MADLat 2010

This year's Manitoba Association of Distributed Learning and Training annual international conference at the Red River College Princess Street Campus was a roaring success by reckoning. The workshops by Darren Kuropatwa from MECY and Stephanie Chu from Simon Fraser University provided many educators with Web based online learning tools they hadn't previously known about. But my thoughts on both of these workshops, as I am familiar with many of these tools, was towards the comments about the establishment of a great student-teacher rapport and the liberation and sharing that occurs when collaborating online.This is oft touted as the main pedagogical reason for incorporating social networking and Web 2.0 technologies in your classroom. I must concur that this can and does happen, but does it also not l take place between and effective teacher and his students without being in the public domain? If it is indeed beneficial to share with others and post all of your students work (akin to a WorldWide Bulletin Board) why can it not be on the school intranet or in a WAN set up for that purpose.This would then be inclusive for not only the students but also parents and other stakeholders who have a vested interest in particular student's creativity and work; as the neologism goes, a 'walled Garden. Not everything that is created is in, or belongs in, the public domain! I suspect that the answer to why all things must be posted to the web lies in the fact that everyone is looking for either their 15 minutes of glory ( students) or some shameless self-promotion and aggrandizement (teachers). I know of many very effective and superb teachers and professors that accomplish all their curricular outcomes ( and then some) without excessive or even ANY use of the current social networking tools.In many cases they either have no access to PCs due to scheduling not the number of computers or in a lot of cases they choose not to spend all the extra time required to implement and administer the online/application technology for the same outcome that can be achieved much easier. My wife is one such person and I would not classify her as a Luddite in the least. She is just trying to be effective and maintain balance in her (our) life. Many instructors and teachers do not examine the pedagogical grounding for incorporating a technology into their classroom and so either use it because of the 'neato' factor or to show they are incorporating ICT into their coursework, thereby placating their superiors who have invested large sums of public funds in said technology and infrastructure. He who mandates technology is not interested in mass-adoption of technology but rather has ulterior motives . We as educators need to exercise the critical thinking skills we are expected to instill in our students and question if and why at technology should be incorporated in our class and how it fits with our education and teaching style.
As we learned in the Emerging Tech course, people learn best socially anyway. This would explain why the luminary thinkers of yore, without Facebook, email or even any means of video or audio capture, still managed to create enduring works that we are still remixing and recreating today. As Steven Covey's 7 habits suggests the character and real substance lays beneath the surface (roots) not in the facade presented to most people.Unfortunately we are immersed in a culture of immediate gratification, the trivial and vain.When my boy says to me after I tell him to stop going from screen to screen (T.V, Computer, DS, WII....) "Dad! That's what we do!", I am saddened because he is right; that is what they do. They do not engage much in the use of their imaginations or any active 'creating' of learning materials, for sharing or otherwise. They are passive consumers. And this I think is the overarching societal condition that is leading to the results that are evident in the BU study.





Dr.Michael Power from Laval University was this year's keynote speaker and a very engaging one at that. I thought he was from Newfoundland as his accent seemed to attest to, but he is from Nova Scotia.(He's 'caper', they threw rocks at the seagulls to create NFLD ya know) .He talked about Blended Online Learning Design (BOLD) which prompted some lively discussion within the post secondary set of instructors. I saved my questions until after they were finished as a lot of what applies to post secondary institutions does not have the slightest bearing on High School; namely funding, student motivation, institutional barriers to technology and a myriad of others factors which have unique parameters within our domain. I asked him how his theories would be adapted and incorporated at the secondary level and he gave pointed me towards a PhD candidate who is working with BOLD concepts and implementations in the high schools of Newfoundland ("DA ROCK Brudder")

My primary reason for attending this year though was to find out more about the work by Mr. Michael Nantias and his colleague Dr. Glenn Cockerline on the abilities, or lack thereof, of Digital Natives based on the survey work they did at Brandon University last year. Their session, Are Millennials Digital Illiterates? Busting the myth about the current cohort of post-secondary students, was very well attended and the discussions could have went on for longer than the prescribed hour. Their research paper (Adobe Acrobat pdf file p.57) is here http://www.mern.ca/reports/Journal-V3.pdf. Basically it states that last years education students at B.U., some of whom are post-graduates, are sorely lacking in the skills that ,we are constantly told, are needed for the 21st century. The limited skills they do have are acquired from using the ubiquitous devices of our age in conjunction with the Internet purely for entertainment purposes, the skills being ancillary to the fun. This was a theme followed up by Dr.Keengwe later in session 31 in which he attributed the same to his graduate students in is classes in North Dakaota. One of my perceptions that I shared with the presenters was, that these are merely technical skills in which one must become proficient so that creation/recreation and personal learning with OERs (or offline materials) may take place in some meaningful, deeper manner; the presumption being that students all ready have the the higher order thinking and reading skills required to be successful critical thinkers online.

If, by their own admission, this filtered and elite subset of post secondary students is the best we can hope for in the turning of the pedagogical tide towards ( blended ) online learning , or in fact inculcating these skills in our youth as educators, then we are a very long way off from the paradigm shift that much of the current literature says is imminent. A mass-movement towards engaged learning in a remixed culture of participatory learning and sharing cannot happen without the masses and this study shines a pragmatic light on this whole area of learning with some serious ramifications for teaching as well. But like all things antithetical to the accepted wisdom ( Tapscott,Prensky etc.), it is heretical to criticize or even bring a 'questioning mind' to the discussion on the 'new' technologies. Indeed you are either seen as anti-technology or a gadfly who wishes nothing but to take an adversarial position for some sort of perverse pleasure; not as someone seeking some scientifically quantifiable measurement which will actually be of use beyond selling the next technology as a panacea for all our educational deficiencies. I feel that is why the literature in this field is so sparse and why the work of Mark Bullen et.al. , Douglass Ruskoff , Mike Nantais and Larry Cuban, to name a few, is so important. It lets us know there are some persons who have the 'rose-colored' glasses removed and are staring down the microscope for our benefit. Thanks guys.