The twentieth Online Educa Berlin conference took place December 3rd through 5th, 2014. The conference brought together 2332 partcipants from 100 countries. I intended to skip the conference this year, but changed my mind for three reasons: Howard Rheingold, George Siemens, and Stephen Downes.
Stephen Downes reminded the conference that he and Siemens invented MOOCs, something that’s often forgotten. Matthew James Constantine from Spain offered practical tips for MOOCs: keep videos under 7 minutes; plan a 4 to 6 week duration for the MOOC overall. |
Howard Rheingold spoke convincingly about the empowering potential of learning and the importance of networks. Teachers should discuss with students, find out their needs, and enable them to take responsibility for their own learning. The instructor’s task is to learn along with students instead of teaching. Rheingold recommends replacing pedagogy with peeragogy, which highlights different co-operative methods such as co-writing. Instead of memorizing we should consider meanings and connections. Effective networking requires that students create their own public voice. When someone enters your name in Google, you want the results to include your own outputs, not only information written by others.
Stephen Downes, in turn, advocated that each person needs his own independent online space. In the same way, every student should have his own personal learning environment, which is linked to other environments. The main idea is linking rather than using a joint platform. Services like Facebook are based on the premise that users are a product to sell to advertisers. Learning management systems, similarly, collect student data for the benefit of the organization and for the LMS company, even though the student should have the primary right to decide on its use. Content creators should always be able to take their data with, when they stop using the service. Our technology choices will define our future.
Thursday evening’s Oxford-style debate is always the culmination of the conference; two debaters stand for a given claim while two others argue against it. George Siemens and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger defended the idea that big data is not corrupting education, but rather helps to enhance and personalize instruction – as long as its use is open and transparent. Ellen Wagner and Inge de Waard were sceptical about the methods and goals of data use. In the post-debate poll, 72% of the audience agreed with the men. The debate was entertaining as usual, but it didn’t deliver such sparkling arguments as in previous years.
Things Are Getting Better, Even If It Doesn’t Look Like It
Keynote speaker Lisa Lewin illustrated with her own personal history that political decisions have both micro and macro impacts. In her case, they made it possible for her to study at Harvard. For many women and minority groups, good political decisions have opened access to higher education which was previously reserved for the elite. With the help of technology we can continue to increase educational opportunities. Lewin thinks that educational technology has now passed the rapid assimilation phase and has reached the endpoint of an S-curve. Now we need new innovations, which may come from the fields of big data or neuroscience.
Ola Rosling delivered another interesting presentation. He began by posing three questions to the audience to find out if the participants viewed the world based on facts or illusions. It turns out that we education professionals were nearly as well-informed as chimpanzees. Rosling demonstrated that we believe the state of development in general is far darker than statistics show it to be. Poverty has been halved, women’s education has increased, and natural disasters have been less devastating than we think. Instructors in particular should rely on a fact-based worldview.
Tablet Is Not a Solution
Beyond its keynote speakers, the Online Educa conference offered many interesting presentations for smaller audiences. I was inspired by three Canadians – Thomas Stenzel, Michael Canuel, and Donna Aziz who dealt with teaching English in Thailand. The Thai government had ordered nine million tablets as part of an effort to improve miserable student performance on the PISA exams. The tablets ended up on the shelf. No content had been planned for them, and they couldn’t even charge the batteries. Only after this failure was the Canadian group invited to establish a workable, web-based model for learning English. The case is a typical example of what happens when a so-called reform begins by purchasing technology without a pedagogical plan and without training teachers. Technology deployment requires their skills and commitment. Without their own e-learning experience, it’s impossible to implement new teaching methods. Unfortunately, the acquisition of tablets in particular seems to be a value in itself, rather than their purpose. Before deciding on a device, we should analyze its intended use: is it a tool for working and interaction, or mainly a reader for ready-made materials? In the search for fast solutions, we often grasp the wrong end of a problem.
Educa offered several smaller sessions. Canadians Thomas Stenzel, Michael Canuel, and Donna Aziz presented a web-based model for learning English. New generation virtual glasses attracted attendees: there was a continous queue in front of the booth. |