Pale Blue Dot

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us.

This image of Earth taken from Mars' orbit represents my theme today.

While doing some house-keeping on my YouTube Favourites recently I re-discovered again an except from Carl Sagan's work Pale Blue Dot.

Rediscovered again? Are we going all Sam Beckett here? (No. Not Quantum Leap Sam B. - the playwright Sam B.)

...begin again all over more or less in the same place...

Now read on...

The original Pale Blue Dot photograph of planet Earth was taken by Voyager 1 from a distance of nearly seven billion kilometres (4 billion miles) as part of the Solar System family portrait.

It showed the Earth suspended in [the illusion of] a ray of sunlight [caused by the spacecraft's lens optics], against the vastness of space. This image had a much more profound effect on me than the Apollo 8 Earth Rise image - partly because, I suspect, I never knew a time when Man hadn't visited the Moon, and Earth Rise was always there as part of my socio-cultural heritage (much a kids today can't envisage a mobile-phone free world I guess), and it wasn't really that far away anyway.

The personal value of this image of "a mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam" is not only what it represents to us as a species, but its purpose as a semantic denotation, or what what David Jonassen would call "an object to think with." And inevitably, that leads to Carl Sagan and his exposition on what the Pale Blue Dot represents. People my age who grew up under a sky increasingly filled with communications satellites were the first generation to be exposed to the mass media and all that came in its wake; so we saw the (soccer) World Cup live from Argentina, and we also saw hijacked planes and embassies stormed before our eyes.

And we also saw what a diverse world we were a part of (and believe me this was important if you lived on a mostly green island on the western edge of Europe, just a few degrees south of the Arctic circle), through documentary series like Cosmos and David Attenborough's Life on Earth. There was an immediacy and an almost visceral quality to the narratives presented; a Shock of the New, imparted by these amazing colour images beamed into our living rooms (yes kids, before that TV used to be in both colours - black AND white). Better than fiction.

Now listen on...

Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

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References:

Beckett, S. (2000) How it is. Avalon Travel Publishing.

Sagan, C. (1994). Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. Random House, New York.

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Image source:

Earth and Moon. Photograph courtesy NASA/JPL/Main Space Science Systems. Mars Global Surveyor. May 8, 2003. [Internet] Available from: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/
earth_from_mars_030522.html [Accessed 2 July 2008]

Pale Blue Dot. Photograph courtesy NASA/JPL. Voyager 1. February 14, 2001. [Internet] Available from: http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=601 [Accessed 2 July 2008]

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Constructivism Pt.10: More Mindtools

Significantly, Jonassen et al point out that learning is not restricted to formal learning environments, and that learners can “acquire sophisticated skills and advanced knowledge in natural learning situations" (p. 28).

Table 1 Characteristics of a computer-based learning environment (after Jonassen, 1994)

Characteristic	Definition
Active:	Learners are engaged by the learning process in mindful processing of information where they are responsible for the result. In natural learning situations, learners, without the intervention of formal instruction, can acquire sophisticated skills and advanced knowledge about what they are learning. Through formal and informal apprenticeships and communities, learners develop skills and knowledge which they then share with other members of those communities with whom they learned and practiced those skills. In all of these situations, learners are actively manipulating the objects and tools of the trade and learning by reflecting on what they have done.
Constructive:	Learners integrate new ideas with prior knowledge in order to make sense or make meaning or reconcile a discrepancy, curiosity, or puzzlement. They construct their own meaning for different phenomena. The models that they build to explain things are simple and unsophisticated at first, but with experience, support, and reflection, they become increasingly complex. They can only know what they know, so they should be supported in the process of coming to know.
Collaborative:	Learners naturally work in learning and knowledge building communities, exploiting each other’s skills while providing social support and observing the contributions of each member. Humans naturally seek out others to help them to solve problems and perform tasks.
Intentional:	All human behaviour is goal-directed (Cleary & Schank, 1995). That is, everything that we do is intended to fulfil some goal. When learners are actively trying to achieve a cognitive goal (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994), they think and learn more. Learning environments need to support learners in articulating what their goals are in any learning situation.
Complex:	Teachers oversimplify most ideas in order to make them more easily transferable to learners. In addition to stripping ideas out of their normal contexts, concepts are distilled to their simplest form so that learners will more readily learn them. But the message this gives learners is that t the world is a reliable and simple place. However, the world is not a reliable and simple place. Problems have multiple components and multiple perspectives. They cannot be solved in predictable ways. Learners need to be engaged in solving complex and “ill-structured problems as well as simple problems” (p.31). Unless learners are required to engage in higher-order thinking, they will develop oversimplified views of the world.
Contextual:	A great deal of recent research has shown that learning tasks that are situated in some meaningful real world task or simulated in some case-based or problem based learning environment are not only better understood, but also are more consistently transferred to new situations. Rather than abstracting ideas in rules that are learned by rote and applied to other “canned problems” (p.31), knowledge and skills should be delivered in reality-based, useful contexts and provide new and different contexts for learners to practice using those concepts.
Conversational:	Learning is inherently a social, dialogical process (Duffy & Cunningham, 1996). That is, given a problem or task, people naturally seek out opinions and ideas form others. Technologies can support this conversational process by connecting learners across an organisation or across the world. When learners become part of knowledge-building communities they learn that there are multiple ways of viewing the world and multiple solutions to most of its problems.
Reflective:	Learners should be required by technology-based learning to articulate their actions, the decisions they make, the strategies the use, and the solutions that are generated. When they articulate what they have learned and reflect on the processes and decisions that were entailed by the process, they understand more and are better able to use the knowledge that they have constructed in new situations.

The implications of placing learners in this technology-based environment fundamentally affect pedagogical approaches to learning. An interesting subtext to this approach may be the design of the internet itself: as Agre (1999, p.3) points out, the Internet was originally designed for the scientific community. As a result, its underlying design features reflect that community's high capacity for self-regulation and openness. Applications can be used to represent knowledge that is generalisable to content in different subjects; learners are engaged in critical thinking about the subject; and, as skills are integrated into the learner’s schemata, they become transferable to other subjects (1996). From a practical viewpoint, Mindtools can be developed for applications the learner is already familiar with, and that are non-content specific - the classic example Jonassen gives is semantic organisation using databases (1998). Similarly, computers and the internet enable the learner to engage with microworlds that allow the learner to experience multiple representations or simulation of real-world phenomena and which provide immediate feedback when learners attempt to solve problems (1996).

References:

Agre, P. E. (1999). Life after cyberspace. EASST Review, 18(2), pp.3-5.

Carr, C. Jonassen, D. H. & Hsiu-Ping, Y. (1998) Computers as Mindtools for Engaging Learners in Critical Thinking [Internet] TechTrends 43(2). pp.24-32. March 1998

Constructivism Pt.9: Mindtools cont'd

David H Jonassen, with his colleagues Chad Carr and Hsiu-Ping Yeuh in Computers as Mindtools for Engaging Learners in Critical Thinking, (1998) proposes that learning is an active and creative process in that information is processed “mindfully” (p.30), since the learner not only collects information but also constructs a format for representing that information and transforming it into knowledge rather than merely aggregating units of information. This active creation of knowledge reflects the learner's particular understanding and conception of the information, their own act of [knowledge] creation requires a relevant, environmental context.

Jonassen argues that while there are

numerous solutions to over-reliance on single formalisms for knowledge representation, an effective method (though not the only method) for supporting the representation of learner knowledge through multiple formalisms is to use computers as Mindtools to represent their knowledge. Mindtools are knowledge construction tools that learners learn with, not from. In this way, learners function as interpreters, organizers, and designers of their personal knowledge. Each Mindtool uses a different formalism for representing learners' knowledge, engaging a different set of critical cognitive skills.

(2000, p.1)

He posits that technology, and particularly networked computers provide an appropriate environment for Mindtools to function. Jonassen (1994) identifies eight characteristics of the constructivist learning environment (see Table 1). Computer-based technologies should be used to keep learners active, constructive, collaborative, intentional, complex, contextual, conversational, and reflective (pp.28-32) (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 the cognitive web (“Design of constructivist learning environments,” 2007)

References:

Carr, C. Jonassen, D. H. & Hsiu-Ping, Y. (1998) Computers as Mindtools for Engaging Learners in Critical Thinking [Internet] TechTrends 43(2). pp.24-32. March 1998

Constructivism Pt.8: Mindtools

In 2001, David Jonassen argued that “most e-learning replicates the worst features of face-to-face instruction. So, it may be cheaper to ‘deliver’ knowledge over the Internet, but it will not be more effective” (“Interview with Professor David Jonassen”, 2001). He correctly identified that at the time e-learning was on the ascender of the hype curve, and that e-learning was being perceived as the latest panacea for all of businesses ills (2001). He considered that one of the elements of “substantive change in businesses and universities is to care enough about learning to invest the effort to truly understand its requirements and to create meaningful learning experiences to engage them” (2001). However, as businesses in particular, but also third-level institutions operate from the demands of the “bottom line …meaningful learning” (2001) was seen as being simply too expensive to produce. “So, both entities tell their learners about the world and expect them to fill in all of the gaps required to be able to practice” (2001). His analysis and experience of the e-learning industry in the period 1995-2002 reflects Jonassen’s observations; many, if not most, e-learning content production organisations approached the process of producing content as simply ‘webifying’ extant static content.

If I may digress for a moment I’d like to give you an example of this approach. The Irish e-learning company the Educational Multimedia Group (EMG) – where I served as Digital Media Manager from 1999 until 2002 – developed Microsoft Office User Specialist (MOUS) and European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL) courseware. Significant resources in the company were dedicated to the task of extracting static content from tests published by content partner Pearson Publishing and their subsidiaries Que Books and SAMS and ‘making it move.’ Content was authored in Macromedia Authorware 5 and adhered to a very linear learning model: The learner was ‘locked in’ to the content delivery mechanism with little opportunity to explore the content except via the channels facilitated by the format of the content. In many ways, the content replicated a textual approach to information delivery – the learner could move forward or backwards (as one does with a book), could navigate between lessons and so forth, but the real potential inherent in multimedia and multimodal delivery of content was not actualised. The learner typically used the courseware in isolation, with little interaction with fellow learners, and while an attempt was made to integrate an electronic performance support system (EPSS), it was not integrated into the actual application the learner was studying, but into a simulacrum of the application available on a CD-ROM that needed to be loaded into the system and launched as a separate program to be utilised. While this approach represented the state of the art at the time, the learner was presented with non-contiguous, fragmentary and even arbitrary (in that the designers were constrained to develop within the limitations of the resources at their disposal) courseware that did not provide the level of learning reinforcement and support – the authenticity that constructivists deem a prerequisite for effective learning – as from this perspective, there was an implicit assumption that learner could abstract the appropriate knowledge into an environment where it could be used (Brown, Collins & Duguid, 1989, p.32). This “breach between learning and use” (p.32) is, the authors of Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning contend, is a consequence of the “didactic systems” (p.32) operated by educational institutions, where knowledge is treated “as an integral, self-sufficient substance” without contextual meaning.

References:

Brown, J. S. Collins, C. & Duguid (1989) Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning [Internet] Educational Researcher 18(1), pp. 32-42, Jan-Feb 1989. Available from: http://tiger.coe.missouri.edu/%7Ejonassen/courses/CLE/index.html [Accessed January 12th 2007]

Exclusive Interview with Professor David Jonassen (2001) IN: elearningpost [Internet] Available from: http://www.elearningpost.com/articles/archives/
exclusive_interview_with_professor_david_jonassen [Accessed 12th January 2007]

The E-learning Curve blog

Welcome to my blog, The E-Learning Curve.

I guess I'll start out by explaining where the name is derived from; we're all familiar with the phrase "learning curve", though much like the termitself, there is much discussion over what the phrase actually means.

Historically, the fundamental concept of the learning curve as a means to measure learning and retention was posited in the 19th Century by Hermann Ebbinghaus; later the term acquired a broader meaning. The learning curve effect for example describes the phenomenon, "the more times a task has been performed, the less time will be required on each subsequent iteration." In a sense, that is one of my ambitions for this blog; the more I use it to describe my ongoing experiences and development as an e-learning professional, the better I will become at

1. capturing and implementing the information and
2. interpreting and finding meaning in what I write
   

So that brings me neatly to the elearning curve. I define an elearning curve as

the facility to learn and transfer newly-acquired skills and knowledge through a web-based medium; the emergence of new and the enhancement of current concepts, procedures, and practises in learning, based upon multifarous cognitive events.

Yes, I know that this is subjective. AND I know that this definition leaves a lot to be desired. But its a work-in-progress and it will change over time.

This blog is a mindtool: computer applications that, when used by learners to represent what they know, engages them in critical thinking about the content they are studying (Jonassen, 1996).

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References
Computers as Mindtools for Engaging learners in Critical Thinking. Techtrends, v43 n2 p24-32