Summary: A multimedia and in depth learning ecology lesson is available. Slides and Audio. Whether you are after content learning or metalearning, George Siemens offers understanding and advice on how you creates a learning ecology -- and supports the subsequent evolution of quality . His ideas will apply online or off.

PS. You can navigate in nonlinear fashion --attending to voice, or slides or graphics, as you like.

His graphic above (slide 19 in his audio and video sequence), captures important segments of the depth complexity of a learning ecology.

PPS. Nota bene. This delivery demonstrates what can be done with powerpoint. Further, because he has used "Articulate" - a Windows-friendly powerpoint-augmenting software -- you get more features and don't have to worry about downloading, compressing or decompressing. :o]

[George's Material came to me via Will Richardson's Weblogg-Ed ]

Summary: The resources abound for technically inclined teachers and motivated and technically inclined learners.

The picture makes sense when you've read the Jan 25 entry on Bee-Coming A Webhead. It's all really happening.

Michael Coghlan is now presenting Hearing Online Voices in EFL/ESL on Yahoo Messenger for the BaW 06 Evo Session. 30 people present, among whom 3 Brazilians (Carla Arena, Erika Cruvinel from Brasilia and myself in Sao Paulo). Aiden is explaining how she participated in an audio exchange with Michael and how the students became the main protagonists in the chat. Michael describes how Chris Jones (Arizona), Anne Fox (Denmark) conducted exchanges online with their classes. Buthaina (Kuwait) had webheads listen to students' oral presentations and ask questions. Aiden and Michael have recorded wonderful messages for my blogging workshop on the Summer School Podomatic.

It's almost to the point where people are "taking it for granted". Scary -- cause we still have to pay attention to whether we are teaching!!

[technorati: weblogging, edublogging, onlinelearning]

Summary: Bill Wong's parents and I mull over what Bill should learn next. I've just finished a conference with the teacher. Now we explore the same topic with Bill's parents.

The parental take on the "short and sweet" is probably neither short nor particularly sweet to any of the others involved in the question of what and how to teach.

[See my earlier entries in the What to Teach sequence of entries. The first entry is here , and the second is here . ]

This entry and the one which will follow will focus on parental and individual takes on exactly the same profile of skills.]

* A reminder: Bill Wong is a hypothetical person. His profile does represent, however, the very real complexity that each person, each learner brings to the discussion of what to learn/what to teach.

---

Now, instead of discussing the results with principal and superintendent or Bill's teacher, I work with Bill's parents to think about Bill's test results. What do they think should be taught?
Mr. and Mrs. Wong have requested a review of Bill's test results. They want to plan his middle school and high school education. As we sit down they both glance at their copy of Bill's Profile of test results (A copy just above ).
Mr.Wong: Is this some kind of report card or something? We called for this meeting to talk about Bill's future.	Spike Hall: It's Bill's Achievement Profile. I've taken all of his achievement test results and summarized them in this graph. This graph can really help us think about Bill's future.
Mr. W makes sure his copy is the same as mine and then notes, " It's pretty complicated , I see that, but I don't see any of the courses he's signed up for on the chart!. What's it have to do with what we're meetings for -- And what're the vertical lines about and the colored dots and so on. (Mrs. W nods in agreement.)	Spike Hall: Ok. Each vertical line is an area of development. For example, gross motor development translates into, say, athletics. Each vertical line is, like gross motor (athletics), an area of important development that starts with what you and I and Bill -- everybody-- generally bring into our first days in a school and ends with what some  of us master in our late teens. Generally speaking, roughly one hundred things, things that need to be learned pretty much in order, are, presented during each year of school. Of course there are individual differences and school to school differences in how much is presented and how much is learned.
Mrs. W asks, "Are those differences important?" Oh -- and what is that horizontal line across the graph. Is that important? I see some of his dots, five, are above the line and a couple are a little bit below?	Spike Hall: That's an important question Mrs. W. That line represents what other boys and girls of Bill's age are capable of doing -- on the average. You can see --
Mr. W interrupts to say: Fine Motor, Gross Motor, Math and Ethics are the ones that are obviously above and Receptive Language and Expressive Language are below. What does all of that mean?	In everyday speak? Bill's capable of reading and writing and speaking but, at least on tests and during observations, he comes up a shade under the class average in those skills. But in athletics, in penmanship and in drawing and in knowing and sharing what he considers right and wrong he is outstanding. Sometimes his skills in communication -- or  his reluctance to communicate--, I'm not sure which -- your experience at home may help clear up that mystery -- get in the way of his communicating that strong sense of right and wrong and of justice. Even with communications skills exactly as they are he's clearly a leader, a leader for the good, in my opinion, in these areas.
Mr. W: So he's high in some areas and low in others. Are we supposed to do something because of that?	Spike Hall: I'd say yes! All of us should build from this profile-- at home and at school-- to construct what all of us, Bill most of all,  would consider a desirable, doable set of possibilitiees. We can, I believe, build from Bill's high skills (and high interests) in his schooling to help him  grow in all his  areas. Now that we have this information, we can use it to tailor how we advise Bill on activities and how we encourage him to take on new projects and to set goals. In other words, with this material in hand you and I and Bill can all make life more challenging and more interesting to Bill. At the same time, we can help him see how other areas (math, for example) can support the growth areas that he really does like.
Mr. W: Makes sense so far. But we need to talk over the results with Bill. It's ok, right? (Hall nods emphatically). He's never seen this kind of thing before.	Spike Hall: Makes sense. Then maybe we can have a follow up with all of us and Bill putting together a plan or outline that builds upon Bill's interests and strengths to take him farther on the path he seems to be on.
Mr. W: Hold it. What if he changes his mind three years from now? What if he wants to, all of a sudden, focus on, say, poetry -- which is not interesting to him now.	Spike Hall: That would be his choice. The idea isn't to make him a slave to his best skills or his least skills. Rather-- it is to have his skills work for him and for his evolving life interests (and your backing for them). The idea is for him and you be in the driver's seat when it comes to building his future. When he has the inclination to shift his priorities our job isn't to stop him or to say, blindly, "Go for it!". Our job, at least as far as I see it, is to help him learn and to help him project the consequences of his actions and plans into the future . We would weigh those future consequences against his needs and our greater experience and report our "findings" to Bill. As he gets older and more "in command" our reports become more and more advisory -- a back-up resource to his own evolving command of his future prospects.
Mr. W: Sounds good. Mrs Wong: Good but work too!! Hmm!! But nothing we wouldn't be doing anyway. This is the first time I remember thinking that school and home we're obviously working for the same thing.	Spike Hall: Nice to hear you say that Mrs. W. Yes it will be work and much communication for all of us. I'll look forward to hearing from you two and Bill after you've had your talk about these results and what they mean. Let me know If I can help as you and Bill get into thinking about his growth plan. However your discussions turn out, it would probably a good idea for all of us to get together in the next 2-3 weeks. Next time your house? I'm really looking forward to our next discussion!!

Five minutes later Mr. and Mrs. Wong' and Hall exit the school building on their way to their cars. As Mr and Mrs. drive away Hall waves and smiles. They're too busy talking to notice! He nods his head, smiles and gets into his own car.

Summary: I have written admiringly of John Taylor Gatto before. I am provoked to do so again by Mike Kilen's moving summary and critique of mandatory schooling (aka the factory model of education). There are large dangers to 'factorified' education; the worst, IMHO, is each student's loss of relationship to her or his potential. What's left? The sole decision: as to how much one commits to, or resists, becoming an "appropriately trained" worker participant in a one-size-fits-all vision of existence .

To quote Gatto (via Mike Kilen in today's Des Moines Register):

"To raise kids to get a job rather than find a way to be useful in the world[italics mine*, SPH] is an act of murder," Gatto said.

"In a perfect world, he would close all government schools, use the money to pay parents or other experts to teach kids and sponsor apprenticeships."

"It's not going to happen although a growing number are taking education into their own hands by home schooling.[sigma]

[sigma]So Gatto would start by taking the profit out of teaching kids the relatively easy tasks of reading and arithmetic. He'd eliminate the administrators and school boards. He'd have small, neighborhood schools and measure performance by individualized instruments while teaching themes instead of subjects. He would allow flexible time and space for students to think critically and perform creatively, all within a framework of core values of work, duty, obligation, loyalty, service and fun.

---

*I'd rephrase more explicitly to say, "find a way to become a satisfactory version of one's vision of one's unique self and at the same time be useful (i.e, contributing to the ongoing project of righteous survival for the immediate and extended community )

Links:

• Gatto's web site
• His acclaimed and Insightful The Underground History of American Education
• An audio clip from "The Paradox of Extended Childhood"
• His link to World Prosperity - " A group that is dedicated to defining the root causes of social dysfunction, the most fundamental of which is a dysfunctional educational system."

Summary: Bill Wong's parents and I mull over what Bill should learn next. We've just finished a conference with the teacher. Now we explore the same topic with Bill's parents.

The parental take on the "short and sweet" is probably neither short nor particularly sweet to any of the others involved in the question of what and how to teach.

[See my earlier entries in the What to Teach sequence of entries, First entry here , and the second here . This entry and the one which will follow will focus on parental and individual takes on exactly the same profile of skills.
* A reminder: Bill Wong is a hypothetical person. His profile does represent, however, the very real complexity that each person, each learner brings to the discussion of what to learn/what to teach.

---

Now Bill's Parents and I process Bill's Results. What do they think should be taught?
Mr. and Mrs. Wong have requested a review of Bill's test results. They want to plan his middle school and high school education. As we sit down they both glance at their copy of Bill's Profile of test results(Copy just above )
Mr.Wong: Is this some kind of report card or something? We called for this meeting to talk about Bill's future.	Spike Hall: It's Bill's Achievement Profile. I've taken all of his achievement test results and summarized them in this form. This form or graph can really help us think about Bill's future.
Mr. W makes sure his copy is the same as mine and then notees, " It's pretty complicated , I see that, but I don't see any of the courses he's signed up for on the chart!. What's it have to do with what we're meetings for -- And what're the vertical lines about and the colored dots and so on. Mrs. W nods in agreement.	Spike Hall: Ok. Each vertical line is an area of development. For example, gross motor development translates into, say, athletics. Each vertical line is an, like athletics, area of important development that starts with what you and I and Bill -- everybody-- generally bring into our first days a Kindergarten class and ends with what most of us master in our late teens. Generally speaking, roughly one hundred things, things that need to be learned pretty much in order, are, learned each year of school. Of course there are individual differences and school to school differences.
Mrs. W asks, "Are those differences important?" Oh -- and what is that horizontal line across the graph. Is that important? I see some of his dots, five, are above the line and a couple are a little bit below?	Spike Hall: That's an important question Mrs. W. That line represents what other boys and girls of Bill's age are capable of doing -- on the average. You can see --
Mr. W interrupts to say: Fine Motor, Gross Motor, Math and Ethics are the ones that are obviously above and Receptive Language and Expressive Language are below. What does all of that mean.	In everyday speak? Bill's capable of reading and writing and speaking but, at least on tests and during observations, he comes up a shade under the class average in those skills. But in athletics, in penmanship and in drawing and in knowing and sharing what he considers right and wrong he is outstanding. Sometimes his skills in communication -- or reluctance, I'm not sure, your experience at home may help clear up that mystery -- get in the way of his strong sense of right and wrong and of justice. But he's clearly a leader, a leader for the good, in my opinion, in these areas.
Mr. W: So he's high in some areas and low in others. Are we supposed to do something because of that?	Spike Hall: I'd say yes! We build on this at home and at school. We can, I believe, be pretty darn active in involving Bill's high skills (and high interests) in his schooling and in helping him bring enhance the other skills to support his strong areas. I believe that, now that we have this information, we can use it to tailor how we advise Bill on activities and how we encourage him to take on new projects and to set goals. In other words, with this material in hand you and I and Bill can all make life more challenging and more interesting to Bill. At the same time, we can help him see how other areas (math for example) can support the growth areas that he really does like and with which he has such considerable skill.
Mr. W: Makes sense so far. But we need to talk over the results with Bill. It's ok, right? (Hall nods emphatically). He's never seen this kind of thing before.	Spike Hall: Makes sense. Then maybe we can have a follow up with all of us and Bill putting together a plan or outline that builds upon Bill's interests and strengths to take him farther on the path he seems to be on.
Mr. W: Hold it. What if he changes his mind three years from now? What if he wants to, all of a sudden, focus on, say, poetry -- which is not interesting to him now.	Spike Hall: That would be his choice. The idea isn't to make him a slave to his best skills or his least skills. Rather-- it is to have his skills work for him and for his life interests (and your backing for them) be in the driver's seat rather than some anonymous and bureaucratic textbook series. When he has the inclination to shift his priorities our job isn't to stop him or to say, blindly, "Go for it!". Our job, at least as far as I see it, is to help him learn and to help him project the consequences of his actions and plans into the future -- and to weigh those consequences against his needs and our greater experience.
Mr. W: Sounds good. Mrs Wong: Good but work too. But nothing we wouldn't be doing anyway. This is the first time I remember thinking that school and home we're obviously working for the same thing.	Spike Hall: Nice to hear you say that Mrs. W. I'll look forward to hearing from you two and Bill after you've had your first talk. If I can help interpret or back up interpretation at school with Bill in class let me know. Then we'll all get together in the next 2-3 weeks. I appreciate your coming over and your kind comments so much!!

The Wong's and Hall exit school building on way to cars. Mr and Mrs. drive away having an animated conversation. Hall waves and smiles. They're too busy to notice!

Summary: Real Person and I talk about the Meaning of Life and Learning For Bill Wong. RP and I begin to talk about developmental profiling in general and as it would benefit instruction in the classroom (in RP's case a High School classroom). (This will be the first of a series of entries on how classroom activity and the learner's cutting edge can or should relate to each other.)

---

---

We Talk about Bill, Potential and Real Life.
RP and I are sitting in my office after he's had a rough and demanding day in his High School History Classroom. We're planning later classes in his Masters program. As we are just finishing up our planning he looks over at this chart that's been sitting next to his papers. (Copy just above )
RP: Whatya got there, some kind of graph. I remember you showing us progress graphs in the assessment class.	Spike Hall: It's Bill's Achievement Profile. I've taken all of his achievement test results and summarized them in this form.
RP moves to my side of the table so he can see it better. So what're the vertical lines about and the colored dots on them.	Spike Hall: Ok. Each vertical line is an area of development that starts with what kids generally bring into the beginning of a Kindergarten class and ends with what the best kids master in their late teens. All in all, roughly one hundred things, things that need to be learned pretty much in order, are supposed to be learned each year in each area.
RP squirms a bit, picks up the chart and reads labels, rotates chart first vertically then horizontally
RP: Okay, I get the basic idea, sort of. What are each of the areas?	Spike Hall: GK: General Knowledge. That which is frequently a major component of so-called IQ tests. Material that should make sense on news shows, that comes up in the newspaper, how everyday things work, safety, history, that sort of thing. RL: Receptive Language. Reading, Listening and Signing recognition are examples. In general, receptive language involves: The ability to process incoming language. This requires ability to receive some signal (as examples the word "dog" as said by another, "dog" as signed by another or the word "dog" on the printed page). This ability requires a set of "words" that are recognizable by the individual. The ability to process complex linguistic messages requires memory and grammatical decoding skills as well. EL: Expressive Language. Writing, Speaking and Signing are examples. In general, expressive language involves: The ability to process an outgoing message. This requires the formulation of an intent, the translation of that intent into a set of semantic items, the grammatic connection of those items into a message and the generation of signals appropriate to those grammatically connected items The ability to process complex linguistic messages requires short-term memory as well as the skills already mentioned. FM: Fine Motor. Fine motor skills: The ability to coordinate hand in small spaces to accomplish such things as handwriting, carving, puzzle assembly, knitting, sewing, etc. Usually aided by senses of sight and touch GM: Gross Motor. The movement of the body in space as in walking, running, tumbling, gymnastics, swimming. Athletics of competitive and noncompetitive forms generally involve the demonstration of skilled gross motor skills. Dancing involves the above plus the ability to move as influenced by the rhythm and even mood of music. ML: Math and Logic. Perception of, reasoning and communication about amount, amount and space(as in geometry and trigonometry) and logical relations as they have bearing on various understandings concerning everyday and professional existence. Soc: Social Skills. Ability to respond to and send messages which are socially effective in the context. This would include manners, perception of emotions, expressing emotions effectively, leading, following, cooperating, negotiating. E: Ethics, Ethical Skills. The ability to perceive the application of moral and ethical principles to practical and general situations involving individual, small and large group behavior. The ability to not only perceive but to influence the ethical practices of others would combine both social and ethical domains.
RP has become increasingly agitated while all of this explanation has taken place. His foot is tapping and his face is a little redder than it was a few minutes ago.
RP: [Splutter, cough … ]. I'm having trouble getting behind this project--- connecting it to what I do, which is teach History to kids who start out having no use for it and too often end up the same way. I have attendance problems, I have a Department head who thinks videotapes and DVDs 75% of the time are the answer. Help me make the connections Spike -- I'm not seeing them!	Spike Hall: Okay. Let's start with a premise, namely, that each student will learn well and easily if instructional material, content and process are at or near her or his "readiness level", also that it will not go wellor easily if the material is too far below or above "readiness level". Look now at Bill, particularly at his "profile". What do you see?
RP: Well, for one, his profile has hills and valleys. The hills, I suppose, represent strength and the valley's weakness. Right?	Spike Hall: Close enough but with some qualifications. First, it will depend on how you define strength. If one defines strength as "power" with a material (say social skills) that is greater than that one one's peers. Then yes. But it will depend on the individual. The goal-directed won't be so pleased or sense themselves so powerful if even a relative social strength in social skills or logic or whatever isn't sufficient to realize self-set goals. But, yes, let's talk of strength as defined by one's power relative to one's peers. How does Bill measure up in that sense?
RP: Well I wouldn't know about Bill except with reference to himself-- that is how many objectives out of the total K-13 set he has mastered. In some areas more than others. Those are self- and sequence- related strengths right?	Spike Hall: Right. That's the way I see it too. But we also have that funny dashed line going across the chart. That represents the average that is expected of people who are the same age.
RP: That would allow us to compare him to the "norm". Ok, I get it and on that basis he's quite strong in in Fine Motor and Gross Motor skills, and really good with Ethics; and more or less average in other areas.	Spike Hall: Do you see any implications from this pattern of average to terrific in various skill areas?
RP: Maybe. Hmm. Maybe the Ethics would be useful as we look at political history or social dynamics or the conduct of school board and city council meetings, etc.	Spike Hall: I agree. But it isn't just benefit to the class. It's benefit to him. If you ask things of him and instruct him in a way that respects and interacts with his present skills and beliefs you will be more likely to help him make significant growth. It doesn't have to be a totally different curriculum to do that. You can still have the American History textbook play a significant part. But how you use it can be adjusted to skills, values and profiles, to the benefit, and learning pleasure, of all.
Rowanda F., fellow faculty member and advisor to RP, drops by and is invited to sit down. She listens a bit while looking over the Bill W chart. She gets an intensity of look and is clearly about to say something. Spike and RP look expectantly in her direction. Rowanda: You two are obviously onto something hot and, as much as I've been able to gather getting here late, it seems really worthwhile. But - hey --I'm concerned about something too. Where is it that Bill's aims, ambitions and concerns are folded in? [Rowanda continues] One of the most powerful forces for success in Bill's (and any other student's] program has to be what s/he wants, what s/he will commit to, what goals are driving actions right now. Even if we keep the subject matter organization, this really should be questioned, but even if we did, we have to have Bill sitting in the driver's seat and with us as advisors. This chart will give Bill insight, us too. But it shouldn't call the tune. It's not that Bill is low in X and high in Y that is important. What is centrally important is what Bill wants to do now and what he wants to become. The fact that he is high in Fine Motor skills and Ethics may inspire choices of goals or methods... but shouldn't BECOME the goals. [Rowanda concludes] Finally I don't see one assessment that I think is central if Bill is going to be in the driver's seat (and he should be). It has been called metalearning and deuterolearning -- but basically is how good he is at learning to learn. Having an understanding of how well he independently or with guidance learns to learn any given subject (for example the general subjects on this chart) is insight Bill needs as he tries simultaneously to find out who he is, what he wants and what he might be good at. [Rowanda exits] Sorry guys to introduce the subject and then exit but have an appointment for which I'm already 10 minutes late.
RP: Wow that's too much too fast but I think I've been swayed!!! At the same time I don't really know what this chart or expanded one Rawanda is referring to has to do with how I run my History class. More on that later.	Spike Hall: [laughing] She's always like that. Frays the nerves, at least in my case, but there's lots to be had by replaying what she says. In this case I've got two things to start with. The first one is that Bill has to be at the center. These test results are for Bill's guidance as he makes decisions; we are informational and planning resources, but it's his plan!! This is a far more radical idea either of us might realize. The second is the whole idea of learning to learn. If you accept the idea of Bill's being in charge of his learning -- and he is,ultimately, however much we insist on control of our classroom or class processes, then knowing just what his l-to-l skill in each area is important as he chooses what to do. Finally, he should probably understand how good he is at this central skill and what he can do about it. My mind is tired. Let's quit for now.
RP and Spike agree to let it go for the day. RP wants specifics and Spike promises to describe possible uses and classroom actions that are tuned more exactly to RP's history classroom.

[Stay tuned for further interactions. Bill Wong: Part II.]

Summary: Readiness theory would have us predict that learning will be real and non-trival to the extent that what is being taught about and how it is taught matches the content and learning strategies already "owned" by the learner. It seems that the education profession is quite comfortable with this as a general statement; however, the useful application of this maxim in classroom situations, i.e., something that results in improved student learning, is appallingly small . Class lectures and/or reading one chapter at a time from a text, as representative examples of current practices, are not good ways to maximize student learning. In this entry I offer one basis for understanding why this is so and then I sketch several ideas for making the ideal into the real.

Moving to Personalization from Large Group Instruction is a BIG Deal:

Assume that you have the objective sequences, tests, and instructional activities for several content areas planned; that map is lying in front of you. If you are teaching in an elementary school as a classroom teacher, you may have to teach each of thirty pupils in each of these content areas. If you are a secondary or adult-level teacher working in a typical situation, you may have as many as two or three content areas to cover for perhaps ninety to one hundred and fifty students.

Let's look at the elementary classroom. In that classroom, as stated before, you might be responsible for thirty students' progress in five curriculum areas. You would probably be responsible for reading, language arts, arithmetic, social studies, and science. As is illustrated in the first table, your personalization problems would be considerable. In these five areas you could, if each student had different objectives from all of the others in that area, have responsibility for personalizing in a classroom with instruction required for 150 (5 areas x 30 students) objectives.

Thankfully, since there are usually several objectives which are needed for more than one student, the required instruction would probably come closer to a distribution like that illustrated in the table below example (where instruction is required for approximately 85 objectives as the year begins ).

In such a situation there is no way that "whole class" lectures alone could be a useful instructional activity for each of the students depicted below (as x’s in the table below) . Even if your lesson was perfect, that lesson could only say the appropriate thing to a small fraction of your students (those who had sufficient skill levels to be able to learn from the concepts that you were using).

The other students might sit still, might even acquire pieces of the information here and there, but would not learn in the sense that you assumed or were hoping for.

The Personalizer's Dilemma
Reading		Language Arts		Arithmetic		Social Studies		Science
Obj. #	# of Students	Obj. #	# of Students	Obj. #	# of Students	Obj. #	# of Students	Obj. #	# of Students
1	--0--	1	--0--	1	--0--	1	--0--	1	--0--
2	--0--	2	--4--	2	--0--	2	--0--	2	--0--
3	--2--	3	--1--	3	--0--	3	--5--	3	--2--
4	--1--	4	--1--	4	--0--	4	--5--	4	--3--
5	--1--	5	--1--	5	--0--	5	--3--	5	--3--
6	--1--	6	--1--	6	--2--	6	--1--	6	--1--
7	--1--	7	--0--	7	--3--	7	--1--	7	--1--
8	--2--	8	--0--	8	--1--	8	--0--	8	--4--
9	--2--	9	--0--	9	--1--	9	--1--	9	--1--
10	--3--	10	--1--	10	--1--	10	--1--	10	--1--
11	--3--	11	--1--	11	--1--	11	--3--	11	--1--
12	--0--	12	--1--	12	--1--	12	--1--	12	--1--
13	--1--	13	--1--	13	--0--	13	--1--	13	--1--
14	--1--	14	--1--	14	--3--	14	--0--	14	--0--
15	--4--	15	--1--	15	--2--	15	--0--	15	--0--
16	--4--	16	--1--	16	--1--	16	--0--	16	--0--
17	--1--	17	--1--	17	--1--	17	--1--	17	--0--
18	--0--	18	--1--	18	--1--	18	--1--	18	--0--
19	--1--	19	--1--	19	--1--	19	--0--	19	--0--
20	--0--	20	--0--	20	--1--	20	--1--	20	--0--
21	--1--	21	--3--	21	--1--	21	--1--	21	--1--
22	--0--	22	--3--	22	--1--	22	--3--	22	--1--
23	--1--	23	--3--	23	--3--	23	--0--	23	--1--
24	--0--	24	--0--	24	--3--	24	--0--	24	--1--
25	--0--	25	--1--	25	--1--	25	--0--	25	--1--
26	--0--	26	--0--	26	--0--	26	--0--	26	--1--
27	--1--	27	--2--	27	--0--	27	--0--	27	--1--
28	--1--	28	--0--	28	--0--	28	--0--	28	--0--
29	--1--	29	--0--	29	--1--	29	--0--	29	--0--

You can probably see that this same sort of reasoning applies to any secondary or college classroom situation that you might describe. While there might be fewer subjects taught during the day, there would be more students. The likelihood of one textbook page or one lecture being appropriate for all students is virtually zero. The difficulty of managing the delivery of personalized instruction is at least as difficult for the secondary or college teacher as it is for the elementary teacher. And , if maximizing the rate of student mastery of (not exposure to) material is the goal , it is equally crucial to the success or failure of the secondary and college enterprise

Organizational Assumptions

Normally, we interact with people spontaneously, and in a 1, 2, 3, 4 at a time fashion. However, teaching and personalization are not "normal" relationships. The relationship in each is purposeful and planned. Personalization, when it occurs, requires the simultaneous distribution of a teacher's purposes, plans, and interactions among thirty people, at maximum; and at minimum (as in the reading example in Table 1), among four to six individuals or clusters of individuals.

In order to have the maximum impact upon all thirty individuals in a classroom, there has to be a radically different organization to instructional activities than there would be, say, to a conversation.

Each personalizer has many forces with which he or she must deal in order to personalize. All of those forces mandate high organization in order to accomplish individually prescribed instructional objectives. A list of these forces is given in the following table.

With these factors in mind, you can see that personalization requires a high level of classroom organization. It follows that a lecture format does not allow personalization and thus is not productive in terms of student learning. Implementing a high/middle/low grouping plan will allow finer tuning of instructional delivery. Everything else held constant this will enhance average learning of objectives per week but will be far short of what is possible.

The cause of personalization will be advanced considerably by moving the teacher out of the role of a bottleneck in the flow of instructional information and organizational and operational communication (One thing about large group lecture, choral recitation and all doing the same thing—fewer decisions for the teacher . When the teacher organizes the personalized classroom s/he is building in a necessity for many more moment to moment decisions. Why? Because decisions are no longer the same for all nor do they occur at the same time. Thus the need for careful planning and organization in the personalized classroom. The bottleneck is found when every or most instructional messages and organizational decisions must be created on-the-fly by the teacher. When the bottleneck exists the classroom pace grinds down to a snails pace within moments of the beginning of class.

On the other hand, if the volume of decisions is planned for, these decisions are anticipated and thus built into the structure and processes of the classroom. Class members act independently as signaled by place, circumstance or time. Once these signals are planned and then learned and practiced, the multiple organizational and instructional decisions will be carried out independently by members of the class. During class hours the teacher spends time on planned instructional delivery and on individual learning concerns that have not been built into the carefully designed personalized learning environment.

By having much of the organizational decision-making and instructional communication capable of occurring independently of here-and-now teacher action we eliminate the bottleneck. All students will have access to the instructional communication and organizational decisions that they need. Thirsty people will get to drink when they need it, or, in ‘instructionese’, each person will get the lesson that is appropriate to her or his level of readiness.

Teaching a System as Well as Subject Matter:

Your major trick will be to set up an instructional system that eliminates the bottleneck, and to teach students to use it. In such a system, you would reserve for yourself those instructional communications and organizational decisions that could not be made by students or materials. Naturally, the fewer of these on-the-fly the less likely there will be bottlenecking.

Components of Your Organizational System

The major idea of your system is the division of the total activities of the class into subactivities which are carried out at centers. For example, the centers might be as follows:

1. direct instruction/individual counseling
2. tape and filmstrip,
3. group study,
4. reading,
5. individual work,
6. mastery testing,
7. daily monitoring of progress in each (orspecially targeted) subjects.

Each center has its organizational rules which govern its use and which are posted for all to see in its location. This particular subdivision of classroom activities is not the only one possible. Subdivisions could be based on subject matter (e.g. science, reading, math, etc.), or topics, such as environment, creativity, etc. in which all basic skills have a part. (For example, the environment center might have required math, reading, writing, and social activities associated with its objectives.)

[Edited for html problems readability 12/1. Also having trouble with MarsEdit and Radio Userland Handshakes]

Summary: It's hard to find a path to educational reform. Using "deficiency scores" on norm-referenced tests is and ineffective approach, even if it's sincerely intended only as a startup catalyst. They just aren't family-, school- or teacher- friendly enough to translate into effective reform. The heat they generate consumes resources while enhancing nothing but the level of distrust of Federal change efforts.

Effective reform must translate directly into classroom change, one child, one objective and one lesson at a time. (And yes, NCLB doesn't work because, while it may generate just criticism, it does not simultaneously generate effective change.) What could fit these "good change effort " specifications is curriculum based testing in multiple developmental areas. The pay off for such a monumental test development and administration effort is that, even if the results do not flatter our present instructional efforts or systems, we will have created a precise "what to teach next" estimate for each individual in each of multiple developmental areas.

One motivator: A local demonstration the reality that individual growth isn't yet touched by what we do now. One approach to such a sketch, cousin to the present dysfunctional consumer of state funds, could take flesh as a statewide assessment of a representative sample of schools. This assessment would actually help has to in two ways that our present mandated system does not: a) it would be curriculum referenced and directly translatable into retargeted, individually tailored instruction, and (b) we would then have a sense of what is possible (from trial teaching and summer teaching) and what is real, right now. We could use these discrepancies to focus our reform efforts.

A piece of such an analysis is sketched and explained below.

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I'll illustrate by filling in (hypothetical) results for the sixth grade in the state of Floriana. For this illustration I'm discussing results in 3 of 14 areas of development* from the table of my last entry and interpreting. Pieces of the table with interpretation follow below:

Statewide Measures of Developmental Knowledge: Sixth Grade
Data Timing or Analysis--------> Type of Skill	A Test Begin School Year	B Test End School Year	C Test Begin Next School Year	D School Growth/ Week	E Summer Growth/ Week	F State Annual Growth/ Week	G National Begin Next School Year	H National Annual Growth/ Week
General Cultural Information	660	770	830	2.8	5.0	3.3	1092	2.4
Receptive Communication (Listening, Recognizing Signed Communication, Reading, etc)	902	1092	1110	4.8	1.5	4.0	1010	3.0
Social Interaction (Including Self Control)	1242	1382	1424	3.5	3.5	2.0	800	1.5
Ethical/Moral Understanding and Behavior	1010	1154	1221	3.6	5.6	4.1	600	1.5

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In this example I am assuming that 3900 objectives have been carefully and rigorously sequenced as stairways to growth for for any learner. The phrase "carefully and rigorously sequenced" means that if one is tested and found to be ready for objective 29 then s/he has mastered/doesn't need all objectives of lower number and would fail at tests of mastery of objectives of higher number. There are more than enough possibilities in each area for even bright 25 year olds.

Columns A-F report state averages whereas columns G and H report national averages.

Columns A-C and G report report average positions within learning sequence at state and national levels, respectively.

Columns D-F and H report average growth per week at the state and national levels, respectively.

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Now that the stage has been set for our mental experiment, what might Floridians note about this data? How might they interpret it. How would these intrepretations affect future actions?

First, let's note column D . It's values are the computed average weekly growth rate during the school months (roughly 36 weeks of school distributed over 40 weeks of the year). We find that in the state of Floriana students master an average of 2.8 objectives of general cultural material, 4.8 objectives having to do with receiving and understanding information that made accessible in books, lecture, television, conversation,etc,3.5 objectives per week having to do with social interaction skills (manners, reading body language, negotiations, games, are examples) and 3.6 objectives per week having to do with moral/ethical behavior (for example, behaving in such a way so as to benefit others and to support, say, social order and what society considers "a good life"). In short, progress is made in the sixth grade; there seems to be markedly less learning in the area of general cultural understanding, however.

Comparing what we've just learned from column D with the information from column E allows us to compare the impact of school with the impact on non-school life as they each affect the growth of sixth graders. This comparison makes it obvious that, in the State of Floriana, non-school has a decidedly stronger impact on growth in all areas but receptive communication. What this means will require further research by Florianan policy makers.

Finally, Florianans will probably want to compare Florianan to National levels of achievement and growth rates.
Levels of achievement: Florianan students are higher in all but general cultural information.
Growth rates: Sixth grade Florianan students have a higher annual growth rate in all areas: for the first three areas growth rate is 25-33% higher. Perhaps most interesting is the growth rate of Florianan students in ethical/moral behavior. It is just short of three times greater than the national average. With a difference this big I suspect that the only surprise will be for an out of state analyst. This will come as no surprise to Florianans once noted. It may well be an indicator of a strong and unique divergence of the Floridian life-style and belief-system from that of the nation as a whole.

However Florinian analysts end up calling the divergence from national norms, the differences between Summer growth rates and School Year growth rates needs understanding. What is it that accelerates the summers (or depresses growth in the school year)? Are there factors in classrooms , curriculum choices, preprofessional or inservice training or supervision that could be altered. However this analysis turns we can check growth rates again next year and determine if our chosen solution was effective. That is, we can check if we adopt and use the criterion-referenced, curriculum-referenced test system that was initially developed to assess the system as a whole.

Don't worry, in the criterion-referenced view, teaching to the objectives is fair and appropriate. Just don't teach memorized answers from a purloined or otherwise copied master test.

Summary. This entry takes up where my earlier entry on Needs Based (or Goal Free) Evaluation [at the general level] left off. In this one I've decided to conduct a 'mental experiment' by beginning to describe a needs based evaluation of our schools.

In order to procede with some intellectual order that we'll start with the following definition:

"A student is having educational needs met when:

• a) she/he is receiving appropriate instruction for her/his "zone of proximal development" (roughly synonymous with "readiness level" and first articulated by L. Vygotsky);
• b) this condition (a above) will be bet in each of 14 distinct areas of development (see below for a list);
• c) the conditions indicated in a and b above are also delivered at a rate that is determined by maximum comfortable rate of learning in each area of development for each person.*"

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Then we get busy.

For starters: Conduct a needs based (goal free) assessment in one tenth of the school districts of one state. Get pre and post data over one calendar year. Use criterion and curriculum referenced testing in each of 14 areas of human endeavor. Add a sampling at the beginning of summer to enable an estimate ofthe amount and sorts of learning that occur outside of school.

In order to design school improvement efforts we must know what to improve. Thus we will have to profile the benefits (i.e., the learning) presently derived from schools. Such a profile will allow us to portray the rate, breadth and depth of school learning. This information cannot stop with the basics, i.e., 'reading, writing and arithmetic'. We are concerned that our developing citizens are capable of engaging with deeper issues, such as active citizenship, an understanding and care for the natural environment, etc. We are also concerned with development of individual potential wherever it is headed (as long as it is not hostile to or destructive of the general social order). In order to test our present delivery (via home and school interventions) of such a breadth of skills we'll have to test quite broadly. We will also --- in order to be sensitive to rate of learning as an indicator of potential-- we'll also have to be able to determine the degree to which the average rate of learning of such skills is close to optimal (i.e., a sufficient realization of what is possible with "state of the art" instruction).

Statewide Measures of Developmental Knowledge: Sixth Grade
Data Timing or Analysis-------------> Type of Skill	Test at Beginning of School Year (v1**)	Test at End of School Year (v2)	Test At Beginning of Next School Year (v3)	School Year Growth per Week (v4)	Summer Growth Per Week (v5)	Annual Growth Per Week(v6)	National Avg. at Beginning of Next School Year (v7)	National Avg. Growth Per Week (v8)
General Cultural Information
Receptive Communication (Listening, Signing, etc)
Expressive Communication (Speaking, Signing)
Written Expression
Numerical and Logical Understanding
Bodily Coordination
Eye-Hand Coordination
Social Interaction (Including Self Control)
Introspective Knowledge
Ethical/Moral Understanding and Behavior
Musical Appreciation and Expression
Visual and Multidimensional Appreciation and Expression
Mechanical/Scientific Appreciation and Expression
Appreciation and Interaction with Natural (Living and NonLiving) Systems

This would give us a basis for deciding what we would like to do given what we presently [have been proven to] accomplish with our schools.

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* This implies that the instructional system will be providing instructional materials, lessons and tests at a pace that is dictated by individual rate of learning as opposed to a fixed schedule. Thus, at any given time, students will be working on different objectives, with different materials, for differing lengths of time. It should be obvious that, while I have stated needs to be, roughly,"to grow as much as possible in areas of activity that are valued by most human societies", this does not overlap with subject coverage in most schools.
** All variables are calculated averages deriving from statewide grade level sampling of actual instruction. Another variable, Potential Annual Growth per Week, could be created through use proven alternative curricula on a cross sectional subsample of students in representative regions of the state . *Edited 10/20/05

Summary: Must we always evaluate only because a funder or service provider mandates or requests the evaluation? For example, must we only evaluate a school as required by, say, the school board or the school's faculty or administration? Must the local hybrid gas-electric engine plant be evaluated only as corporate offices dictate? The answer to all is no! In this entry I work to unpack the ideas using thoughts from Michael Scriven, eminient philosopher and evaluator. As you probably can guess, I will fold in some thoughts and interests of my own.

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Scriven's Description:

"... the evaluator is not told the purpose of the program but does the evaluation with the purpose of finding out what the program is actually doing without being cued as to what the program is trying to do. [....] Merit is determined by relating program effects to the relevant needs of the impacted population, rather than to the goals of the program (whether the goals of the agency, the citizenry, the legislature, or the manager) for the target (intended) population. It could equally well be called "needs-based evaluation" or "consumer-oriented evaluation" by contrast with goal-based (or "manager-oriented") evaluation. It does not substitute the evaluator's goals nor the goals of the consumer for the program's goals, contrary to a common criticism; the valuation must justify (via the needs assessment) all assignments of merit. The report should be completely transparent with respect to the evaluator's goals.

One of the major arguments for the pure form is that it is the only systematic or design procedure for improving the detection of side-effects. Evaluators who do not know what the program is supposed to be doing loom more thoroughly for what it isdoing. Other arguments for it include:

• (i)it avoids the often expensive, always speculative, and time-consuming problems involved in determining true current goals and true original goals, reconciling and weighting them;
• (ii) it is less intrusive into program activities than GBE [Goal Based Evaluation];
• (iii) it is fully adaptable to midstream goal or need shifts;
• (iv) it is less prone to social, perceptual, and cognitive bias because of reduced interaction with program staff; and
• (v) it is 'reversible', that is, one can begin an evaluation goal-free and switch to goal-based after a preliminary investigation thereby garnering the preceding benefits (whereas if you begin goal-based, you can't reverse);
• (vi) it is less subject to bias arising from the desire to please the client because it's less clear what the client was trying to do.

[...]

GFE is somewhat analogous to double-blind design in medical research; even if the evaluator would like to give a favorable report (e.g., because of being paid by the program, or hoping for future work from them) it is not (generally) easy to tell how to 'cheat' under GFE conditions. The fact that the risk of failure by the evaluator is greater in GFE is desirable since it increases effort, identifies incompetence, and improves the balance of power.

Doing GFE is a notably different and enlightening experience from doing the usaul kind of evaluation. there is a very strong sense of social isolation, and one comes to be extremely conscious of the extent to which GBE evaluations are not reallly 'independent evaluations' even when they are called that; they are cooperative efforts, and hence easily co-opted efforts. Ones is also conscious of the possibility of enormous blunders. It is good practice to use a metaevaluator and very desirable to use a team.

[GFE is not a method in the same sense of other evaluation methods ... in that it can be combined with any one of them, except a goal-based evaluation, and that only for a part of the investigation. i.e., start multimethod goal free and after having reaped all desired benefits switch to goal based and start working more closely with program personnel.] [Evaluation Thesaurus,4th edition, 1991, Sage p 180-182]

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It is clear from what MS has argued that he believes that one can evaluate without being program driven. He has made clear that the GFE does revolve around some form of needs analysis which puts limits on the breadth and depth of inquiry. Thus there is some agenda, with argument and political subscription of some degree, which will serve as a driving set of values from which the needs analysis will be derived. You have to start somewhere however, and, if you are doing other than putzing around, you better have some large group of stakeholders invested in the needs assessment that you use in your GFE in order for it to be deemed worthwhile.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we have built our needs analysis [an analysis of some portion of human existence which leads to a description of needs which are entailed and a working definition of what "meeting" those needs amounts to]. Our GFE would then concern itself with determining the causal effects that the chosen program or programs, has had upon the client population.

If, say, one were inquiring about safety from various forms of fire, there would be a set of needs that, if addressed effectively, would result in a minimal average risk of injury or loss due to fire. It seems clear that since absolute safety (no fires, no damage, no form of injury, ever) is impossible, some statistical goals will serve as standards for excellence, satisfactory and unsatisfactory service. All of this having been said, the fire system of, say, Dogpatch, could be directly observed and statistically weighed against those statistical standards without any consideration of what programs are being offered by the Fire Department as a whole, by the separate fire houses or by the individual firemen. This, then, would be GFE of fire protection in Dogpatch.

Could we also do a Needs Based Evaluation of education in Dogpatch or its distant, metropolitan neighbor, Erehwon? Yes! I believe we could.

The basic outline would be the same: List the needs, educational needs in this case, locate and translate standards for excellent, satisfactory, unsatisfactory and dangerously low levels of meeting of those standards and sample, measure and estimate until a confident estimate of true standard adherence has been created. However, it would be more difficult with education.

First, education's mission differs, at least at the outer boundaries, from town to town. Further, even given a common general agreement as to mission, to develop each child to her/his maximal individual potential, for example, the difficulty will derive from great number of possible practical translations. Given this considerable ambiguity what I will next say can only be taken as illustrative. Whatever the standards and however chosen they must be a potent, useful, assessable, yet at the time acceptable to the stakeholding recipients of the GFE Education report.

Let's say that criterion referenced developmental sequences of objectives in each of Howard Gardner's distinct developmental areas are chosen as basis for testing. Further, we've found an authority who's already developed and applied those sequences in K-15 in multiple regions of country. Part of that translation has involved the development of criterion-referenced, group administratable, tests which reliably place each person within their "zone of proximal development" (ala Vygotsky). Finally the same tests have been reliably used to assess learning rate (objectives mastered) for each individual in each area of development, given appropriate instruction at proximal level of development.

Given this much we will be able to proceed to some fruitful needs-related assessment.

[Go to my next entry for further details.]

Summary: I've been away (for more than 2 months) for several compelling reasons. One, for example, has to do with the preparations for and financing of the wedding of my youngest. Another has to do with the recasting of myself outside of a professorial mode- i.e. what else, after being a "Special Ed Professor" can I/will I do to nurture personal and familial body and soul? More, perhaps, on those topics later. At this moment I want to list several of my seed ideas --- to ensure a more likely later expansion of each.

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The list of ideas:

• Goal-Free (or Needs Based) Evaluation
• The Needs of Gifted
• Are Gifted also Autodidacts?
• Deuterolearning: Does High Capacity for Deuterolearning Correlate with High Rate of Classroom Learning? How much? What are Controlling Variables?
• Models/Specs for Needs Based Assessment. Start with N of 1 and Work outward to self-sufficient No Growth communities
• What would be processes and products of a Goal Free/Needs-Based School Assessment?
• CMap -- a free software which will enable collaborative knowledge development as augmented by jointly developed concept maps. See, also, Compendium.
• Ontology Making. At some point the generative power of inspiration alone needs help. An serious effort at ontology building, using software like Protege', will help determine the shape of what is now thought, what is now known, and of gaps that demand development. This knowledge map will likely refuel the inspiration that originally fueled the effort.

Summary: It would be a complicated proof, at this point in our [proven] understanding of weblogs, but wouldn't we start with the "Goose to Gander" inference?

"What's good for the goose is good for the gander!" is intpreted to mean , "What is good for a man is equally good for a woman; or, what a man can have or do, so can a woman have or do." This comes from an earlier proverb, "What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander."

From Bartleby's New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy

That is, if weblogging enhances deuterolearning for students then don't we at least make the initial assumption that it enhances learning for teachers, too?

Thus, given that a significant fraction of professorial behavior involves teaching, don't we also assume that weblogging would be good for the learning of professors too?

Therefore, I offer the following hypothesis:
Intensive, consistent and persistent professorial weblogging significantly accelerates meaningful professorial learning* **.

Let's get on with specific research efforts on professorial weblogging! Let's find out what aspects of weblog form, structure and/or process separates translates this speculative logic into a comprehensive set of real findings which verify the utility of weblogs in the job-related practice of professors !

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*Where meaningful professorial learning is defined as documented changes in behavior, i.e., real and significant change in content of knowledge shown in relevant instructional, research and service domains.
**"Meaningful" is meant to distinguish job-relevant learning from learning that does not relate to the professors role or competence with her/his specific discipline. No disrespect is intended towards other learning that may also occur. However, those learnings that enhance the income and prestige for the institution, the advancement and known disciplinary competence of the professor and the quality of education for the student are seen to be centrally important in the higher education context.

Summary: Earlier his month the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article on faculty weblogs in higher education, it was Bloggers Need Not Apply by Ivan Tribble (a pseudonym). The apparent message of this entry: "Don't write a weblog if you want to get be hired as a faculty member; the risks far outweigh the gains" [or words to that effect]. Stephen Downes' reaction to the entry: "[In a nutshell you've said :] Let's keep our lives secret before we take a new position; that will make it much more certain the job will be a good fit. [And I say, ] "Rubbish". More reactions below.

Given that I'd just written about multiuserweblog set ups in university settings this counter-response to "rubbish" seemed apt. More, , possibly, later.****

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A respected University of California Philosophy Professor, J. Searle, in a public service appearance. His purpose, in this case, was to make his ideas accessible to the broader San Francisco Bay Area community. (details on all professorial duties immediately below). Professors have multiple public functions to fill.

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Background on being a professor, i.e., teaching faculty member in a college or university: The professorial position is not paid by the hour but, rather, in return for carrying out of certain functions. The are three central functions are generally seen as:

1. make new knowledge (=scholarship),
2. transmit knowledge to students (undergraduate and graduate), and
3. help the institution carry out its functions now and in the future (=teaching), within the institution or within the community within which the institution functions (=service).
   

The quality of a professor's efforts in each of these areas depends on the quality of her or his written/spoken/or-otherwise-communicated knowledge or thoughts.* In short, the professor is a public knowledge resource in her or his specialty area and is expected to be a good, thoughtful and reasoned thinker in the general sense communicating effectively to a fairly wide audience in a considerable variety of situations. In the classroom the professor is expected to be an effective communicator and to be a just grader. She/he is expected to use her or his influence and power in an ethical fashion.

The principle of academic freedom affords the professor (at whatever level) the room to pursue knowledge development in her or his field as he or she sees fit. The methods of research must be both legal and moral. The degree to which the topic(s) of those investigations are popular or acceptable to a general public, even to Deans or to Board of Trustee members is, at least in theory, out of bounds.

First criticism of Tribble's view (you can find plenty of them by searching Google under "Ivan Tribble"), nicely said by Evan Roberts in his weblog (one of many in the University of Minnesota multiuser weblog system) Coffee Grounds:

To me it seems that the gist of Tribble's article is that the search committee was shocked (shocked) to learn that their candidates had outside interests and emotions that might prevent candidates from spending 14 hours a day on research or teaching.

He gives a lead in to some other higher ed weblog material from Daniel Drezner

"…"[Untenured faculty are cautioned to] think very, very, very carefully about the costs and benefits of blogging under one's own name (emphasis original)." I'm not sure that I thought very, very, very carefully about blogging under my own name; perhaps very carefully.

as well as the following analysis

Can academics be bloggers?

A truncated version of what I said at the Public Choice roundtable with Michael Munger and Chris Lawrence on the question of "Can Academics Be Bloggers?":

1) Of course academics can be bloggers. The more interesting questions are:

a) Can academics be good bloggers?

b) Should academics be bloggers?

My answer both of these questions is "yes, with significant caveats."

CAN ACADEMICS BE GOOD BLOGGERS?

The answer should be yes:

1) 40% of TTLB's Higher Beings have Ph.D.s, so clearly it's possible.

2) Academics possess skills that are useful for blogging -- expertise, writing experience, analytical and critical thinking skills, etc.

That said, the answer for many academics is no:

1) To put it gently, some top-notch academics have not completely mastered the art of the blog. In all likelihood this will change, but it points to a barrier to entry for good scholars; unlike lower-level primates like myself, high-profile academics will often attract attention the moment they start blogging, stripping them of the opportunity to stumble out of the gates and move down the learning curve under the radar.

2) Furthermore, tenured academics have to adjust to a new and strange power structure if they start blogging. Suddenly they're in a world where mere graduate students, or worse yet, people possessing only a B.A., wield more power and influence than them. I mean, it's been three months and Munger is still in a fetal position from being exposed to my "mighty" hit count. And that's just between a full professor and an assistant professor!

3) Richard Posner's theory of public intellectuals suggests that as academics stray from their area of expertise, their signal to noise ratio of the information they generate drops. Some academic bloggers strongly confirm this hypothesis.

4) Yes, academics have writing experience, but they've been trained within an inch of their lives to eschew clear prose for jargon-laden discourse. There are sound and unsound reasons for this within the academy, but for blogging to the general public it's disastrous.

5) It should be stressed that these hindrances are not permanent, but they do constitute a barrier to entry.

SO, SHOULD ACADEMICS* ENGAGE IN BLOGGING**?

*By academics, I mean untenured ones, for tenured faculty [ motivation to exert oneself is less?, see however Manho Singhman's notes on why he blogs below. ]

**By blogging, I mean [general blogging-- my phrase SPH] rather than blogging only about one's research, which is an unalloyed good. [emboldening is mine , SPH. See, for example, excerpts below*** from Mano Singham's Web Journal

1) Blogging can be thought of as part of service. It's a low-cost way of reaching beyond the ivory tower. It's also acting like a quasi-referee of public intellectual output.

2) As blogging has become more respectable, the stigma associated with the activity has faded away.

NO:

1) It can be addictive.

2) If the blog is successful, it will breed resentment from colleagues, because it creates an alternative path to acclaim where tenured faculty do not function as gatekeepers.

3) Colleagues who do not write for a wide audience will overestimate the amount of time you devote to blogging, because they assume a one-to-one correspondence between public articles and scholarly articles (the actual ratio is more like 1:3). They will also underestimate the possibility that blogging is a complement rather than a substitute to traditional scholarship.

4) Scholars who out themselves as not part of the mainstream political persuasion of academics will have some uncomfortable hallway moments -- though this cost is often overestimated.

5) More serious are the academic political minefields that blogging can trigger -- you know, thin-skinned senior academics who are perfectly willing to carry a blog grudge into the academic realm.

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*There are gradations in professorial rank (in the US, typically, instructor, assistant professor, associate professor, professor-- professor the highest).

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** Movement through the ranks is supposed to relate to quality in carrying out the actions associated with the role. Generally the actions are categorized as teaching, scholarship and service. While much time can be, and is, in some cases, spent assessing each, in my experience rough and ready solutions are applied in order that committee members can return to more familiar, and less intense, duties. I would say that, in general the rough and ready translations are: quality of scholarship translates as "number of juried journal publications (prestigious , juried, journals preferred) per year", quality of teaching translates into a summary of student evaluations on after-class polls and quality of service translates as "number of worthy nonteaching, nonscholarship activities (committee work is typical) successfully undertaken.

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***Mano Singham's "Why I blog"

I reached a kind of landmark this week with this blog. I have been making entries since January 26th, posting one item each weekday, except for a three-week break in June. As a result I have now posted over 100 entries and consisting of over 100,000 words, longer than either of my two published books.

Why do I blog? Why does anyone blog? The Doonesbury comic strip of Sunday, July 3, 2005 fed into the stereotype of bloggers as self-important losers who cannot get real jobs as writers, and feed their ego by pretending that what they say has influence. The idea behind this kind of disparaging attitude is that if no one is willing to pay you to write, then what you have to say has no value.

Of course, there are a vast number of bloggers out there, with an equally vast number of reasons as to why they blog so any generalization is probably wrong. So I will reflect on why I blog. Some bloggers may share this view, others may have different reasons. So be it.

The first reason is the very fact that because of the blog, I have written the equivalent of a complete book in six months. Writing is not easy, especially starting to write on any given day. Having a blog enforces on me a kind of discipline that would not exist otherwise. Before I started this blog, I would let ideas swirl around in my head, without actually putting them down in concrete form. After awhile, I would forget about them, but be left with this nagging feeling of dissatisfaction that I should have explored the ideas further and written them down.

The second benefit of writing is that it forces you to clarify and sharpen your ideas. It is easy to delude yourself that you understand something when you have the idea only in your mind. Putting those ideas to paper (or screen) has the startling effect of revealing gaps in knowledge and weaknesses of logic and reasoning, thus forcing a re-evaluation of one's ideas. So writing is not a one-way process from brain to screen/paper. It is a dialectic process. Writing reveals your ideas but also changes the way you think. As the writer E. M. Forster said “How can I know what I am thinking until I see what I say?” This is why writing is such an important part of the educational process and why I am so pleased that the new SAGES program places such emphasis on it.

Another benefit for me is that writing this blog has (I hope) helped me become a better writer, able to spot poor construction and word choice more quickly. Practice is an important part of writing and the blog provides me with that. Given that the blog is public and can (in principle) be read by anyone prevents me from posting careless or shoddy pieces. It forces me to take the time to repeatedly revise and polish, essential skills for writers.

When I started this blog, I had no idea what form it would take. Pretty soon, almost without thinking, it slipped into the form that I am most comfortable with, which is that of a short essay around a single topic each day. I initially feared that I would run out of ideas to write about within a few weeks but this has not happened. In fact what happens is what all writers intuitively know but keep forgetting, which is that the very act of writing acts as a spur for new ideas, new directions to explore.

As I write, new topics keep coming into my mind, which I store away for future use. The ideas swirl around in my head as I am doing other things (like driving and chores), and much of the writing takes place in my mind during those times as well. The well of ideas to write about does not show any signs of going dry, although it does take time to get the items ready for posting, and that is my biggest constraint. Researching those topics so that I go beyond superficial "off the top of my head" comments and have something useful to say about them has been very educational for me.

Since I have imposed on myself the goal of writing an essay for each weekday, this has enabled me to essentially write the first draft (which is the hardest part of writing, for me at least) of many topics that may subsequently become articles (or even books) submitted for publication. If I do decide to expand on some of the blog item for publication, that process should be easier since I have done much of the preliminary research, organization, and writing already.

All these benefits have accrued to me, the writer, and this is no accident. I think most writing benefits the author most, for all the reasons given above. But any writer also hopes that the reader benefits in some way as well, though that is hard for the author to judge.

I remember when I was younger, I wanted to "be a writer" but never actually wrote anything, at least anything worthwhile. Everything I wrote seemed contrived and imitative. I then read a comment by someone who said that there is a big difference between those who want to be writers and those who want to write. The former are just enamored with idea of getting published, of being successful authors and seeing their name in print. The latter feel that they have something to say that they have to get out of their system. I realized then that I belonged to the former class, which I why I had never actually written anything of value. With that realization, I stopped thinking of myself as a writer and did not do any writing other than the minimum required for my work. It is only within the last ten years or so that I feel that I have moved into the latter category, feeling a compulsion to write for its own sake. This blog has given me a regular outlet for that impulse.

I would never have written so much without having this blog. I would recommend that others who feel like they have to write also start their own. Do not worry about whether anyone will read it or whether they will like it. Write because you feel you have something to say. Even if you are the only reader of your own writing, you will have learned a lot from the process.

POST SCRIPT

Paul Krugman is an economist at Princeton University and is a member of the reality-based community. His July 15, 2005 op-ed in the New York Times shows how far politics has moved away from this kind of world and into one in which facts are seen as almost irrelevant.

Thanks to Richard Hake for the following quote by F.M. Cornford, Microcosmographia Academica - Being A Guide for the Young Academic Politician (Bowes & Bowes, Cambridge, 4th ed., 1949 first published in 1908), which might well have been addressed to Krugman and other members of the reality-based community, although it was written over a century ago:

You think (do you not?) that you have only to state a reasonable case, and people must listen to reason and act upon it at once. It is just this conviction that makes you so unpleasant….are you not aware that conviction has never been produced by an appeal to reason which only makes people uncomfortable? If you want to move them, you must address your arguments to prejudice and the political motive….

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**** a more systematic analysis of perceived benefits and detriments on the part of higher education practicitioners; I'm collecting documents now. Suggestions are welcome!

Summary: I started with leads from Jeremy Smith and James Farmer , D'Arcy Norman, among others. I have compiled a list of higher education multi-user weblogging implementations. There are two results: a) the table below, in which are noted institutional weblogging adaptations and software, where known, and b) also a list of some of the softwares available.

There were more institutions and softwares mentioned than I have shared. Why? If I, rightly or wrongly, had the impression that in-early-development was more the flavor than "we're using it, it works for the average user" I left the institution or software off the list. (This is a weblog entry, however, and I was, no doubt, less consistent in this attitude than I could/should have been {;o} !!)

While we're at it let's moderate any unbridled enthusiasm for the institutional momentum chronicled here and elsewhere. As excited as I am about the possibilities of weblogging as a part of effective and collaborative learning, I am leery of the consequences of rapid deployment for the sake of invention and institutional fund-raising (not the same as a deep, collective conviction amongst the majority of those who will have to live with all of the consequences of the innovation). In this vein, James Farmer also wrote another entry in which to worry about this phenom here. He was thoughtfully supported by a number of others. His entry is well worth your reading and thinking time. Let me here add my vote for caution; it's a mistake to give full reign to the charge led by early adopters and fund-raisers; I'm old enough to have helped "lead the charge" (aka dragging the many behind the cart of the enthusiastic few) more than once. The results of precipitous development aren't always pretty, even for the developers!!

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University Weblogging Systems
Country	Description	Comments
Case Western University	US	Jeremy Smith of Case Western (see below) gives a 3.5/5.0
Stanford	US	Campus-Wide Weblogging Collaboration is essential to the Stanford University mission. After starting with one installation to meet a specific need in IT, the university now offers a campus-wide license of Movable Type to support the multi-disciplinary teamwork of faculty, staff, and students. Approach A member of the IT staff who'd been using weblogs for a while set up Movable Type as an ad-hoc bug-tracking system, allowing his team to submit bugs, make notes, and stay current with development project status. The department evaluated various backend tools for communication with an eye to campus-wide deployment. Movable Type was selected. Results Movable Type is designed to facilitate communication. For instance,at Stanford, science departments are able to work with engineering departments to realize innovative ideas and bring new projects to completion. And now anyone at Stanford can better foster highly collaborative teaching, learning, and research. [Statement above is from Moveable Type site]
Yale	US
Harvard	US	Open to anyone with a Harvard email address. Hosted at Harvard Law School. Dave Winer, one of the pioneers of weblogging, instrumental in setting up Harvard system and philosophy. Donna Wentworth is coeditor. 765 weblogs (onsite and off) hosted on Userland Manila server.
Northern Michigan University	US	Looks as if there's a clearance/recruitment process. Implying a wish for control signifying much for all institutional moves in this direction.
University of Minnesota	US	Assigned a 4/5 by Case Western rater (which has its own blogging system which the rater, http://blog.case.edu/jms18">Jeremy Smith gave a 3.5
Reed Journals	US	Run independently and is, at this point, used by a small fraction of student, administrator and faculty population (186 accounts on 7/14)
University of South Florida	US	---
Bryn Mawr	US	(for use with language classes, 67 users on 7/15)
Penn State	US	experimental system
Rice University	US	Official launch 2/24/05
Virginia Commonwealth University	US	(not rated; not clear from online links how much weblogging is a central feature of WSS services at VCU or of student or faculty participation in the university)
Dartmouth	US
MIT	US	Rated by Smith at a 3.5 out of 5
University of Calgary	Canada	Appears to have been up 20 weeks or so; wiki available and navigable/editable by all. Powered by Drupal. (See this page to read D'Arcy Norman's comparison of multuser weblog systems.)
Weblogs@UBC (University of British Columbia)	Canada
University of PEI (Prince Edward Island)	Canada
University of Warwick	Great Britain	(rated a 5 out of 5 by J Smith of Case) Some advantages: single sign-on system, a blog directory, a "planet" site, as well as a roster of blogs for courses, faculty divisions and services plus "tons" of documentation, FAQ's, tours, a glossary and etc. Plus all setting up of blogs has be automated through something called Blogbuilder .

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Software:

As for software to run a multiuser weblog system, see James Farmer's entry on Incsub his weblog. He and his commentors give considerable detail. His initial list includes* **:

Manila,

Drupal. See, also, this this presentation on Drupal as a nonproprietary Drupal to forward teaching, writing collaboration and general engagement in higher ed (Samantha Blackmon, David Blakesley, Charlie Lowe, TLT Conference, Feb 2005) ,

Moveable Type,

Tikiwiki,

WordPress Multi User,

pLog,

LiveJournal.org,

Roller, and

Blosxom (The Blosxom inspired Blosjom (a java application) can also be configured for a multiuser environment. It now comes bundled with OS X (Tiger) version (more here from Tom Hoffman).

*Click on the software name to get James' summary points about each. **Click here to link to commenter responses to James' detailed entry.

Technorati tags: multiuserweblogs universityweblogs universityweblogging highereducationweblogs webloggingsoftware socialsoftware knowledgemaking wiki weblog

Summary: The number of ways to transmit a motivating vision knows is limited primarily by one's communicative imagination and ingenuity. We know the effective vision by it's effects. It frames and impels specific learning. An effective vision is not limited by the knowledge-making venue; a good vision can work in instructivist, deuterlearning and independent or collaborative research environments.

All of this I said in a recent entry. In this entry I would like to share a specific vision-making classroom activity, one that has turned the heads of 20 year old sophisticates and superintendents with 20 years of experience.

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Here are the clients of the simulation activity:

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Part of the visioning is the creation of an imaginable reality, as you can see in this case, a group of people working together. A teacher and 6 students. The idea of the picture is to create an imagining, a vessel for memories and analogies to real people rather than "words" and "phrases". These imagined people will draw commitments, concerns, compassion and hope in a way that "individualizing" "personalizing" "maximizing potential", alone, cannot.

Impact on thought comes through a) the acceptance of the assumptions about how things work and the b) consequent psychological transitions which occur when the simulation, with an accepted set of premises, impacts the simulation students as it does. (Class members will generally agree that the 6 member class more-or-less represents the range of skill/character variation within a typical class.)

The following sets up the exercise (which I've typically done in a 1-1.5 hr period) The Ms Fineteach Simulation Experience

(these materials are supplements for the accommodative instruction class discussion)

The purpose of this simulation is to examine curricular and instructional ideas as they interact with each other and as they influence real life situations.

The following are the guiding concepts of this particular simulation:

   Rule 1: Kids learn things in sequence. Placing them above or below their readiness level will result in no learning.

   Rule 2: Lessons have content aims. If the content aim is within three objectives, up or down, from a studentÕs readiness level, s/he will learn at her/his learning rate (LR). Otherwise s/he will not learn at all. Example: If Howard Hughes is ready for, i.e., has mastered prerequisite skills/ concepts/etc for, objective 27, he will learn at his learning rate. If he learns at a rate of 6 objectives per week (LR=6), he will do that (even if the teacher isn't exposing material that quickly). If he learns at a rate of 2 objectives per week (LR=2), he will learn that many objectives this week, even if the teacher has presented more material than that.

   Rule 3: Students will give teachers a two week honeymoon... with only minor-too all intents and purposes, negligible --misbehavior ... for two weeks at the beginning of the school year. This means that what would, under other circumstances, set off misbehavior will not do so during the honeymoon. Good impact of instruction will, however, take place.

   Rule 4: For Òoff-taskÓ read 50% of it as quietly off-task (e.g., staring out the window... reading a comic book hidden in the text book, etc.) and read the other 50% as a ÒtroublesomeÓ [disruptive] kind of off-task.

   Rule 5: If misbehavior of the ÒtroublesomeÓ variety is between 25% and 50% the teacher is decidedly grumpy; i.e., s/he is less positive, takes more convincing to participate in building planning and development activities [which, in the long-term, makes or breaks a school; change is constant...if teachers don't participate in the structuring of how change impacts their school... then laws are imposed on them... they resent... and feel out of control and unimportant and their cooperation level goes down even further, and so on].

Rule 6: Ms Fineteach aims her reading program so that it covers 3 objectives per week. She starts the present semester and this unit on objective 30. Her method is large-group-oriented: There is an explanation of the activity followed by the activity. There are roughly 6 different and worthwhile multisensory activities which are set up for each objective. She plans for the group to complete the [18] activities having to do with three reading objectives each week. By the end of our 8 week simulation she will have exposed each student to 24 objectives [and 144 activities].

 Rule 7: If the average of all students' troublesome behavior averages greater than 50% teacher begins to be decidedly bitter... i.e., waaaay beyond grumpy. Problems are projected onto others. Uncooperative and hostile toward a problem solving orientation. His/her lessons arenÕt as effective. Coverage is reduced from three to 2 objectives per week -which will alter teacher impact on the students who are at the appropriate learning level.

Rule 8a: Impact of nonlearning. With the exception of the honeymoon, when a student does not learn anything during a given week, her/his OT rate (see below) will double in the following week.

Rule 8b: Impact of learning. Any week in which at least one objective is learned will result in a studentÕs cutting her/his OT rate in half during the following week.

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A full set up of the experience with worksheet and value/concept probes is provided on an in-class worksheet( which is accessible via this link).

Summary: After I blogged critically on tags recently, I found and read a wowser summary treatise from Clay Shirky. Then I happen upon Ming the Mechanic (Flemming Funch) singing the praises of Clays article. I offer my own excerpts and emboldening below. The article is well worth the reading.

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In short, Clay has hope and reason for it. He believes that the mechanisms are developing so that we will, in a not-so-distant future, be able to use the web as a giant reference system, even while each of us has singular purposes and a distinctly individual philosophy of life.

Shirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags: "Great Minds Don't Think Alike #

Tags are simply labels for URLs, selected to help the user in later retrieval of those URLs. Tags have the additional effect of grouping related URLs together. There is no fixed set of categories or officially approved choices. You can use words, acronyms, numbers, whatever makes sense to you, without regard for anyone else's needs, interests, or requirements.

The addition of a few simple labels hardly seems so momentous, but the surprise here, as so often with the Web, is the surprise of simplicity. Tags are important mainly for what they leave out. By forgoing formal classification, tags enable a huge amount of user-produced organizational value, at vanishingly small cost.

[…]

With those changes afoot, here are some of the things that I think are coming, as advantages of tagging systems:

Market Logic - As we get used to the lack of physical constraints, as we internalize the fact that there is no shelf and there is no disk, we're moving towards market logic, where you deal with individual motivation, but group value.

As Schachter says of del.icio.us, 'Each individual categorization scheme is worth less than a professional categorization scheme. But there are many, many more of them.' If you find a way to make it valuable to individuals to tag their stuff, you'll generate a lot more data about any given object than if you pay a professional to tag it once and only once. And if you can find any way to create value from combining myriad amateur classifications over time, they will come to be more valuable than professional categorization schemes, particularly with regards to robustness and cost of creation.

The other essential value of market logic is that individual differences don't have to be homogenized. Look for the word 'queer' in almost any top-level categorization. You will not find it, even though, as an organizing principle for a large group of people, that word matters enormously. Users don't get to participate those kind of discussions around traditional categorization schemes, but with tagging, anyone is free to use the words he or she thinks are appropriate, without having to agree with anyone else about how something 'should' be tagged. Market logic allows many distinct points of view to co-exist, because it allows individuals to preserve their point of view, even in the face of general disagreement.

User and Time are Core Attributes - This is absolutely essential. The attitude of the Yahoo ontologist and her staff was -- 'We are Yahoo We do not have biases. This is just how the world is. The world is organized into a dozen categories.' You don't know who those people were, where they came from, what their background was, what their political biases might be.

Here, because you can derive 'this is who this link is was tagged by' and 'this is when it was tagged, you can start to do inclusion and exclusion around people and time, not just tags. You can start to do grouping. You can start to do decay. 'Roll up tags from just this group of users, I'd like to see what they are talking about' or 'Give me all tags with this signature, but anything that's more than a week old or a year old.'

This is group tagging -- not the entire population, and not just me. It's like Unix permissions -- right now we've got tags for user and world, and this is the base on which we will be inventing group tags. We're going to start to be able to subset our categorization schemes. Instead of having massive categorizations and then specialty categorization, we're going to have a spectrum between them, based on the size and make-up of various tagging groups.

Signal Loss from Expression - The signal loss in traditional categorization schemes comes from compressing things into a restricted number of categories. With tagging, when there is signal loss, it comes from people not having any commonality in talking about things. The loss is from the multiplicity of points of view, rather than from compression around a single point of view. But in a world where enough points of view are likely to provide some commonality, the aggregate signal loss falls with scale in tagging systems, while it grows with scale in systems with single points of view.

The solution to this sort of signal loss is growth. Well-managed, well-groomed organizational schemes get worse with scale, both because the costs of supporting such schemes at large volumes are prohibitive, and, as I noted earlier, scaling over time is also a serious problem. Tagging, by contrast, gets better with scale. With a multiplicity of points of view the question isn't 'Is everyone tagging any given link 'correctly'', but rather 'Is anyone tagging it the way I do?' As long as at least one other person tags something they way you would, you'll find it -- using a thesaurus to force everyone's tags into tighter synchrony would actually worsen the noise you'll get with your signal. If there is no shelf, then even imagining that there is one right way to organize things is an error.

The Filtering is Done Post Hoc - There's an analogy here with every journalist who has ever looked at the Web and said 'Well, it needs an editor.' The Web has an editor, it's everybody. In a world where publishing is expensive, the act of publishing is also a statement of quality -- the filter comes before the publication. In a world where publishing is cheap, putting something out there says nothing about its quality. It's what happens after it gets published that matters. If people don't point to it, other people won't read it. But the idea that the filtering is after the publishing is incredibly foreign to journalists.

Similarly, the idea that the categorization is done after things are tagged is incredibly foreign to cataloguers. Much of the expense of existing catalogue systems is in trying to prevent one-off categories. With tagging, what you say is 'As long as a lot of people are tagging any given link, the rare tags can be used or ignored, as the user likes. We won't even have to expend the cost to prevent people from using them. We'll just help other users ignore them if they want to.'

Again, scale comes to the rescue of the system in a way that would simply break traditional cataloging schemes. The existence of an odd or unusual tag is a problem if it's the only way a given link has been tagged, or if there is no way for a user to avoid that tag. Once a link has been tagged more than once, though, users can view or ignore the odd tags as it suits them, and the decision about which tags to use comes after the links have been tagged, not before.

Merged from URLs, Not Categories - You don't merge tagging schemes at the category level and then see what the contents are. As with the 'merging ISBNs' idea, you merge individual contents, because we now have URLs as unique handles. You merge from the URLs, and then try and derive something about the categorization from there. This allows for partial, incomplete, or probabilistic merges that are better fits to uncertain environments -- such as the real world -- than rigid classification schemes.

Merges are Probabilistic, not Binary - Merges create partial overlap between tags, rather than defining tags as synonyms. Instead of saying that any given tag 'is' or 'is not' the same as another tag, del.icio.us is able to recommend related tags by saying 'A lot of people who tagged this 'Mac' also tagged it 'OSX'.' We move from a binary choice between saying two tags are the same or different to the Venn diagram option of 'kind of is/somewhat is/sort of is/overlaps to this degree'. That is a really profound change.

[…]

[After looking at user tagging patterns we can say], of particular URLs, that the users tagging this URL either did or did not center around a certain core tags, with this degree of certainty, and, thanks to the time stamps, we can even start to understand how the distribution of a URLs tags changes over time. It was 5 years between the spread of the link and Google's figuring out how to use whole collections of links to create additional value. We're early in the use of tags, so we don't yet have large, long-lived data sets to look at, but they are being built up quickly, and we're just figuring out how to extract novel value from whole collections of tags.

Organization Goes Organic #

We are moving away from binary categorization -- books either are or are not entertainment -- and into this probabilistic world, where N% of users think books are entertainment. It may well be that within Yahoo, there was a big debate about whether or not books are entertainment. But they either had no way of reflecting that debate or they decided not to expose it to the users. What instead happened was it became an all-or-nothing categorization, 'This is entertainment, this is not entertainment.' We're moving away from that sort of absolute declaration, and towards being able to roll up this kind of value by observing how people handle it in practice.

It comes down ultimately to a question of philosophy. Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world? If you believe the world makes sense, then anyone who tries to make sense of the world differently than you is presenting you with a situation that needs to be reconciled formally, because if you get it wrong, you're getting it wrong about the real world.

If, on the other hand, you believe that we make sense of the world, if we are, from a bunch of different points of view, applying some kind of sense to the world, then you don't privilege one top level of sense-making over the other. What you do instead is you try to find ways that the individual sense-making can roll up to something which is of value in aggregate, but you do it without an ontological goal. You do it without a goal of explicitly getting to or even closely matching some theoretically perfect view of the world.

Critically, the semantics here are in the users, not in the system. This is not a way to get computers to understand things. When del.icio.us is recommending tags to me, the system is not saying, 'I know that OSX is an operating system. Therefore, I can use predicate logic to come up with recommendations -- users run software, software runs on operating systems, OSX is a type of operating system -- and then say 'Here Mr. User, you may like these links.''

What it's doing instead is a lot simpler: 'A lot of users tagging things foobar are also tagging them frobnitz. I'll tell the user foobar and frobnitz are related.' It's up to the user to decide whether or not that recommendation is useful -- del.icio.us has no idea what the tags mean. The tag overlap is in the system, but the tag semantics are in the users. This is not a way to inject linguistic meaning into the machine.

It's all dependent on human context. This is what we're starting to see with del.icio.us, with Flickr, with systems that are allowing for and aggregating tags. The signal benefit of these systems is that they don't recreate the structured, hierarchical categorization so often forced onto us by our physical systems. Instead, we're dealing with a significant break -- by letting users tag URLs and then aggregating those tags, we're going to be able to build alternate organizational systems, systems that, like the Web itself, do a better job of letting individuals create value for one another, often without realizing it.

Summary: Your first job as master teacher is to wake them up. After the last echo of the wake-up call has fallen silent your students will be left with a hunger and a vision. The vision will enlighten each act of specific learning. The vision is necessarily new and the hunger is for its realization.

The vision is a context, a framing, a meaning system within which all of the specific content of your teachings will fit. As with pieces of a jig saw puzzle, each teaching is seen, by the awakened, to be a specific and partial realization of the vision, "big picture". The struggle to acquire the piece that fits just so, or, possibly, the struggle to find any piece that clearly fits anywhere in the design, is driven by the vision of the awakening.

Without the vision your students are reduced to doing what they're told to do, to "behaving" in a teacher-approved way.

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(Picture from Tulare county (USA, CA) library online photo archives. As typical as this picture is for its time, I thought it an evocative nonexample of vision-guided individual learning.)

Alright!, you say. I'm going to explain my whole philosophy for the course right at the beginning. That way they'll get the big picture. Sounds good!!

Not really! The creation of an integrating vision is a huge challenge. The vision must leap over the ignorance that the specific teaching that follows is meant to erase. In my own case, for example, I've found that without suffcient care and creativity my previews can be an explanation which is constructed from the yet-to-be-mastered pieces. Appropriate as a review, perhaps, but NOT as a preview, even less as a vision.

Even less? Well yes! You can't construct an explanation from concepts and principles not yet mastered. So that's mistake one. But, because the vision has two jobs, there's yet another problem. The other, deeper, problem is that a set of terms does not equal a vision. The vision has to make an end-run around unknown content in order to achieve two objectives: to create useful expectations of the content, the pieces and the whole. The vision should also make the need for personal realization of the vision understandable, thereby creating a sense of a possible personal future that is both:

• higher (better in some moral sense), and
• better (in the sense of personal efficacy)

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An Integrating Vision can help all sorts of "teacher + class" groups achieve common learning goals.

Vision: Its Uses at Different Levels of Learning/Knowledge-Making
LEVEL	DESCRIPTION	INTERPRETATION
Instructivist	Learning material is acquired in presequenced, "bite-sized" chunks that have been preassembled by curriculum developer. In the Instructivist world, where knowledge has been analyzed into a sequence of objectives which when mastered progressively move the learner from not knowing (e.g., 'non reader') to knowing (e.g., 'proficient reader') the vision can motivate and inform the learner so that her/his energies and intellect can support the instructional efforts which are working on her/his behalf.	I think of this as the passive learning mode. This is how we typically teach reading and arithmetic skills in US schools. Even here ... a vision, which affords an alternative view (the same end, even the learning route, as seen from a different, and accessible, perspective) can support learner efficiency and motivation and commitment. Each will enhance total learning efficiency.
Deuterolearning	In the Deuterolearning world, where sequences of objectives play a varying yet always part-time role in learning, the vision can integrate and organize as student switches back and forth between instructivist and self-chosen experimental learning methods, as dictated by both strategy and vision.	The vision is a constant source of reference, here, as next objective and strategy are chosen from the staging platform which is present level of mastery. On more than one occasion the vision itself will be questioned and possibly be redesigned as its reality and accessibility are tested.
Research	And finally, in what may seem a novel twist, we have learning in the research world. In the research world the learning that is sought is knowledge presumed to be not yet known. There are no precut learning sequences. Here the vision is all there is.	In this situation there is no triangulation of already established method and predetermined sequence and end result, on the one hand, and the vision-based view of the same object, on the other. In this situation, it is not established that the vision is anything but a fantasy, an imagined allegorical possibility. In this situation, therefore, the vision plays an immense part of learning sequence design for the researcher or research team. At the same time, and of necessity, it is also subject to constant scrutiny and revision as its utility in moving researcher/research team to the desired end is put to the test.

In all cases the vision serves an orienting and motivating part which helps separates empty learning activities from those that are in fact inspired.