairly simple definition, how radical that pattern is. The Internet supports lots of communications patterns, principally point-to-point and two-way, one-to-many outbound, and many-to-many two-way
• Prior to the Internet, we had lots of patterns that supported point-to-point two-way
• patterns that supported one-way outbound
• So although the Internet does good things for those patterns, they're patterns we knew from before.
• Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table. There was no technological mediation for group conversations. The closest we got was the conference call, which never really worked right
• ridiculously easy group forming is really news
• software that supports group interaction is a fundamentally unsatisfying definition in many ways, because it doesn't point to a specific class of technology. If you look at email, it obviously supports social patterns, but it can also support a broadcast pattern
• If I'm mailing you, and you're mailing me back, we're having point-to-point and two-way conversation, but not one that creates group dynamics
• email doesn't necessarily support social patterns, group patterns, although it can. Ditto a weblog
• weblogs are not necessarily social, although they can support social patterns.
• Nevertheless, I think that definition is the right one, because it recognizes the fundamentally social nature of the problem. Groups are a run-time effect. You cannot specify in advance what the group will do, and so you can't substantiate in software everything you expect to have happen.
• The best explanation I have found for the kinds of things that happen when groups of humans interact is psychological research that predates the Internet, so the first part is going to be about W.R. Bion's research
• that I believe explains how and why a group is its own worst enemy.
• The second part is: Why now? What's going on now that makes this worth thinking about? I think we're seeing a revolution in social software in the current environment that's really interesting.
• And third, I want to identify some things, about half a dozen things, in fact, that I think are core to any software that supports larger, long-lived groups.
• Part One: How is a group its own worst enemy?
• Part Two: Why now?
• The web turned us all into size queens for six or eight years there. It was loosely coupled, it was stateless, it scaled like crazy, and everything became about How big can you get? "How many users
• But it could only be really a lot if you didn't require
• answering those readers, and you didn't require those readers to be talking to one another.
• The downside of going for size and scale above all else is that the dense, interconnected pattern that drives group conversation and collaboration isn't supportable at any large scale. Less is different -- small groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can't.
• We've had things like mailing lists and BBSes for a long time, and more recently we've had IM
• We've gotten weblogs and wikis, and I think, even more importantly, we're getting platform stuff. We're getting RSS. We're getting shared Flash objects. We're getting ways to quickly build on top of some infrastructure we can take for granted, that lets us try new things very rapidly
• It's not that you couldn't have built a similar application a couple of years ago, but the cost would have been much higher. And when you lower costs, interesting new kinds of things happen.
• Why did we get Geocities and not weblogs? We didn't know what we were doing.
• It took a long time to figure out that people talking to one another, instead of simply uploading badly-scanned photos of their cats, would be a useful pattern
• So, first of all, this is a revolution in part because it is a revolution. We've internalized the ideas and people are now working with them. Second, the things that people are now building are web-native.
• Third, in David Weinberger's felicitous phrase, we can now start to have a Small Pieces Loosely Joined pattern
• So, suddenly you've got this meeting, which is going on in three separate modes at the same time, two in real-time and one annotated.
• But something different is happening now. In many situations, all people have access to the network. And "all" is a different kind of amount than "most." "All" lets you start taking things for granted.
• for some groups of people -- students, people in high-tech offices, knowledge workers -- everyone they work with is online. Everyone they're friends with is online. Everyone in their family is online.
• this pattern of ubiquity lets you start taking this for granted.
• a different kind of thing than the old pattern of "online community."
• a second kind of ubiquity, which is the kind we're enjoying here thanks to Wifi.
• These kinds of ubiquity, both everyone is online, and everyone who's in a room can be online together at the same time, can lead to new patterns.
• Part Three: What can we take for granted?
• If these assumptions are right, one that a group is its own worst enemy, and two, we're seeing this explosion of social software, what should we do? Is there anything we can say with any certainty about building social software, at least for large and long-lived groups?
• "What is required to make a large, long-lived online group successful?"
• But I can at least say some of the things it depends on.
• The normal experience of social software is failure
• failure is inevitably more than 50%
• Three Things to Accept
• 1.) Of the things you have to accept, the first is that you cannot completely separate technical and social issues.
• 2.) The second thing you have to accept: Members are different than users.
• core group, Art Kleiner's phrase for "the group within the group that matters most."
• n all successful online communities that I've looked at, a core group arises that cares about and gardens effectively. Gardens the environment, to keep it growing, to keep it healthy.
• if the software doesn't allow the core group to express itself, it will invent new ways of doing so.
• the software does not always allow the core group to express itself,
• mailing list was for meta-discussion
• So they created this three-tier system, not dissimilar to the tiers of anonymous cowards, logged-in users, and people with high karma on Slashdot.
• 3.) The third thing you need to accept: The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations.
• So the core group needs ways to defend itself
• leveraging the core group is a really powerful system
• you have to accept them. Because if you don't accept them upfront, they'll happen to you anyway
• All groups of any integrity have a constitution. The constitution is always partly formal and partly informal.
• there will always be an informal part
• Four Things to Design For
• 1.) If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in.
• anonymity doesn't work well in group settings, because "who said what when" is the minimum requirement for having a conversation. What's less well understood is that weak pseudonymity doesn't work well, either
• best reputation management system is right here, in the brain
• in the back, in the emotional part of the brain
• If you want a good reputation system, just let me remember who you are
• Users have to be able to identify themselves and there has to be a penalty for switching handles.
• 2.) Second, you have to design a way for there to be members in good standing
• 3.) Three, you need barriers to participation.
• Ease of use is the wrong way to look at the situation, because you've got the Necker cube flipped in the wrong direction. The user of social software is the group, not the individual.
• 4.) And, finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations
• the density of conversation falls off very fast as the system scales even a little bit.
• soft forking

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• Why do some innovations spread so swiftly and others so slowly?
• Consider the very different trajectories of surgical anesthesia and antiseptics, both of which were discovered in the nineteenth century.
• The first public demonstration of anesthesia was in 1846
• later, on November 18th, Bigelow published his report on the discovery of “insensibility produced by inhalation” in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal
• The idea spread like a contagion, travelling through letters, meetings, and periodicals.
• Within seven years, virtually every hospital in America and Britain had adopted the new discovery.
• Sepsis—infection—was the other great scourge of surgery
• In the eighteen-sixties, the Edinburgh surgeon Joseph Lister read a paper by Louis Pasteur laying out his evidence that spoiling and fermentation were the consequence of microorganisms. Lister became convinced that the same process accounted for wound sepsis

• The result was strikingly lower rates of sepsis and death. You would have thought that, when he published his observations in a groundbreaking series of reports in The Lancet, in 1867, his antiseptic method would have spread as rapidly as anesthesia.

  Far from it.
• It was a generation before Lister’s recommendations became routine
• In our era of electronic communications, we’ve come to expect that important innovations will spread quickly. Plenty do
• But there’s an equally long list of vital innovations that have failed to catch on. The puzzle is why.
• Did the spread of anesthesia and antisepsis differ for economic reasons? Actually, the incentives for both ran in the right direction.
• Proponents of anesthesia overcame belief by encouraging surgeons to try ether on a patient and witness the results for themselves—to take a test drive. When Lister tried this strategy, however, he made little progress.
• The technical complexity might have been part of the difficulty
• anesthesia was no easier.
• Yet most surgeons stuck with it—or else they switched to chloroform
• Faced with the complexities, they didn’t give up; instead, they formed an entire new medical specialty—anesthesiology.
• First, one combatted a visible and immediate problem (pain); the other combatted an invisible problem (germs) whose effects wouldn’t be manifest until well after the operation
• So what were the key differences?
• Second, although both made life better for patients, only one made life better for doctors
• a tough sell.
• This has been the pattern of many important but stalled ideas. They attack problems that are big but, to most people, invisible; and making them work can be tedious, if not outright painful.
• The global destruction wrought by a warming climate, the health damage from our over-sugared modern diet, the economic and social disaster of our trillion dollars in unpaid student debt—these things worsen imperceptibly every day.
• Meanwhile, the carbolic-acid remedies to them, all requiring individual sacrifice of one kind or another, struggle to get anywhere
• The global problem of death in childbirth is a pressing example.
• Simple, lifesaving solutions have been known for decades. They just haven’t spread.
• We’re infatuated with the prospect of technological solutions to these problems
• As with most difficulties in global health care, lack of adequate technology is not the biggest problem.
• neither penalties nor incentives achieve what we’re really after: a system and a culture where X is what people do, day in and day out, even when no one is watching.
• To create new norms, you have to understand people’s existing norms and barriers to change. You have to understand what’s getting in their way. So what about just working with health-care workers, one by one, to do just that?
• give them mentors
• The most common objection is that, even if it works, this kind of one-on-one, on-site mentoring “isn’t scalable.” But that’s one thing it surely is.
• But, to combat the many antisepsis-like problems in the world, that’s exactly what has worked
• To reduce illiteracy, countries, starting with our own, built schools, trained professional teachers, and made education free and compulsory for all children.
• In the era of the iPhone, Facebook, and Twitter, we’ve become enamored of ideas that spread as effortlessly as ether. We want frictionless, “turnkey” solutions to the major difficulties of the world
• We prefer instructional videos to teachers, drones to troops, incentives to institutions. People and institutions can feel messy and anachronistic. They introduce, as the engineers put it, uncontrolled variability.
• But technology and incentive programs are not enough. “Diffusion is essentially a social process through which people talking to people spread an innovation,” wrote Everett Rogers, the great scholar of how new ideas are communicated and spread.
• Every change requires effort, and the decision to make that effort is a social process.
• In 1968, The Lancet published the results of a modest trial of what is now regarded as among the most important medical advances of the twentieth century
• Then, in the nineteen-sixties, scientists discovered that sugar helps the gut absorb fluid.
• One might have expected people to clamor for the recipe after these results were publicized. Oral rehydration solution seems like ether: a miraculous fix for a vivid, immediate, and terrifying problem. But it wasn’t like ether at all.
• A decade after the landmark findings, the idea remained stalled.
• In 1980, however, a Bangladeshi nonprofit organization called BRAC decided to try to get oral rehydration therapy adopted nationwide
• A gem of a book published in Bangladesh, “A Simple Solution,” tells the story. The organization didn’t launch a mass-media campaign—only twenty per cent of the population had a radio, after all. It attacked the problem in a way that is routinely dismissed as impractical and inefficient: by going door to door, person by person, and just talking.
• It started with a pilot project that set out to reach some sixty thousand women in six hundred villages. The logistics were daunting.
• They recruited teams of fourteen young women, a cook, and a male supervisor,
• They travelled on foot, pitched camp near each village, fanned out door to door, and stayed until they had talked to women in every hut.
• The workers were only semi-literate, but they helped distill their sales script into seven easy-to-remember messages
• BRAC’s scientists had to figure out how the workers could teach the recipe for the solution
• Eventually, the team hit upon using finger measures: a fistful of raw sugar plus a three-finger pinch of salt mixed in half a “seer” of water—a pint measure commonly used
• Initially, the workers taught up to twenty mothers per day. But monitors visiting the villages a few weeks later found that the quality of teaching suffered on this larger scale, so the workers were restricted to ten households a day.
• Then a new salary system was devised to pay each worker according to how many of the messages the mothers retained when the monitor followed up
• having the mothers make the solution themselves was more effective than just showing them
• The program was stunningly successful. Use of oral rehydration therapy skyrocketed. The knowledge became self-propagating. The program had changed the norms.
• Coaxing villagers to make the solution with their own hands and explain the messages in their own words, while a trainer observed and guided them, achieved far more than any public-service ad or instructional video could have done
• Over time, the changes could be sustained with television and radio
• Nonetheless, only a third of children in the developing world receive oral rehydration therapy.
• People talking to people is still how the world’s standards change.
• Surgeons finally did upgrade their antiseptic standards at the end of the nineteenth century. But, as is often the case with new ideas, the effort required deeper changes than anyone had anticipat
• A few pioneering Germans, however, seized on the idea of the surgeon as scientist
• The key message to teach surgeons, it turned out, was not how to stop germs but how to think like a laboratory scientist.
• Proselytizing through their own students and colleagues, they finally spread the ideas worldwide
• we have only begun to accept that the critical practices aren’t going to spread themselves. Simple “awareness” isn’t going to solve anything. We need our sales force and our seven easy-to-remember messages. And in many places around the world the concerted, person-by-person effort of changing norms is under way.
• With time, it became clearer to the nurse that Sister Seema was there only to help and to learn from the experience herself.
• You could hear her pride as she told her stories.
• Many of the changes took practice for her
• But, step by step, Sister Seema had helped her to do it. “She showed me how to get things done practically,
• “Why did you listen to her?”
• All the nurse could think to say was “She was nice.”
• “It wasn’t like talking to someone who was trying to find mistakes,” she said. “It was like talking to a friend.”

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