PBS’s Frontline is a fantastic show, and best of all, is freely available for viewing online. Thus, this episode is officially on my to-watch list: Growing Up Online :: PBS Frontline.

Recently, he co-wrote an article for EduCause, entitled Minds on Fire. (1.4MB PDF link!)

Below are a couple passages that got me excited. They’re more exciting in context, so I invite you to read the full article at JSB’s site, as linked above. (hyperlinks below are of my own insertion to help illustrate)

On Social Learning,

Compelling evidence for the importance of social interaction to learning comes from the landmark study by Richard J. Light, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, of students’ college/ university experience. Light discovered that one of the strongest determinants of students’ success in higher education—more important than the details of their instructors’ teaching styles—was their ability to form or participate in small study groups. Students who studied in groups, even only once a week, were more engaged in their studies, were better prepared for class, and learned significantly more than students who worked on their own.

On collaborative, open to the world learning,

An example of how the power of participation can be harnessed within a single course comes from David Wiley at Utah State University. In the fall of 2004, Wiley taught a graduate seminar, “Understanding Online Interaction.” He describes what happened when his students were required to share their coursework publicly:

Because my goal as a teacher is to bring my students into full legitimate participation in the community of instructional technologists as quickly as possible, all student writing was done on public blogs. The writing students did in the first few weeks was interesting but average. In the fourth week, however, I posted a list of links to all the student blogs and mentioned the list on my own blog. I also encouraged the students to start reading one another’s writing. The difference in the writing that next week was startling. Each student wrote significantly more than they had previously. Each piece was more thoughtful. Students commented on each other’s writing and interlinked their pieces to show related or contradicting thoughts. Then one of the student assignments was commented on and linked to from a very prominent blogger. Many people read the student blogs and subscribed to some of them. When these outside comments showed up, indicating that the students really were plugging into the international community’s discourse, the quality of the writing improved again. The power of peer review had been brought to bear on the assignments.

This is why I’m working on designing and creating software and techniques to enable social interaction that encourages learning.

I almost didn’t read far enough to note that the reviewer didn’t agree with Dreyfus. My immediate reaction is that someone (Dreyfus) had not spent any time actually in any online communities, and used his place of piety to lob stones at it. It would be the digital equivalent of renouncing some newly found culture in the Amazonian rain forest, without ever having spent time within the society.

I decided that I should probably finish reading the review.

Once I had done that, I figured I should do some more research, seeing that this book was written in 2001, which is approximately 70 years ago in Internet time (yes, it’s kind of like dog years). I found Dr Dreyfus’s homepage at Berkeley, and firstly found this Los Angeles Times article about Dr. Dreyfus’s podcasts being of the 20 most popular downloads on Apple’s iTunesU podcast directory. The Times story was a wonderful read, and I recommend it highly. I, too, have listed to a few lectures from there.

One of the articles main points is that people around the world, from all walks of life want to learn. Online education gives them capabilities that have never before existed so broadly or freely. I thought it a bit ironic that Dr. Dreyfus, who still stands by his 2001 work, nevertheless moved to a classroom with audio equipment to improve the recordings, of his own volition. From the article…

Dreyfus says the chance to disseminate ideas softens his reservations. And the e-mails he receives from the listening audience—”you podcast people,” he calls them during class—are touching.

To conclude, I still think Dr. Dreyfus’s assessment of communities on the Internet is critically lacking. I believe (without a lot of hard evidence to back me up) there’s a significant chance that the (at the time) 71-year-old Dreyfus read some philosophy books on artificial intelligence, communities on the Internet, then sat down with very little first hand experience with quality communities on the Internet and wrote his luddite screed against learning on the internet. Ironic, since he sees about 25% of his in-person class missing each class he holds in person, in a large lecture hall. It seems his own model is broke, as well.

“I’m pretty honored to take the class, but at the same time, when he does his lectures, it’s not like I’m there with Dreyfus the man,” Diaz said, referring to the impersonal feeling of sitting in a large lecture hall.

Quality communities can absolutely exist online. To say they do not is simply misinformed. It’s hard to say exactly what Dreyfus said from reading a book review alone. Did he mean communities cannot thrive, or they cannot thrive to the extent that they can be effective enough to promote learning at an advanced level? The bigger question I feel is, “Can quality online communities form quickly enough to be an effective environment for a limited-duration online class?”

I mentioned that my posts that are intended for 619 wouldn’t be showing up on my site’s main RSS/Atom webfeed and that I would make seperate feed for just these posts. Unfortunately, I have not been able to bend WordPress (and its realted plug-ins) to my will, so here’s how to follow the blog without visiting.

All the 619 content will be visible in my normal site feed:

http://briandigital.com/evolve/feed

And I’ll put a little parenthetical note in the title (619) to mark class-specific content. The rest of the content will be tangentially related anyhow (the blog is about tech and design in education, after all) but if you’re just here for course work, then look for the (619).

More coming soon!

(In case you missed it, here was my latest update)

You can find a little more about me on the About page, you can find out a lotta bit more about me by simply visiting the root of this domain, briandigital.com. There my homepage lists all my blogs, plus the other places I frequent on the Internet. Feel free to friend me on Facebook or Twitter, for example.

And now, the questions proposed by Ms. Brenda,

Q1.) What made you want to take this course?

A: I’m in this program to study the interaction between education and technology. This course applies.

Q2.) What are 3 things that anyone who knows you knows about you?

A: 1, tech geek; 2, cycling geek; 3, lovely wife and I are expecting our first son in September.

Side note about this class blog: To see my posts for 619, you’ll need to visit this specific URL: briandigital.com/619 which redirects you here. If you visit the main part of this blog, briandigital.com/evolve you won’t see these 619 posts. I’ve set the whole category of 619 posts only to appear here, as they may confuse regular readers of the blog. This means the general RSS feed for the site will also not show the posts (theoretically). If you’re not familiar with RSS feeds, I’d highly suggest checking out this short video explaining them:

RSS :: The CommonCraft Show

All of CommonCraft’s videos are great, simple primers on how regular humans can take advantage of some of the latest web technologies, like social networks, Twitter and more. If you’re looking to get started in web technologies, start there.

Meridian Community College President Scott Elliott says his students, who on average drive 30 miles round-trip to campus, could save $200 or more a semester based on recent pump prices. “When you’re … working a minimum-wage job and (taking) care of a child or two, that could be a lot of money,” he says.

This seems to be a big opening for distance technology. Perhaps one class a week over a forum or an audio or video chat technology.

Thanks to Chris Penn for the link.

Related, also from CSP: Cisco’s really pushing telepresence. It’s hard to tell the quality from this video, it’s lighting, etc. but it’s clear they have something going.

The University of Chicago in April announced its law school was turning off the WiFi during class time.

The University of Chicago Law School has removed Internet access in most classrooms in order to ensure the value of the classroom experience.

And in related news, the school will be holding a book burning outside the Library this weekend.

I’m sad a classy school like UChi decided to go this route. It’s not the WiFi’s fault some students choose to distract themselves online. Without the Internet, those same people can still play solitaire. I doodled my way through some boring, non-WiFi-equipped classes.

We need to equip students to handle distractions. Those who can handle the Internet should be allowed access it. Perhaps a few students want to take collaborative notes online, they should not be punished for having advanced digital skills.

What truly surprises me is that we’re talking about law students at an elite university. If they can’t handle having Internet access, how were they sharp enough to get into school in the first place?

If I were a student who had my WiFi turned off, I’d be ticked. Or I’d just buy a EVDO card.

Click the screen icon to watch full-screen or click here to see a medium-large size on Blip.tv’s main site.

The last month has been incredibly busy for me. One of the things that was keeping me busy was working on this video/screencast introducing the Social Media Classroom to the world. And now, just after making this video, we have a working name for the software component. We’re calling it “Colab” (or possibly “Co-lab”) which is inspired by the collaboration we hope it helps to foster in a student’s work, and the term “collaboratory,” which according to William Wulf’s definition is a,

“center without walls, in which the nation’s researchers can perform their research without regard to physical location, interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational resources, [and] accessing information in digital libraries”

We’re continuing to develop the core of the system, a site to host it on, and a framework of support materials, as well as Howard’s Social Media curriculum, which was the original genesis of this project. Check back here for a post when we have a public site!

Thanks to the rest of the SMC Team: Howard Rheingold (his update), Sam Rose and Max Senges.