Ken Carroll

Via Stephen Downes, Judy Breck believes, and I agree, that the economic crunch will speed the advent of network learning.

Getting a college education in the US is absurdly expensive, but like property, or the stock market, the education bubble too will burst - the financial institutions simply no longer have the money to fund the madness.

Change is on the way. Consider how the Open Courseware movement is giving way to the idea that, in essence, a university education could become available (including Open Accreditation) free of charge. This is not, of course, a done deal, but  economic necessity will force us to look more closely at these issues. And crucially, we can now consider such possibilities because of the network. The network doesn’t just change the way we learn from a pedagogical or behavioral perspective - it also changes the economics of the production, distribution, and consumption of educational products and services. The network has the potential to dis-intermediate the inefficiencies in the system and change it fundamentally. That is what will and should happen.

So, it is fair to ask about the value (in the economic sense) of a US university education.  Given their origins, it is unsurprising that university cost/benefit may be out of sync with the broader economic reality. Schools are hard to manage from a cost perspective. I’ve sat on the board of a privately held language school since 1996 and I’ve seen that, without the strictest approach to cost-control, for example, the customer can end up paying for the institution’s inefficiencies. In a state-funded university with a closed system and little financial accountability, I can only imagine what goes on.  (Even without seeing the books, we could probably guess, though.) And as we all know, there are many other reasons why our educational institutions can allow their fees to, er, bloat.

 What I am not saying

Let me be clear on something.  I am not proposing that  the educational system be turned over to free market forces (though there may actually be a case for it).  Nor am I saying that our universities suck and that educators are bad, etc. What I am saying is that the network is exposing the economics of the old system and it doesn’t look good in the context of the tough times ahead. It is the economics, too, that will determine the extent of the changes we are about to see to a far greater extent than will the ideas, the pedagogy, or even the technology.

The fact is that the network can replace large chunks of the old system at a fraction of the cost  but it is the economics that will determine how it configures. Judy mentions textbooks, scaling up good teachers, etc, but there are endless other ways. And Judy is exactly right when she suggests the power of mobile learning in this scenario. But there are, in fact, entirely new conceptions of what a university education should be that go way beyond this. This is not news, but that conversation is going to get louder.

 Our example

It was this economics of the network concept that brought Praxis together as a company. I spend my days trying to figure out the economic reality of schools, of networked learning, and of how to create more value for our learners-as-customers. I would argue that we are slowly but surely solving the puzzle - thanks, of course, to the network.  A Praxis Pass, for example, offers full access to 4 languages for about 80 cents per day. Meanwhile, the more we scale it up, the cheaper it can get, to the point where we could offer access to dozens of languages (or other subjects) for a few cents per day. Nor is there any reason why we could not do that (assuming we reach reasonable scale) make money, and even give the service away free to entire regions where people were too poor to pay for it - parts of Africa, India, or China, for example. We are a small organization (58 people) but it is entirely possible that we  could do those things. It may demonstrate the broader potential of the network in this context. We just have to think about this differently.

The point is that networked learning is in its infancy, and so are the economics of networked learning. There is an awesome power out there waiting to be unleashed if we are willing to reconfigure how we think about all of this. The coming economic collapse will provide the push. After that it will be time to be very open and very creative.  This isn’t edupunk -  this is real life. I doubt if any of us would have liked it this particular way, but hey, get ready for the era of networked learning.

Ken Carroll

This week was an exciting one for us - ChinesePod published lesson number 1,000.  Around all these learning objects we have had tens of thousands of conversation threads, questions, answers, and comments. There are some serious connections getting formed out there.

Meanwhile, there is some real energy in the edublogosphere concerning this course in connectivism.  So, what about ChinesePod from a connectivist perspective? As it happens, connectivist theory and ChinesePod practice are surprisingly consistent. Let me point to some examples.  

 Connectivist principles

Central to connectivism is the primacy of the connection, the belief that more connections lead to more learning. ChinesePod started out with a similar idea: to maximize the interconnectedness between the people, the content, and the system on the platform. At this point, I think it is self-evidently true that (connectivist) theory squares with (our particular) practice. More connections on a network simply do enable more learning, though there are other factors involved.

And where you get connections, you also get networks. George Siemens distinguishes 3 types of networks that enable learning. These are slightly more tricky to assess but I think they also square with our experience.  Let’s look at them:

1. Neural networks. No one can really know what goes on in learners’ synapses, but we all know that it is possible to induce learners to mobilize their cognitive faculties to a greater or lesser extent. More cognitive and affective experiences lead to more thinking, more synaptic connections, and more learning. To this end, we have sought to leverage guesswork,  repetition, stories, context, in-depth discussion, etc, to offer what Siemens might call  ’frequency, diversity, and depth of exposure’ to the content. I’ve always maintained that learning is multi-dimensional, and deepened when you approach the subject from different angles. The connections around the subject should be many and varied, a position consistent with connectivism: ’The act of knowing is to be in a particular manner of connectedness’. 

2. Social/external networks.  Learning has an undeniable social dimension, and on the network there are many ways to exploit the fact.  For us, the starting point was Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development (reinforced by Krashen’s more cognitivist input theory). Hence the ethos of the community of practice, the specialized groups, etc, on ChinesePod.  These things were designed to bring together teachers, practitioners, and learners and increase learning opportunites. Most  learning in life happens when we connect with someone who knows more about a subject than we do.  There’s no reason why that would be any different on the network, or on ChinesePod, and so the community, an the connections they are allowed to make, play a central role.

3. Conceptual connections.  To me, language learning must subordinate the structures (grammar) to meaning, concepts, conversations, and events. Concepts provide the basis for discussion, reflection, and cross-referencing from the learner’s own life experience and existing knowledge. We start with the concepts and try to relate specific language items to them by using those items for what they are designed to do: to describe concepts. The language learning is almost as a bi-product of the conversation, the reflection, etc.  I am convinced that there is such a thing as conceptual networks and that they are crucial to learning. We hang the language onto the concepts, not the other way round. It is also very clear that learners are far more willing to engage with real concepts that connect with their lives than with grammatical abstractions that do not.

Seeing the patterns

Connectivism clashes with one of dominant concepts in ESL for the last 20 years - second language acquisition.  Stephen Downes asserts, I think convincingly, that we do not acquire linguistic items in the sense of holding or possessing pieces of knowleledge, wrapped in language forms. Instead, we come to recogize meaning as an epiphenomenon of distributed patterns. I can actually live with both notions but as it happens I think we have taken a course that is consistent, once again, with the connectivists.

Example: The teachers and practitioners on ChinesePod do not see ourselves as lecturers or teachers who impart knowledge in the old sense. Instead, we are connectors, or resources who point learners at key patterns or elements that help strengthen their connection to a piece of information (and emphasize the skill of being able to identify patterns).  One example is the focus on lexis, rather than grammar. Grammar offers a set of abstractions to be used, theoretically, in a deductive way to generate accurate sentences. In reality, however, it suffers from the humpty-dumpty effect: good for breaking language down, but not for putting it back together again. By contrast, lexical patterns, chunks, and collocations reflect how the language is actually spoken. It shows how certain words are more likely to consort with certain other words (like clusters or even networks).  At the level of comprehension and of production, language learners do well to get good at identifying the patterns of the target language.

What are the differences? 

All in all, I think there is a good deal of consistency here. Looking at the differences would require a new post, but such differences as there are emerge from perspective rather than philosophy.  As a content provider we have to be very mindful of the motivational, humanistic, and affective dimensions of learning. (Carl Rogers had a permanent effect on me, personally.) We also need to ensure the learning is as relevant as possible - relevance is something that we have to strive for on a daily basis, to paraphrase John Pasden.  

Most edubloggers are concerned with the broader question of education as a system. That is a huge challenge and a noble undertaking. We approach it from a very different perspective and a narrower focus. I think this explains the differences in perspective but again, this is one for another day. In the meantime I salute the people behind the connectivism course and I will continue to follow it as closely as time permits.  After all, we have much in common.

 Ken Carroll