Post-it found! the low-tech side of eLearning 3.0 ;-)

Greetings fellow three-point-oh'ers
(or is it just fellow eLearners?)

This past week in eLearning 3.0 (Week 2, aka 'the cloud'). This week's guest was Tony Hirsch, and what was discussed was the cloud, and specifically Docker.  Before I get into my (riveting) thoughts on the cloud, let me go back  to Week 0 (two weeks ago) and reflect a little on the thoughts I jotted down on my retrieved post-it note.

So, in the live session a couple of weeks ago (it's recorded if you want to go back and see it), Siemens said something along the lines of "what information abundance consumes is attention". This really struck me as both a big "aha!" as well as a "well, d'uh! why hadn't it occurred to me already? D'oh!". There has been a lot said over the past few years about how people don't read anymore (they skim), and how bad that is.  This ties into "what learners want" (a phrase I've heard countless times on-campus and off), and that tends to be bite-sized info, which leads us to the micro-learning craze.  While micro-learning, or bite-sized learning, has its place, it can't be the end-all-be-all of approaches to learning. When the RSS feed is bursting with around 1700 unread posts (my average day if I don't check it), the effort to really give 100% attention to each item is too much; and part of it is that full articles no longer come over RSS - it's just the title and perhaps the first 250 characters of the article if you're lucky, so the 'click to go to article' is a necessity if you want to read the full thing. Back in the day (ca. 2005) I could actually read most things because my unread count wasn't all that big.  So, as the abundance of data has become a reality, attention deficit seems like a natural connection to that.

Another thing that Siemens said was that before the "messiness of learning was viewed as a distraction from learning, whereas now the making sense part is the learning"  (paraphrased). This got me thinking about messiness and not-yet-ness. I agree that messy learning is what college (BA all the way to PhD) should be what learning is about, but how does that square with the mandates for learning outcomes and the measurability of those outcomes?  This is particularly pointed at the moment as this year one department I am affiliated with went through their 'academic quality' review, and my home department is going through ours in early 2019.  Messy works, but how do you sell it to the upper level admins? Also, how do you sell it to learners who have been enculturated into a transactional model of education?  I don't have the answers, but interesting points to ponder and discuss.

Now, on a more geeky or technical side:  Docker and the cloud.  As Stephen and Tony were discussing the cloud. This made me think of tinkering as learning, authentic learning, and the aforementioned messiness in learning.   We now have the technology that allows us to spin off fresh instances of a virtual machine that has specific configurations.  I've been able to do this on Virtual PC (back before microsoft bought them) on my mac for ages.  It was actually a lot of fun to find old versions of Windows, OS/2, NEXTSTEP, and other operating systems and play around with them on my Mac.  It was a great learning opportunity.  But, but wasn't scalable. As a tinkerer I could do this on my own machines, but I couldn't distribute easily.  Now, if I were teaching a course on (insert software), I could conceivably create the 'perfect' environment and have students be able to spin-up instances of that to be able to try things out without the need to install something locally; not sure what licensing looks like in this field, but let's assume it's 'easy' to deal with. Whereas in prior eLearning (elearning 2.0?) the best that we could do is limited simulations with Articulate, we can actually afford to let the learners loose on a real live running instance of what they are learning.  When they are done, they can just scrap the instance.  Even if you needed to run the instance for an entire semester non-stop (15 weeks), that would still only cost the learner around $80.  Not bad!  The best thing about this?  You can freely mess around, and if you break something (irreparably), start from scratch!

Anyway, those are my thoughts on this week on eLearning 3.0 - what are your AHA moments?

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