This has gotten me thinking about types of knowledge and how and why we value them, and how they link to remembering as a form of knowing. So, I’ve done a short analysis of what I think is going on as a way of explaining why this privileging might occur.

Let’s start with three common forms of knowledge — declarative, procedural and conditional — and take them apart a bit.

Here’s a basic representation:

In my observation and experience, most Aussies rank ‘knowing how’ at the top of a hierarchy of knowing. This isn’t really surprising, as ‘knowing how’ to do stuff is of great value to us: we see ourselves as practical people, as people who can fix things, as people who are problem-solvers with a can-do attitude. And ‘knowing how‘ to do stuff means all those things I’ve pulled out in the above table: remembering steps, using skills to complete a task, and producing a measurable, observable performance that evaluates circumstances.

A further, more general, explanation could also be that procedural knowledge is perceived by most people as the most imperative and useful for web purposes: “I just need to know how to make it work, before I gather too much information about what it is and the principles that underlie its function, and before I think about why I might want to use it.”

‘Knowing how’ to do stuff is thus seen as a right and good thing, and therefore something that is assigned a price above that given to the declarative and conditional ways of knowing.

But it is the cognitive form of remembering that is of interest to me in this post, because when people ask me about their web travails, “How do I do X?” and I respond, “I don’t remember … I know that you can do it, though, just let me have a quick look,” I’m often challenging their assumptions about the primacy of procedural knowledge. And giving a declarative answer to a procedural question makes many people uncomfortable because, as I’m arguing here, the ‘doing’ of a thing is valued more highly than is either understanding why you might do it, or having facts about it in the first place.

It’s also surely the case that ‘doing stuff’ tends to yield more tangible and measurable products (which are relatively easy to evaluate) than does thinking about stuff or identifying principles (which are harder to evaluate). Which is not to say that ‘knowing how’ is unimportant or irrelevant in. But it is to say that an approach to knowledge that privileges one form of knowing over others prevents us from bringing together all the ways of knowing into an attitude that could, quite frankly, help us learn quicker and more deeply, no matter the context.

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*Here I’m thinking of ‘actions’ along the lines of Aristotle’s praxis.

Me mates at education.au have released a report on Educators and ICT usage and one of the most interesting things it points to are the barriers that educators report to thier teaching and learning with online technology (p. 33). Here are the main hindrances they’ve identified, plus my reasons for why all of these, excepting the final barrier, should not be barriers at all:

• 41%: Poor infrastructure, bandwidth, equipment reliablity, accessiblity of logins, permissions. Discounting the bandwith issue, the ‘poor infrastructure’ barrier can be largely blamed on unwieldy and user-unfriendly Learning Management Systems (BlackBoard, MyClasses, WebCT …) that school and some university administrations insist teachers use. Logins, permissions, reliablity, blah blah blah, aren’t an issue with most online applications that can be turned to an educational use.
• 40%: Blocking/filtering of internet content. See above, with an especial emphasis on ‘administration’ — namely, the reluctance and/or unimaginativeness on the part of ‘admin’ to come up with policies and guidelines that manage risk.
• 21%: Limited access to computers or internet connection. Will Ruddy’s digital education revolution sort this one out? There’s no excuse for its not doing so.
• 20%: Limited confidence or expertise in the use of compter technologies. See above and above and above. Teachers need PD in this stuff and it needs to be paid for, but, really, the main reason they’re spooked is that they’ve only ever had experience with dead-awful LMSs and they subsequently don’t know how easy the Web could be if only they were allowed to use it.
• 12%: Lack of relevant resources on on the internet. You could say that there’s not much you can do about this one … except why not create such resources yourself?

What a dire set of results! But as a South Aussie, and as someone who passionately believes in the value education, not firewalls, I’m pleased to say that South Australian educators were most likely to name blocking of internet content as a barrier to teaching and learning online, at a respectable 67%.

Come on, education leaders! Start being a bit creative and pro-active on these issues! Decide where your priorities need to be with online teaching and learning and develop policies to manage risk. Employ people who know this stuff from an educational point of view and who can teach the teachers and who can defreakify things for them. Get yourself educated on online technologies and their use in education. Students, parents and teachers are relying on you to be across the issues and to start finding solutions that will work in the ‘real world’ of the Web.

But for the moment, here’s a bit on what ‘The Big Three’ tools of forums, blogs and wikis can achieve in class.

Discussion forums should be saved for exploration of a topic, where challenges to thinking are put up and questions raised. Discussions should proceed with new information being added in each reply, and questions ensure that this happens; ‘cheerleading’ posts, where participants only encourage and don’t question, do not move the conversation forwards. Check out the article Challenges beat cheerleading from eCampus Today for more info.

Blogs are best used in getting students to reflect on a topic through the blog posts that they make. Blogs aren’t about discussion, per se, but more about what Susan Lowes calls “cumulative talk” — students can make comments that respond to the original posting without having to follow a thread from the beginning. Blogs are about process and the development of a point of view on the subject matter. Blogs help you track students’ thinking over time, through both the posts and comments that are made.

Wikis, on the other hand are all about collaboration and teamwork — they’re about the end product and they should be used to show changes in writing and to evaluate how students have synthesised research or subject matter. Wikis can tell you how students are constructing their knowledge on a particular topic, and how they are creating documents to express that knowledge.

For a really excellent comparision between blogs and wikis, visit WikiAndBlog at Bemidji State University.

Let me know your experiences with trying to make sense of the difference between these tools and how to use them in class.

Module structure

Within any course or topic that you’re teaching, be sure to get up a standard structure for your modules. That way, students get used to how to find their way around the online learning environment you’ve built for them. Whether it’s in MyClasses, BlackBoard, WebCT or in a wiki or blog, you can use the following model to structure your material.

1. Module objectives. Think carefully about what you want the students to do and know and make it explicit to them. Objectives need to be relevant and meaningful.
2. Student objectives. Ask the students what they’re hoping and expecting to learn. You might get some useful data out of this question.
3. Introduction. Make it fairly brief and basic. Don’t go crazy on it.
4. Focus questions. Ask the students to specify what they already now about the topic, or to share related experiences. Write lots of questions and direct them clearly to the module topic. This can give you a good sense of where they’re ‘at’ before you even start.
5. Information/content. This is the core of what you want students to engage with. The content you provide can be quite detailed in nature, but try to mix it up a bit: insert videos, images, hyperlinks, as well as basic, textual ‘info dumps’.
6. Exercises. You can get imaginative here. Again, be specific about what you want the students to do and communicate that clearly. If you’re writing questions to stimulate critique, make sure you put in lots of questions. Really interrogate the topic yourself.
7. Reflection. At the end of the module, ask the students to reflect on what they’ve learnt. You can relate your reflection questions closely to the module content, or you can use a generic set of questions, such as these: What have I learnt? What is still unclear? What do I need to follow up on? Where to from here?
8. Links and resources. Consolidate any links or resources you’ve referred to in the earlier ‘content’ parts of the module here, and add any extra resources. Don’t go overboard, but make sure there’s enough stimulating material to encourage further exploration.

Examples

You can check out how I’ve structured some of my free online courses on wikis and blogs in a similar way.
Blogagogy

Edupedia

Tara Brabazon’s Digital Hemlock: Internet education and the poisoning of teaching was first published in 2002. Reading it six years later (or four years, if you’ve got the same 2004 reprint that I have), it provides an intriguing aperture into how things have changed in the online world, and how we try to make sense of cultural flux using concepts already familiar to us.

Brabazon’s case was that economic rationalism, consumerism and reduced government funding were the drivers behind the insistence that courses go online — you know, efficiency gains and all that. Brabazon points to the labour-intensiveness of internet-based technologies, the “bland, unforgiving educational platforms” (d’accord!) of Web$CT and Black$Board, and the leap-frogging of critical and higher-order thinking skills that these technologies subsidise. This was true at the time, and may still be to a certain extent.

However, post-Web 2.0, there is something else going on, and the habitat has changed. In the first instance, we are seeing massive and definable shifts in culture. The imperative now is to embrace technologies in our teaching not primarily for efficiency or for economic reasons, but because we need to be where our students are and we need to take them where they will need to be if they are to be energetic, sophisticated, knowledgeable participants in a communications society.

Secondly — thankfully! — online tools are much easier for teachers to use these days (except, of course, for the positively awful Web 1.0 systems such as Black$Board, Web$CT and My$Classes, that many institutions insist their distressed and beleagured teachers use, but that’s another story … *). As teachers begin to make use of collaborative and participatory online instruments such as blogs, wikis, social networking, and the like, more energy can be devoted to the bigger picture stuff we want our students to demonstrate: critical thinking, interpretation, validation, synthesis, evaluation, analysis, creativity, imagination …

Always, the mistake is to separate the cultural from the technological, and that is why there is no sense of social telos in Brabazon’s book. Again, no-one’s to blame, it’s just our way of trying to understand stuff. As Nicola Yelland in Shift to the Future: Rethinking learning with new technologies in education reminds us, technology is process as well as tool. Either may be privileged, depending on the historical moment, but since Digital Hemlock was first published the Web has gone social. It is now primarily a cultural artefact, not a technological one, and re-conceptualising it as such will move our thinking and our attitudes forward, opening up exhilarating possibilities for the expansion of our own minds, not just those of our students.

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*Honest-to-God, if we ditched these ‘Learning Management Systems’ and went for web-based apps, then supposedly ‘technophobic’ teachers would be on board like that. Those we label (and who feel they must label themselves) ‘technophobic’ just have natural reactions to crappy systems — these people aren’t technophobic at all … just practical. All we need do is show them that wikis and blogs make perfectly serviceable LMSs, that Facebook has course apps that are pretty good, and that The Class Connection and MyNoteIT are specifically designed for students to track their classes. No wonder Black$Board is suing smaller competitors — it knows it’s on the way out.

At the moment, I’m having trouble figuring out how ‘online’ pedagogy is any different from ‘ordinary’ pedagogy. I’m even thinking that it might be slightly beguiling to suggest that learning online qua learning requires special consideration, intellectually speaking, that is.

Naturally, the things we can do as online learners are different from the things we could do as pre-internet learners, but is it the doing of it that’s important in this instance? The doing is essential to how we use web tools (wikis, blogs, social networking, videos, slideshares etc.) in a educationally sound fashion in our daily teaching, but to suggest that there’s something special going on privileges the notion that the internet actually changes learning and gives learning online properties that it doesn’t necessarily have. So let’s not talk about ‘online learning’ but ‘learning online’.

Pedagogy is pedagogy, and the type of pedagogy you deploy will depend on the outcomes you’re seeking. Let’s not privilege the technology too much.

I’ve written the ‘blog’ courses in the WordPress blogging interface. As you do the course, you have the opportunity to blog your ideas, thoughts and observations on the course blog. Cool, hey? 8)

The ‘wiki’ courses are written as WetPaint wikis. For these courses, you can record your ideas and observations in the discussion threads at the end of each page.

The idea is that if you’re in the wiki or blog environment as you’re doing the course, then you’ll learn about that environment much more quickly. Also, the courses are designed to show how you, yourself, can set this type of thing up for your class, and they’re built in a pedagogically sound fashion, with scaffolding and stuff. You can do the modules at your own pace and in whatever order you want. I’ll embed more media and links as I find them — again, to show how powerful these things can be as teaching and learning tools.

I’ve used these courses successfully in class, too — not just as ‘distance ed’-type things. They allow individual members of the group to work at their own pace, and at the same time it frees me up to move around the room to check to see how people are going and whether or not I can help.

What fantastic Learning Mangement Systems! Better than BlackBoard or MyClasses, at any rate, cos they’re easy to set up and use, they look great, they’re free, and they ain’t trying to rort education and then use our money to fund legal actions against smaller enterprises, thus creating educational monopolies

So, it’s all good! Let me know what you think — or at least have fun!

Meg’s Learning Futures Web 2.0 and the Net Generation

Meg’s Blogagogy Using blogs in education

Meg’s EduPedia Using wikis in education

Meg’s PressGO! How to set up a WordPress blog

Meg’s BrushUP! How to set up a WetPaint wiki

Players have to save the planet ‘Helios’ from ecological destruction. The game is dead easy to download and instal, so give it a go to see the potential for this kind of stuff in education.

Basically, I’m still not convinced by the need to have everything in one spot and mounted on an institution’s own servers. And I’m not convinced educational organisations need to pay for this stuff. I think it probably makes it in some ways easier to have everything in one place, and it gives institutions greater control over what systems students use, but I believe we need to be looking further out than that.

You can do all (OK, ‘most’) of the things you can do in PebblePad for free in other online applications – applications that are often more powerful and ‘authentic’ than those found in PP. For example, why use PP’s limited blog function when students can blog via WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal and the like. Students can also share ‘experiences’ and ‘thoughts’ via a blog, and they can set up meetings through Google Calendar or Zoho Planner. And you can sort out action plans through things such as ToodleDo and Remember the Milk. Furthermore, wikis and blogs can make for highly potent and accessible webfolios. For the ‘extras’ such as adding reflections or doing SWOT analyses, well … I’m sure teachers can come up themselves with ways of integrating them into assignments or classroom tasks and should be doing so, anyway.

I just believe that schools and post-compulsory education need to get out of the mindset of having to pay for everything and having to find server space for it. Web 2.0 allows us to be much more creative than that.

Pebble Pad is pedagogically sound, individually customisable for the student, very user-friendly, and it looks terrific (again, a big improvement over the Web 1.0 systems mentioned above). When I was first playing around in the interface, I was very impressed by the amount of thought that had gone into it. However, there are some broader issues I think thatteachers and educational leaders need to think about, and I’ll get to them in another post.

In PebblePad, users create ‘assets’ such as action plans, meetings, ‘experiences’, ‘thoughts’, blogs, CVs and webfolios. For each asset you create, you’re taken through a set of steps. For example, if you are creating an action plan asset, you are asked to think about and record your current situation, the ideal situation, the steps you will take to make it all happen, a SWOT analysis, the supporting resources you will require (books, journals, web, people, courses etc). You can also tag things up so that they’re easy to find afterwards, thus doing away with the rigid folder system that, again, reflects a Web 1.0 environment. No folders in PebblePad!

It’s a similar process for each asset you create, so, as you can see, the whole thing is very well constructed both technically and educationally. However, the system does have some failings. The blog function was very basic when I looked at it and the visual editor that the whole of PP uses is also fairly primitive. Further, teachers are relying on the makers of PebblePad to have gotten the pedagogy right — which is not such a huge problem, thankfully, because it’s looks pretty good to me — but what if you want to change things yourself? Maybe there’s that function available, but I’m not sure … There’s also the general question of the need to pay for all of this functionality at all when it’s already free and often more developed on the web. See my next post for more on that issue.

Another consideration has to be how easy it is for the student to take all their work with them when they finish at your institution. PebblePad allows them to do that, but why would you ask students to muck around with transferring stuff when they can be doing it all outside of the LMS or PLE anyway and to much greater effect? You’d think it was a hassle, and so would students …

Having said all that, PebblePad is a good system and I’d encourage you to have a look at it.