Zen of Teaching

3er encuentro de educadores puertorriqueños
Ponce 17/3/2012

Zen of Teaching
<Myths of Teaching, Learning & Technology>
With a look at Siemens’ Connectivism</>
<Antonio Vantaggiato</>
Universidad del Sagrado Corazón

zenofteaching.us
Friday, March 16, 2012

http://slidesha.re/zenofteaching
Everything is on-line!


The limits of my language
are the limits of my world
-L. Wittgenstein


This video says it all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WW_dBQPAeDY


The computer is everywhere
The cellphone is everywhere
The Web is everywhere


Welcome, William
Hamlet (Facebook edition, XXI Century)
http://www.angelﬁre.com/art2/antwerplettuce/hamlet.html


"Computers won't begin to have a real impact
on education until they are seen as the
message rather than the
medium. Computers ought not be a new
means of producing a slide show.”
-R. Schank

Web 2.0 > Learning 2.0

The Web: Fundamental
pedagogic environment
(Suter 2005)


Also, a living environment


What is wrong with Higher Ed?
I mean, is there really something
wrong? Or it’s just a media fad?


The Education Bubble?


Peter Thiel - unCollege
“If Harvard were really the best education, if
it makes that much of a difference, why not
franchise it so more people can attend? Why
not create 100 Harvard afﬁliates?” ... “It’s
something about the scarcity and the status.
In education your value depends
on other people failing.”
Peter Thiel: We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education.
Sarah Lacy, TechCrunch, April 10, 2011: http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/10/peter-thiel-were-in-a-bubble-and-its-not-the-internet-its-higher-education/


Quality?
Arum & Roska:

45% of students showed “no signiﬁcant improvement”
over one year of study (freshmen in fall 2005 through spring
2007). 36% showed no improvement after the whole 4 years
of college “education”.
“American higher education is characterized by limited
or no learning for a large proportion of students.”
“Your So-Called Education”, The New York Times May 14, 2011; http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/opinion/15arum.html?_r=3

“Large numbers of the students were making their way through college with minimal exposure to rigorous
coursework, only a modest investment of effort and little or no meaningful improvement in skills like writing
and reasoning. In a typical semester, for instance, 32 percent of the students did not take a single course with
more than 40 pages of reading per week, and 50 percent did not take any course requiring more than 20
pages of writing over the semester. The average student spent only about 12 to 13 hours per week studying
— about half the time a full-time college student in 1960 spent studying.”


Still...

“Universities continue to
serve as remarkable
engines of
innovation”
-S. Johnson

The Myths


Myth Zero

Learning
Happens in the
Classroom.
Because we
deliver
instruction


Lecture
Etymology
14th century: action of
reading, that which is read,
from the Latin lectus, pp. of
legere "to read."
oral discourse on a given
subject before an audience for
purposes of instruction is from
the 16th century.

Verb "to lecture" ~ 1590.

c. 1350

...Students “sit” through a semester
worth of lectures, while “distance”
students “watch” online.

Live vs. Distance Learning: Measuring the Differences
From The New York Times, November 5, 2010 / http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/us/05collegeside.html?_r=1


Myth Zero.1

...Ergo
Method is key
The Correct Method
... Learning
combined with Right
Content and Right
happens!!!!!
Teacher and...


Myth Zero.2

... Without studying (or action)
And no responsibility!! [Upon the student]
The Student: Namely, she who studies!!!


Studying

There is so little “studying” going on in Colleges
that “there is no compelling understanding among
students of why they are there. [...] They may spend
Monday in ‘19th Century Women’s Literature’,
Tuesday in “Animal Behavior’, and Wednesday in
‘Eastern Philosophy’...”
What is a college education really worth?, The Washington Post,
June 3, 2011.


More Connections

Study, the word less used
in education.


“To Study”

The Road Less Traveled

Zero: Number of
occurrences of verb “to
study” within Siemens’
book Knowing Knowledge.


Is connectivism a learning
theory?
Who cares.
-G. Siemens


Myth Zero.3

At end of Lecture,
learning can be
Consequently... assessed,
by means of...
Standardized Testing!!!


PISA
{Not this one}


PISA, Finland

No standardized
testing Accountability is
something that is
Equity
left when
No word for responsibility has
Accountability in been subtracted.
Finnish --Pasi Sahlberg, director of Finnish Ministry
of Education's Center for International
Mobility

What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success

Anu Partanen - The Atlantic, 29 December 2011
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/


Myth
Content


Content & LMS
“Blackboard is itself an embodiment of the university culture that
Neary and Winn rightly ﬁnd so troubling: students cycle through a
system that structurally, aesthetically and
rhetorically reinforces the notions that
education is consumption, the faculty
member is a content provider, the classroom
is hierarchical, and learning is closed”
Luke Waltzer, On EdTech and the Digital Humanities; http://lukewaltzer.com/on-edtech-and-the-digital-humanities

Neary, Mike and Winn, Joss (2009) The student as producer: reinventing the student experience in higher
education. In: The future of higher education: policy, pedagogy and the student experience. Continuum, London,
pp. 192-210.


Let's shutter our "learning
management systems" and build
"understanding augmentation
networks" instead, moving away
from educational assembly lines
toward intellectual ecosystems of
interest and curiosity.
--Gardner Campbell


Myth
The Shallows


“ The enormous
multiplication of books in
every branch of
“ The multitude
of books is a great
knowledge is one of the
evil. There is no
greatest evils of this age;
measure of limit to
since it presents one of
this fever for
the most serious obstacles
writing.
to the acquisition of
--Martin Luther
correct information.
--Edgar Allan Poe
As quoted by Clay Shirky in his rebuttal article Does the Internet Make You Smarter?; The Wall Street Jornal, June 4, 2010; http://
online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704025304575284973472694334.html


Myth
Death of The Book


Death of the
Book
Ceci tuera cela (via
Eco & McLuhan)
Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame, Frollo,
comparing a book with his old cathedral,
says: "Ceci tuera cela" (The book will kill
the cathedral, the alphabet will kill
images).

McLuhan, comparing a Manhattan
discotheque to the Gutenberg Galaxy, said
"Ceci tuera cela."

Nunberg, G. (1997) The Future of the Book. Berkeley; University of
California Press. Eco’s afterword is available online at http://
www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_future_of_book.html.


Death of an Industry?

it makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a
publishing industry, because the core problem publishing
solves - the incredible difﬁculty, complexity, and expense
of making something available to the public - has
stopped being a problem.
--Clay Shirky
Clay Shirky’s Blog, 13 March 2009: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable; http://www.shirky.com/weblog/
2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable


Change of Focus (Shirky)

Save books!
Save Society!
Save newspapers!
(Do whatever works)
(Preserve current
institutions)


Death of...


Back-door Entrance (1)


Back-door Entrance (2)


Interview
Openness


Wikipedia Didn’t Kill Britannica.
Windows Did
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/03/wikipedia-didnt-kill-brittanica-windows-did/


Myth
Curricula / Infrastructure


Departments
Departmentalization of knowledge and its effects

Mark C. Taylor, a religion scholar at Columbia University, has
a vision of a University where “zones of inquiry can be
organized around a broad range of topics: Mind, Body. Law,
Information, Networks, Language, … and Water.” Can you
imagine a Water program? It could “bring together people
in the humanities, arts, sciences... with professional schools
like Medicine, law...”
“End the University as We Know It”; The New York Times of 27 April 2009,
Mark C. Taylor


Dave Winer proposes

“We should aim to recreate the
environment that made the Internet
itself spring into existence, in
academic institutions.”
--Dave Winer

Scripting News, 31 May 2011; http://scripting.com/stories/2011/05/31/isThereAnEducationBubble.html


Myth
Teachers: Can We Be Replaced By Machines?


Interview
Your Job As A Teacher

Myth
Technology


Integrating Technology into
the Curriculum


Technologies!
Language
Paper, pencil,
blackboard, BOOK
Humanity is our
ﬁrst technology.
We are tools.
--K. Kelly

Technology enables modalities such as
constructivism, etc. (Norman & Spohrer
1996)

+ Signiﬁcant
transformation of the
teaching-learning process (Hannaﬁn 2003)


Questions Not Worth
Asking
Is online learning more or less effective than
learning in a classroom?

Who cares. That question is irrelevant. Society
answered the need to use technology through its
broad adoption of the web/internet/online medium.
--G. Siemens


Technology

We shape tools We shape our
Tools shape us
buildings; thereafter
Tools change us
We change tools
they shape us.
Repeat. --Winston Churchill


Myth
Don’t Need Internet / Twitter / Whatever...
OR
Turn Those Devices Off!


The Twitter-ed revolution


La revolución del clic


Myth
Science vs Humanities / STEM vs STEAM
Liberal Arts


Liberal Arts (1)

Liberal Arts include
Liberal, not as in Not
Mathematics, Science,
Conservative
Music, Art.
Liberal, as in Freeing
Don’t include Edu;
(the Mind)
Business; Engineering.


Liberal Arts (2)

Free Thinking Technical / Specialized
Burgeois value? Down-to-Earth edu
Ample culture to do For jobs
exactly what?


Myths
Styles of Learning
Copyright
Mobile Learning
etc.


Now What?


Now What?
Innovations


MOOC
“What we found was that in a MOOC, instead of
the classroom being the center, it becomes just
one node of the network of social interactions."
--G. Siemens


Aprendizaje
::
(crear) Conexiones


Aprendizaje
::
Navegación


superﬁcie
::
profundidad
McLuhan
Baricco
Los nuevos bárbaros

“Hell is a place where
nothing connects to
nothing”
-T.S. Elliot (via M. Núñez)


Ideas As Connections

PLN

Medios externos que llenarán ese
espacio entre lo que soy y lo que
puedo ser, en cada momento de mi
vida.
-D. Reig


Aprendizaje ~ Conectivismo

Proceso /
Conectar nodos


Aprender
::
Conectar
(ideas :: opiniones ::
personas :: nodos de
conocimiento)

Interview
We have always underestimated the value of
access to each other. -Clay Shirky

Conectar

CREAR
enlaces


Papert, Minsky & Kay (2005):
• The key educational task is to
make connections
between powerful ideas and
passionate interests.
• Teach to think deeply
• Teach to think rigorously


Aprendizaje ~ Conectivismo

Conocer más
es más importante
de lo ya conocido


Learning
Sense Making


Change
Content
:::
Conversations
in network


http://slidesha.re/conectivismo10


Khan Academy
Udacity
P2PU


Stanford MOOCs

15.0%

11.3%

7.5%

AI campus

3.8%
AI
Retention rate

200 30 15.0% Machine Learning
AI
campus 0%
AI 160000 23000 14.4%
DB
Machine 104000 13000 12.5%
Learning

DB 92000 7000 7.6%


"We're going to have
detailed records on
thousands of students who
have learned these skills,
many of whom will want to
make those skills available
to employers," said Mr.
Evans, the Virginia
professor. "So if a recruiter
is looking for the hundred
best people in some
geographic area that know
about machine learning,
that's something we could
provide, for a fee. I think it's
the cusp of a revolution."


http://ds106.us

Digital Storytelling (Jim Groom et al., 2011)


What role do blogs, [_____] play
in the classroom or online
learning?
Any role you want.
-G. Siemens


Learning...
Learners should
experience chaos &
confusion
Autonomy is key
Learners in Control of
their learning
Openness

Not bad... just <108> slides!
antonio vantaggiato
e-mail me > avantaggiato@sagrado.edu
visit Skate of the Web > blogs.netedu.info
zenofteaching.us


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