 Well, I guess I'll give you a quick overview of how we're going to go through this process here I'm going to say a bunch of controversial things and Then hopefully we can have an opportunity for a bit more discussion rather than just having me Stand up here and talk about a bunch of things that some of you probably already know or have had some experience with so Certainly my goal is not to spend my time talking the whole time I'd love it if we could you know spend at least half the time in some kind of discourse or argument preferred I guess we're at an interesting time in education and I suspect every generation probably says that You know every generation brings changes in the moment You have changes someone has to come by and say look we're in an interesting era and I'm really every era is interesting But there's some notion I guess from what MIT's focus is with their their center Which is focused on collective intelligence and that's you know, how do we take what we have at our fingertips today? How do we take the technologies? The new abilities that we have to interact with each other new opportunities that we have to make sense of the world How do we take those various? Elements and somehow work together more effectively than was ever possible before we had these technologies at our disposal I mean really to a degree I think that's the heart of what we're all trying to do within education is we're looking at How can we do a better job with the tools that we have and not just to duplicate what we're doing But to create really an entirely new reality if you will Now any presentation that advocates for changes to the education system isn't complete without at least one obligatory quote Suggesting that it's somehow fundamentally flawed and in the really an excellent Book the the Cambridge handbook of learning science is really one of the best texts I'm aware of right now that starts to move toward addressing some of the changes that we're seeing happen with Technology and yet doesn't lose its footing in acknowledging the traditional elements of education a little bit of the you know the concept of the division between the technology focus and the Educational aspects of it, but really this right at the start the first chapter, which is an edited text by Sawyer He acknowledges that there are elements in our education system today that have not been Reflective or weren't created or based on established research Obviously, it's important that we then don't move from that Concern of not being based on established research that we don't neglect our path forward in trying to reconceive and take a new Approach for learning and technology and I'm going to suggest in the presentation here that we're seeing a really an un You know, we're losing anchor, you know We we've lost our direction are bearing by traditional metrics of orienting ourselves to an environment And I think there are new opportunities that we can be oriented to the new environment But it's an interesting period of what chaos is probably a good word Where we're finding our roots or our place more effectively, but while we're making that transition I think it's vital that we don't neglect The notion that more and has put forward and that the intent of education is really to prepare, you know Every individual in society for the vital combat for lucidity. I mean that's the goal of education I read an interesting article just think two days ago in the independent or whatever it magically appeared outside my hotel door in the morning And it talked about how because everyone's getting educated these days the value of an education is reducing And I thought maybe there's a comical argument, but nonetheless the the reality is that the role of education in society today can't be overstated because it is so vital in preparing our society to be able to address the challenges that we face of Course and the argument that I would suggest here is that there are some structural inefficiencies in school in education in universities that don't align with this mandate of forming a lucid comprehensive worldview society in particular and the The challenge I think we're starting to face here is in education. We've had death by hype and Great example, you know I'll see a few years ago. Give it, you know five years from now Somebody will stand up and say I looked at the program in 2008 I put it into many eyes and I visualized it my goodness They talked about a lot of terms that I didn't have a clue what they meant But so we've had in the past your blogs your wikis your podcast They've somewhat given away now where we're talking web 3.0 and web 3d and you know I mean the nonsense just never ends and so it's important that we don't base our Pattern of rethinking education on the trends that are the current instantiation of change namely the tools and focus instead on some of The longer term transitions in change and that's what I'll look at from a fragmentation perspective One of the most valuable models that I think we can look at is the media model It's not a fully accurate model to explore But it's one that has really felt the change pressures that we're encountering education now They've been experiencing them for over a decade. They've been struggling with Digitization they've been struggling with how do we compete in a world where our readers our clients have access to information Literally at their fingertips Why wait for the morning newspaper when you can grab it on Google news about five minutes after it happens? Or you might follow some development just this morning You know with the new Hadron collider being released if you go to twitter.com slash CERN their their live Twittering You know it went around once nothing blew up kind of stuff So it's immediate information, you know some people might read it tomorrow morning Most people read it tomorrow morning in a newspaper But a lot of people as I checked just a couple minutes ago 1568 people are following the Twitter feed on with regard to CERN's activation of the Hadron collider So it's just this sense of We have greater control and by giving greater control to the end user What becomes the role of the people that used to put the content pieces together, you know It becomes a role of a newspaper editor that used to say we will keep this but this doesn't go because it either doesn't reflect our ideology It's not significant or it might be significant, but it's not significant to the bulk the majority So those things have to go because it only applies to three percent of our population We don't sell newspapers if we pander to three percent of the population, you know So those are the kind of choices that they that an editor would make and so what media has done really is they've excessively fragmented if you look and Pew Internet's done some good research on the the information habits of Really newspapers as a whole but particularly from perspective of youth they do still read some traditional newspapers But it's heavily augmented They still watch traditional television, but they spend as much in some cases more time on YouTube as well So we have this dramatic shift where what used to be a cohesive structure a newspaper and newscast in the evening is Now fragmented and broken apart multi-perspective and multiple elements are being included This is certainly the case with regard to variety of areas one content We do different things with content than we've ever done If you're familiar obviously with blogging the first presentation address or some of the growth or at least the access to blogs and organizations Wikis podcasts video casts whatever it is There's an incredible opportunity for anyone to contribute content. That certainly doesn't say it's quality content a lot of it Is is is not but the reality is there's a democratic capacity for anyone to create content It doesn't fit under the domain of people who have access privilege to either a press or to certain types of information So there's that the democratization of that is is very significant And I think we've also seen our ability to Converse with each other is significantly enlarged whereas we've seen previously at least our conversations were geographically based you know and Very well met from University of Toronto's and a lot of work in the sort of the sociological analysis of networks And one of the big things he found was that whereas geographically when we're geographically confined we talked to people Because we're geographically located when we're an online environment We talked to people because we have the capacity for shared interest and so we're much more Methodical if you will in selecting the type of people that we converse with and that we have access to that does that's not It's really a good thing it does produce echo chambers as well where everyone thinks the same and we tell each other what we all believe Which is a bad thing but at minimum at least you can now have a conversation with individuals from around the world in multiple forms Whether it's an online course whether it's in a Google group session whether it's Skype cast which are now defunct But I mean there's other you stream would be another example So there's this opportunity for global conversation that we just haven't had before and it's fragmented our Conversations our bits and pieces here and there just like our content is bits and pieces here There's not just our content and our conversations, but it's also our identity. I'm not sure How many of you have multiple accounts? I'm gonna guess everybody in here probably has two three five ten fifty different accounts on different sites You might have your Facebook profile. Maybe you've got a profile in an Elk service somewhere. Maybe you've got your University profile Maybe you're logging into again. I've mentioned Twitter already or perhaps an LMS that you're using and I mean the list goes on and on your YouTube account and Eventually it gets to the point where we've got so many little pieces of ourselves all over the web that to get an understanding of who We are it's not about going to one place and saying who's George Siemens It's about going to the web and saying well here's X number of references to To me or to you or to whoever and it's by looking at those pieces together that we have this sense of okay That's what this particular individual is all about So that's fragmented our identity is essentially all over the map And it's the pulling together of that identity that marketers absolutely love that's what Facebook is doing Accessibly well Facebook makes a beautiful transaction exchange So a little bit of your soul and we'll give you access to great tools and in the process We will know you better than your friends know you based on your interest in your clicking habits Interesting transaction but also meaning-making is distributed as well fragmented Look at a traditional class and I'll be a little controversial as I go forward in the notion of a typical course But look at traditional class. It's structured in such a manner that the educator has said this body of Information or knowledge that I have bounded in the framework of a course is my opinion and as you select I mean, you know, it's like when you select something. I don't like that link or that author irritates me You know heard him speak at a conference. I'm not going to use that And so I mean that's that's the process that we use when we sometimes pick our elements in a course It's a combination of ideology sometimes just petty reactions to individuals We might not like and that's how we put the pieces together in a course But it reflects a framework in a mindset of one individual and most critically. It's bounded It has this sense of of I've made sense of this discipline for you as a learner by how I've put pieces together And my view of education is quite the opposite. I think on the one hand Education should Complexify the world for our learners Education should help our learners not see a world that is more simplistic But see a world that is much more nuanced and complex and certainly with the technology that they have access to today and the opportunity for Distributed conversations Theoretically that's possible. We haven't quite moved to the stage of how are we going to do a quality analysis of that But at minimum, let's say the first stage. We're there We can theoretically do it the next stage is figuring out how to actually make it effective and help make sense of this particular approach So we have this Fragmentation and there's a freedom. I think at least in fragmentation There are a lot more opportunities available to what we can do because we have a highly fragmented approach to how we interact with content and with each other We have what some have called sort of an end to a grand narrative This one all-consuming narrative that helps us to make sense either of a discipline or of an entire field So the narrative itself has given way to something that isn't grand and universal anymore In fact increasingly, it's what we call a personally creative narrative personally created narrative What I mean by personally creative narrative is it's a narrative that's defined by The information you've had access to the worldviews that you hold and so it's not just the view of the newspaper the News anchor whoever that you're listening to it's a narrative that you yourself have created by the piece of information That you've had access to or perhaps more specifically. It's a personal context It's a narrative that reflects where we are at at a particular point in time And it is a narrative that does evolve and and certainly does change as we go forward Critical though and this gets back to the first couple slides where I talked about Edgar Moran's notion of lucidity now emphasizing lucidity and complexity in my eyes are not at odds with each other But we have this need for coherence We have this need for a framework that helps us to make sense because if we don't have a framework We see everything and when we see everything we're absolutely overwhelmed Anyone is so we do need at some level of framework for making sense whether it's looking at political events Whether it's looking at how we opt to teach in a classroom how we opt to raise children These are all functions of the type of framework that we use to help the world become a coherent place for ourselves So it's this notion of coherence that that we haven't quite figured out how to do in this online space Efficiently because fragmentation challenges that coherence as we have little pieces everywhere That our coherent world view starts to become increasingly difficult to hold or difficult to comprehend or as suggested going back to the Moran quote The the notion of lucidity becomes challenged in a highly fragmented environment By the same account additional frustrations arise with fragmentation the first one is that our The fragmentation has a way of reducing our ability to apprehend the unity of a discipline or the unity of a field We see these little pieces and we don't quite know how the pieces fit together and that puts us in a very difficult cognitive place where we Literally overwhelmed So we've done a great job of taking media elements and pulling them apart In fact, if you look at the last 20 to 30 years, that's almost exclusively what's been happening with content and with education We've taken what used to be a book and broken it down to initially to you know Paragraphs that would be posted on a blog and now we're down to a hundred and forty characters and You know in Twitter and so that's how we've taken and pulled things smaller and smaller and smaller We've done the same thing with with you know the ability for an individual to capture an image online Or just grab that one image off a website And that was the initial intent of learning objects Wasn't it that reusable learning objects would allow us to break learning material down to Small enough pieces so they could be repurposed in multiple environments and so in a similar sense That's that's what the last 20 years have been about with content is we've made it smaller and smaller and smaller and Increasingly fragmented now that gives us tremendous opportunities, especially now that we have resources like Yahoo pipes or other service that allow us to Mesh up different elements or that allow us to take a part here a part there a part there and Create something new with it admittedly that the existing copyright system can Challenge that particular viewpoint, but it is one that we were currently at least able to do and the value of creative commons Or the value of wiki educator or open online courses do Enlarge the potential that we can recreate content in our own context. So again, that's the point. I'd like to keep returning to So but fragmentation ultimately in order for us to have a coherent worldview requires that we recreate We have to rebuild it for ourselves not something that's built by the instructor mentioned the instructor pulls the content pieces together Now I'm referring to the notion that it's no law that the learner in order to make sense Still has to pull things together in some kind of a meaningful manner It's the only way that we can make sense and function So we have to ask the question of how can we foster some view of coherence in a world that's really defined by hyper fragmentation Or put another way, you know, how do we rebuild? How do we take the 30 years of work 20 years of work that we we spent pulling content pieces into smaller and smaller elements and make Something that makes sense now Spend a little bit time later on depending on where we're at Looking at the service called D. Go just as an example of an interesting way in which to make sense around a network manner one way to look at this is the distinction is Educationally, I'm not sure how many of you remember the days of a rubik's cube And I think I was probably about seven eight years old when I first encountered Rubik's cube and the thing drove me absolutely nuts I'm not sure how many of you actually took it apart You popped off that one little cover on the middle one and you could unscrew it and then rebuild it And it looked great because you put it back together That was my my first initial attempt at it before figuring out there's actually you know a mathematical approach You can use to make sense of a Rubik's cube, but a Rubik's cube and a puzzle I mean they have a place that there's a right way if I've put a Rubik's cube together You would say yes George all the colors are the same you didn't cheat you've completed the task a puzzle is the same way every piece has a particular place and my concern with curriculum is that's the view we've had right every part of our Curriculum has a place and all we need to do is get learners involved admittedly this has been challenged with you know Situated learning and and social constructivism and radical constructivism But the view still is primarily that the world is Knowable according to certain metrics and standards and I would use as being a complicated view of the world It says that yes, you can make sense of it you just have to get all the pieces in the right place and you've made sense of your world and Increasingly we're seeing discussion of complexity theory complexity science or a view that the world is complex And the difference between something that's complicated like Rubik's cube Which I can put all the pieces together or a puzzle versus something that that's complex is that a complex entity is not Exclusively knowable the elements of the system are knowable, but the outcome of that system is not knowable That's why you know when the the person doing the weather forecasting says oh tomorrow's gonna beautiful sunny day And then because of the interacting factors these elements torrents have been not so much a beautiful day And that's what we face when when we're looking at complex systems they have a different approach or a different manner of Reconnecting and reconfiguring which is one of the opportunities. I guess that we ourselves have when we start to consider How we create and how we design learning the view that there is greater degree of involvement from the learner and I'll introduce Participatory pedagogy in just a second on that so a few examples We've already alluded to these so I can wing through these quickly But we look at a traditional course, you know What is a course to do and and a course is seen as as a complicated view, right? Here's this domain of knowledge I'll select these pieces and I put it together and there now we have something that's knowable We have the same thing with a program in any level or a degree you could keep extrapolating that Beyond that we also have the notion in a high level of appreciation for the formal Why do we value the formal more in education? Well because the formal has a knowable structure We can say students went from a to b to c to d and therefore they they're warranted some type of a degree or some Type of acknowledgement of their learning so we have a way of apprising formal learning over informal learning the Canadian Council on Learning just released a report where they just addressed sort of the almost the The disdain that academics have for the rich learning that occurs outside of formal classroom environments And yet and US military did a report on this years ago now And they they made a statement that up to 80% of our learning happens in informal environments now I have no idea how you actually calculate that I mean that's I'd love to see how they came to that conclusion But most of us I think can acknowledge that we learn an awful lot outside of classroom environments and the drawback with traditional education and Due to the fact that we have fragmented content conversation identity It means that more and more of our learning happens not Within the confines of a course or a program or a university But outside of it and the question we have you know academically at least is how do we pull those pieces together? This is just a quick diagram that you know tries to address some of the elements of learning Ignore all the things on the side and just focus on those little bubbles that are right in the center And so on the one hand we have formal learning You know we have this notion of of education occurs in in Traditional structured manner that we can then accredit and and say yes you learned this But we also have experienced game-based case-based Problem-based learning as well and increasing with second life or virtual worlds and and other games in education These are again learning activities that may or may not occur in a formal space I would suggest those of you that are educational technologists a good majority of you have probably done the bulk of your training If not all of it in informal means to become competent in the field Some of you may have gone through and taken your formal degrees as well after the fact or even partly during but in a Lot of cases the learning that an educational technologist has done didn't occur in a class Traditionally even a professor at University of Manitoba state, you know, we don't use textbooks anymore Right, I mean our textbooks in our course. They can't be updated fast enough So we're just using a wiki now for our students So there's the sense that the education system the way it's been designed can't keep up with some of the changes They're happening so anyways you've got formal learning game-based simulation based learning We have mentoring and apprenticing which is a wonderful model that that is not necessarily utilized But it does happen outside of work environment the notion of volunteering I mean volunteering for organizations that you you know Have a cause and is a great way of learning new skills and developing Performance support this was huge really in the in the 90s But still can't be overstated and that's the notion of having support at the point of need a Lot of us learn our computing skills For example with sort of this 10-foot rule right the people who are within 10 feet of us when we don't know How to open something or do something that's who we ask and and that's performance support or if you remember the days of clippy little Microsoft Beast you know it would that way that's performance support you have a problem right there There's help available and that's a type of learning it might not be deep learning But it's learning that provides us the ability to complete a task Then the last three self-learning best way look at that's learning that you do just because you enjoy it It's what those of you that that read blogs or those of you that you know Maybe a related field or something that's in your field It's the stuff that you read if you have nothing else to do or what you participate in if you have nothing else to do It's what you have a personal passionate interest in learning you do on your own and then we've already heard talk of you know vangers notion of communities of practice and with the huge opportunities with the web for people to interact with each other online great opportunity to contribute and be involved in multiple communities and then finally informal which You know fits I guess in the banner of conferences workshops those kinds of activities that may be offered by your university or you may just take on your own Okay, so that sets up, you know the notion of the Formal and informal divide and how we do disservice to we don't recognize the formal sufficiently It also challenges the notion of what is packaged coherent sense of content You know, what is the centering element that we start to consider then if everything's being fragmented? What's the role of the university or what's the role of higher education in a world where the pieces are being pulled apart to finer and finer levels? If our role is not to package and make sense of the world in a rubik's cube type framework What does our role become namely? What are the new centers of balance and for the institution? Completely non provocative statement on my part the only sustainable value point in the next decade is accreditation And I'm not sure what it is beyond that but then of course Peter Drucker comes out and says university will be obsolete in 10 years And I think that was what 15 years ago, so you know take that with a grain of salt But the point here is if we have just like newspapers and media use as an illustration initially What happens if the base that you're serving suddenly has control of all the tools that you used to have exclusive control over? What happens to your market if that's what happens and as I mentioned the the critical distinction I think for universities is to emphasize on the accreditation model that blends these various elements of learning Some of you may be familiar with the concept of prior learning assessment and recognition Which which attends to that concept lately, but again non controversial statement. That's the only sustainable value point in the in the near future But what about for the learner? What is it that the learner does in order to make sense of this type of a world and I'll take just a second I'll go look at Digos as an example, but there's a quote that was put out by Roy P. And he published a chapter in I guess Solomon's text distributed cognitions. I think it was in 93 Well ahead of where we started getting very aware of this notion of distributed intelligence and His statement which I think is very accurate is certainly and born out by research in numerous fields Especially neuroscience but Edwin Hutchins as well as talked about with regard to distributed cognition And that's that you know intelligence is distributed across the minds of people in the symbolic devices that we use In in numerous areas, so it's not that we're intelligent only in our head and Andy Clark addresses this as well with the notion of embodied cognition But that we're intelligent across a network and across a group of connections Or as rumblehard puts it in his text on connectionism That the knowledge is literally within the connections Just before I get to this discussion of participatory pedagogies I just want to give you one quick example of how many of you use Digo Okay, so there's a couple of you'll be familiar with this I find this to be and stumble upon is another example But I find this to be really one of the most fascinating tools available And I'm constantly surprised there hasn't been higher adoption with this in education admittedly they did a complete redo I think it was in December of last year, but What you see with Digo for example, you create a network where a group of people that you decide that you want to follow And when you start to follow certain people You're connected to these individuals and then when they visit a website They can mark up a website and annotate a website And when you come by after the fact you can read what they've annotated or changes that they've made to this website For example, there's a course we're doing right now, which is an online course I'm doing with Steven Downs and we've got a number of learners involved and if you Look at some of the one of the readings that we assigned this week was to look at this particular document and As different learners went through they went through the original website now No one who visits this website unless they're logged in with Digo and if these posts have been made public No one who actually goes to this website notices anything on this site But on the other hand if these are people who are part of your network You see the individual discussion that debate happening directly within the page It's it seems like such a simple concept and yet it's in my eyes. It's astonishingly Revolutionary in that it moves conversations outside of environments about the topic or the resource and it makes the Topic retains its identity and the conversation happens around that resource in the resources native space And it happens in a networked or in a distributed manner So again, I find that to be a fascinating concept that I think does significantly Influence what it might look like when we start to conceive of a way to make sense of the world in a networked or in a distributed manner Stumble upon is another great tool that does similar functionality. If you look at public library of science Another great example of how they're trying to alter journals what they've done with journals is you go to Public library of science and they've changed the scholarly process. It hasn't been horrendously successful yet it's an interesting use of words but If you go there you can see an article of somebody who's published an article a typical view of scholarship But you publish it's out there people may read to it and link to it But you never talk in the document you talk about the document and in this case you can now go to the site You can annotate documents that have been published gone through the traditional peer review process And you can also then go buy and comment on the document directly in that native documents area So it's just a small indication of what I what I mean when I try and say what are the new centering elements in education? And for the learner the new centering elements are the tools that enable them to function in a network manner with each other in Spaces that are under their control not the control of the institution Final slide and then I'd like to chat the notion of I guess participatory pedagogy I think is an important one and The emphasis here is that as educators we don't Fully formalize create and structure the curriculum in advance of the learners arriving we leave room for the learner I guess would be another way to put it we leave room for the learners to arrive and To contribute different pieces to negotiate around the curriculum or if you're familiar with the work of Karl Breider He suggested and he actually uses under the critique of constructivism But he suggested that the intent of learning is not just to acquire knowledge, but it's to expand knowledge And that's what he views as the critical flaw in education is that learning should be an expansive process and Angostrom certainly Shares a similar view in his discourse on activity theory So what does it look like in education? What are the new centering points as I mentioned institutionally if we've lost control over the means of communication and creation of content? Which we have I mean learners have it at their disposal We still control the network when learners come on to our campus But even that's changing as they come on with mobile phones and their connection comes with them you know our ability to control becomes increasingly diminished and Finally we're ended as an institution We're left with accreditation as our critical value point But our learners on the other hand are suddenly given these opportunities for an enormous level of advanced interaction with each other And a centering of concepts and ideas around their personal interest It's what I mentioned earlier is this notion of a a narrative of coherence that is defined by a learner's context It's not created outside of an individual. The learner doesn't duplicate your understanding of the world The learner creates a context themselves that represents their understanding of the world. I think I'll pause there and I talked too long, but I'll have some time for questions Yeah A little while ago people talking about death of the author It seems to me that you're saying that everybody's an author and so that's not the problem anymore Perhaps you're talking about I'm making this up as I go along. I'm still thinking about your ideas. That's my whole life story Yeah, that's yeah, it's um That you're saying the new challenge is to is almost to find techniques for curating or or being editors and That service that you are showing at the moment seem to be some kind of collective editorial System you got it. Can you sort of talk about that a little bit more? Yeah, I'm not sure if I caught the question in there, but you're right I don't we had a lot of discussion since the 90s since levees work on, you know collectivism and collective collective intelligence and I Don't think that's really what we're looking at some of you may recall the site We are smarter.org which was this intent to have a group of about 1,500 academics write a business book together basically in a wiki format now I mean just think about that for a second and I'm not sure what what they were consuming when they had this idea But the view was we're gonna get 1,500 academics to share That's nice. So anyway that obviously bombed So what they ended up doing was the book ended up being written by a group of a couple of professional authors Even though at the time that was going on there was huge hype about this wonderful collective activity So it's very important to remember and I didn't address that that in the conversation here But any move toward the collective activity has to recognize the primacy of the individual and the contributions of the individual so certainly the notion of the death of an author I In that seems ludicrous to me the death of expertise also seems ludicrous to me But yeah, there are different tools now that at least and again I don't want to look at the instantiation of the tool I mean don't look at Digo as the example just like don't look at blogs as the example look at what these tools enable and What they represent what do they tell us about how we are and how we want to interact with with information and how We want to interact with each other We know my space turns into Facebook Facebook turns into who knows what else as the different tools come online for popularity so Yeah, the new challenge today is is one of determining it and being able to make a coherent framework of the world through these numerous elements that information source that we encounter on almost daily basis and It does require perhaps different skills some people throw them under the banner of 21st century skills But that is a challenge that we don't quite have fully met at this stage What does it mean to decipher and to make sense of these? This this abundant these these numerous different voices this complex environment, but that's the whole intent of it if we Recognize the worst thing to do is to say you know take a complicated world view which we have as educators We think the world is complicated We're gonna create content in a way that students can somehow make sense of the world if we take a complicated world view and we apply it to What really is a complex world we have what's called a disaster because those two don't align they don't flow well to each other and So with complexity the notion is no one will ever know everything about their field anymore It's just not possible, you know even educational technologists in this room with somebody to come up to you and say Georgia You're wrong here. This is what I think about this and this the author said this and that well, okay You're right. So the reality is that we just don't know everything ourselves And that's the appeal to a distributed cognition or a distributed intelligence model And it's learning how to function in that distributed environment that I think is the key Task for for learners and educators being able to make sense or make coherent views of the world The couple questions one there and I'll let you do that. That's your job I don't want to have to reduce your pay Thanks George. That was fascinating talk. I wanted to link Something that you said with the previous talker and next year's conference, which you may not know has got the tagline Which is a quote apparently from WB E8's in dreams begin? Responsibility and I was thinking about a radical change like connectivism which And anybody who's trying to theorize new ways of learning and there's all this knowledge that hasn't yet got directly onto the Internet So in order to understand learning that's more informal across society It seems to me we have to draw on other disciplines. That's how it links back to the previous point about boundary crossing so Without being negative. How do we think about the dangers of you know? Our responsibility in being part of a radical change is to think about what the dangers are Which requires us in my opinion to look at a much broader set of disciplines So how does this dialogue take place? between what's happening on the blogosphere and what's happening perhaps in some areas where people aren't Engaging in that sort of thing and aren't going to still got something really radical to say and as you said It's not just about us reading what they say. It's also about them reading what's happening So I just wondered how we could respond to that challenge. Yeah, that's a that's a big question. We have another half hour, right? no, I'm just you know the Neil postman has Certainly written with a critical perspective on technology as a whole and one of the things that he said is every technology has an Ideology and every technology gives and takes so if we start to use one tool It will give us new opportunities and I you know I don't want to use the word affordances. I had a chat with somebody about this this morning I mean affordances was Gibson's initial concept and it was tied to perception It was it was sort of you know abducted by Norman when he started to apply it to Technological dimensions, which was very different how Gibson meant it But anyway, so every technology has certain things that it permits us to be able to do But when we start to use it also takes other things away For example, if we say well, you know blogs or wikis well, they do certain things well But they also take away the control of the teacher partly at least that that's where institutions sometimes want to control things and keep me in LMS So how do we get that dialogue though going outside of those spaces to recognize that there are unique dimensions to technology and There are things that aren't that we need to be aware of or more broadly You know people who come along and rant at the current state of the world I mean, you know, that's what every generation is supposed to do, right? That's how that's how we have fun in our spare time I guess but you can't take the The view and say hey everybody should be a blogger if everyone blogs will have a good education system Well, I mean that's utter nonsense, you know There are things that the education system does now that it does extremely well And that's one of the concerns I've had with definitely within a lot of the the edgy blog Conversation at least is that it suggests if we all had a wiki and a blog and no teachers anywhere and no institutions We would have a beautiful learning, you know culture I mean, I can't even begin to engage with that discussion because it's so far out there So we have to recognize I tried to mention this right at the start Is that there are aspects of the educational system that serve us very well and that we need to preserve and It's recognizing. What is it that traditional education does well in terms of Engaging learners in critical thought and in Helping them to understand a new and some complex world view There was paper done about two years ago now by Harvard, which was their new Undergraduate competencies or the new critical skills that everybody who graduates from Harvard needs to have those were skills like being able to understand Oneself as a product of history being a critical creative thinker being an ethical person and it relates to Ron Barnett, I'm not sure we're familiar with his work on super complexity In education it relates to his work where he says perhaps education is becoming one where we shift from epistemology To ontology we count we shift from knowledge to Being and becoming and John C. Brown address of this as well So now I've taken an enormously long way around to get to your question Which is that's the challenge academically is to engage in a Dialogue participatory dialogue with related fields of Change and development. There are some examples out there. We're not hacking our way through a jungle without examples I tried to use for content at least media what's happened with media There are certainly examples with online conversation that education can look to and not say how do we apply this in our organization? But how do we adapt this to our organization? I mean those are some of the challenges, but I Beyond that I mean that seems like such a superficial answer to it's a very complex problem, but it is one that that we do need to engage in and educators Fortunately, I think are much more receptive now than they were five You know seven eight years ago when when you know blogs were still the the ludicrous element of people who have no lives Yeah, and I should make I just want to keep talking No, no, I'm done I was gonna make one point just recognize with a conversation here I mean I see there's a three-stage model, which I think is vital in you know first We have the conceptualization that's where we do all the fun thinking blue skying You know nonsense stuff after that the conceptualization forms our experimentation which experimentation leads to implementation So it's important to remember that we're not analyzing You know I presented a conceptual talk here today It's tough to analyze what I talked about by an implementation standard without first going to the experimentation stage So you know just recognizing the the nature of that the question hi It seems to me that our current Practices in accreditation are very heavily based on this notion of control We we sort of test conformity to what we think the curriculum should be and so if you recognize that we We lost or are losing that control, but we want to keep the accreditation We need to base that on something completely different I'm curious to your views as to what the basis of that accreditation should be Well I did a there's a paper online I can direct you to for a conference I think I'm actually Graham and I will both be in Portugal in October and it was for that conference It was titled you know the new spaces and structures of learning and I sort of suggested an approach of what accreditation might look like In that kind of a model, but it's it's tough to say what it will look like because it's really too early We're not even asking the question yet I mean universities are not Significantly asking the question. How do we accredit learning that goes on outside of our classroom? Why well? We've defined classrooms as our value point of learning MIT took away the content part and said you know open educational resources Content is not our value point anymore and now that we see more and more opportunities for conversation and connections online Around content and with other learners suddenly I'm starting to question whether classrooms are a sustainable value point in education That brings us to accreditation. What does that look like? How could that function? I mean so many directions I can go in prior learning and assessment and recognition is the only Model that I've seen to date that's that does it with rigor It does look at a very structured model of determining competence It is applied extensively in relation to industry as well, but it's a much broader Conversation that I think we can have here today, but you know if you want to look at the PLAR model, that's one area to start Okay, I'm sorry. That's it That's all the time I'd be happy to go on longer, but we have most never sessions done it left on behalf of all It seems that under here. We have a bag of something I'm not entirely sure you can get this on an era plane. So you might have to drink it with people tonight But here you are George. Thanks very much for