Steve's Musings on Education

Well, I’ve been challenged by John Smith to provide some concrete examples of the disorientation that I’ve felt learning new tools this past week in the CPSquare Connected Futures workshop. He makes a good point that discussing disorientation without examples puts the action at a distance (from myself and others). That may have been part of my hesitation to write about it more specifically. The disorientation is uncomfortable and difficult to understand in ways that allow me to work through the disorientation. Thanks to Jeffrey for consistently speaking about this in the last few weeks (see his blog post). So I’ll attempt here to describe some of my disorientation.

Considering individual tools, my experience with Facebook is illustrative. Creating an account was no problem. Soon after I had a number of “people you may know” with each having a “add as a friend” link. What is a “friend?” Of course I have a real-world reference to that concept. But what is the Facebook concept of Friend? What does “adding a friend” make available in terms of interaction? What of my Facebook items can Friends see that others might not?

OK, I didn’t need to answer everything about “friends”, after all, part of the point was to try it and see what happens. But a problem arose immediately. Before I add a friend, how do I know if the person is legitimate? I cannot figure out how to easily find out details about the possibilities posted. Clicking on the picture or clicking on the add a friend link does not give me any more information about the person. Do I have to search for this person? Well, OK, that seems like a lot of work (why can’t the application simply give me the information when I click on the thumbnail–already I’m a bit frustrated by that lack of functionality). But I try a search. Nothing but the same information I already have (picture and name). I try a profile search. Nothing but a cryptic message that ” Profile search will only search your friends and profiles you can see from Portland, OR.” What does that mean? Can’t I see profiles of people throughout the world? What does it mean profiles I “can see from Portland”? That makes no sense to me.

OK, not being able to see a potential friend profile is frustrating. I think that if I understood more about how Facebook worked I might be able to figure out why my confusion. I don’t have a mental model of how it works. I’ve been trying things based on my experience with other such tools (e.g., clicking on a name or picture to see details), but that hasn’t gotten me anywhere.

Clearly, I don’t yet have a workable model of how to use Facebook. But I press on. I still don’t know how to determine if someone is legit. So I ensure that I can verify the person from other sources. Either I know them directly or they are in the list of people who are currently taking the workshop. I can do that. So I dutifully add those people I can verify.

But I also find two features new to me of Facebook that delight me. First, someone in the workshop has recommended a friend to me. Not only does this bypass much of my concern about a person being legitimate, but I realize that it is a nice feature to allow people to network. This seems a real benefit for discovering interesting new people, ideas and possible collaborators. The other feature new to me is the friend-of-a-friend feature. Again, this solves the legitimacy problem and also seems useful for gathering a growing community of people.

It seems clear that I’ve learned about these two features most effectively through the actual use of the tool. Someone could have explained those to me in some “introduction to Facebook” but I think the actual learning experience was more powerful given my previous frustrations with adding a friend. In effect, my frustrations probably led me to ask more significant questions about these features so I was predisposed to look for solutions. Note that one of the features was invoked by someone in the workshop community while the other was a feature invoked by the software. In other words, I learned about the first feature from a more experienced user who took the time to illustrate that feature to me. The second feature was an automatic function of the software, a kind of automatic social network analysis. Nice.

This post is already too long so I won’t continue. Suffice to say that I still have no answer for how to easily find out if someone is legit. And I also have new sources of disorientation (e.g., someone just asked me to share an application–what is that about?). And that’s just the start, I’m still struggling to get Netvibes working properly for me. Oh well, more food for thought.

When we encounter a new tool it if often difficult to understand what it does and what good might it be for use in addressing some community (or personal) need. There seem to be two key cases: 1) New members of a community learning tools that are already in use by a community (or core members of a community); and 2) New tools which are not well known in the community but may have applicability. Are there necessary stages that individuals or groups have to traverse to learn new tools? What strategies might help facilitate that learning?

Focusing on the first case for now, it seems that someone learning a new tools must simply try it. Some things that might help would be descriptions or explanations that help frame the key features of the tool and examples that show the tool being used for do various things valued by some individual or group. For a tool used by a community, watching others use the tool (and the practices around the tool) are useful. All of these take time for the learner (and for those supporting that learning, e.g., creating clear examples). And these elements of learning are not linear by spiral. In other words, it is probably most effective for a learner to try some of the tool features, then see an example, try to apply the example for themselves, see how others use it, and then return to exploring the tool features, and so on.

Well, Hello World is an appropriate title for this first post. It takes me back to my first days as a computer programmer (back in the punch card days, I guess that really dates me). In many respects, what I learned in programming has been overturned by the new Web 2.0 services and applications. I’m having to learn “programming” all over again.

I’ve been interested in Web 2.0 technologies for many months. I’ve dabbled by signing up and briefly trying a number of different ones. But I’ve never spent the time to really use them for collaboration and collaborative learning. This in spite of my strong belief that social and collaborative learning can be a powerful learning experience for students, as compared to an information-transfer model of learning. The current CPsquare Connected Futures workshop is now pushing me to use these new tools, at last.

There is a level of disorientation in appropriating new tools since each new tool provides largely unknown functionality. Because each tool is new there is very little to grasp onto to understand what the tool is for, what problems does it solve or things does it enable. Precisely because these tools are Web 2.0, they offer a new paradigm of exchange and interaction. Yet one is trying to understand them coming from the old paradigm. There are too few clues as to how to learn the new paradigm. I find an analogy to the experience of faculty who have only taught face-to-face as they first attempt to teach online. When they encounter the course management software they simply have no idea what the tool is capable of nor how to translate their current teaching experience into the online mode. While some orientation to the software can help, it is only by using the software (initially, as a student) that they can begin to understand what the software provides.

This disorientation and the difficulty of understanding occurs even though current course management software is quite rigidly course- and instructor-focused, just like most f2f classes. In other words, the paradigm shift is not even as big as the one from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0.

One strategy that might help people overcome the initial disorientation is to prepare some typical use cases and scenarios (coming from the field of interaction design). The idea would be to demonstrate how the tool is used for a particular task. For example, del.icio.us tagging and sharing could be illustrated by an example of finding a resource, tagging it, having someone else find the tag, and so on. Such a case embeds the initial experience within a task that was previously accomplished in more primitive ways (e.g., by sending an email with the URL).