Personal Learning Networks

So now that I'm part of your personal learning network, it's time for you to consider that phrase carefully. Just what is a personal learning network or personal learning environment (both phrases are being used about the Net)? I favor the word network.

Well, I could give a formal definition such as the one in Wikiepdia, but I think the TED video of Sugata Mitra's talk to LIFT07 in my previous post says it best. A personal learning network is the resources that you gather about yourself to help you make sense of the world and life, just as the Hole in the Wall kids in India did.

You've always had a personal learning network, starting with your mother, then your family, then your other groups. At first, you had little choice about who or what was in your personal learning network–you were born into this family and sent to that school–but that has changed. Now, you have more choice. Soon, you will have nothing but choice.

Web 2.0 has connected us to more resources than we currently have the wit to use. It has connected us to the biggest, richest, most intelligent crowd ever formed, and it has given us the tools to manage that crowd, or at least manage our interaction with that crowd. Much of this class is all about exploring this resourceful connectivity, this crowd we've joined. It's also about recognizing that you have a personal learning network and that you are at the control center of that network. Take time to view the following video from Graham Attwell and Andryan Puscuta:



So start thinking about it.

1. Who makes up your personal learning network? And if you limit yourself to school, even the university, then you aren't thinking hard enough.
   
2. What are the most important resources in your PLN?
3. What is the most significant thing you learned this past week, and what role did your PLN play in that learning?

Kid Groups

I'm always happy when a new TED talk comes out. Watch this talk from Sugata Mitra at the LIFT07 Conference.



Mitra's talk can spark lots of ideas, but let's focus on the implications for our topic–the wisdom of crowds. If I understand Mitra correctly, he appears to be saying that if given an interesting challenge, then children will self-organize into a group and teach themselves some rather complicated stuff, all without the oversight or interference of adults. And keep in mind that some of these groups of kids were learning to use a computer in English, a language they did not know, but managed to teach themselves.

The children in the Hole in the Wall experiments gathered themselves together and through trial-and-error began to make sense of an interesting resource. The learning seemed to depend greatly on grouping, however. The kids did not learn alone, but together. Is this group learning not contrary to an educational system, such as we have, that measures only individual learning and often considers working together as cheating?

The learning also seemed to depend on an interesting challenge: the computer itself and the window it opened to other worlds. I can remember learning vocabulary in school and how boring it was, but these Hole in the Wall kids taught themselves vocabulary–in a language they didn't even know–and seemed motivated to do so. Why? Is it because they were challenged by the computer? Is it also because they didn't have any adults about telling them what it all meant and how this would benefit them when they were looking for a job?

Some questions for you:

1. How can a group improve learning for all of its members, learning more and faster than any one of them could learn alone? What are the implications for education?
2. How does play figure into what the Hole in the Wall kids were doing? What are the implications for education?
3. Did the Hole in the Wall group form as an hierarchy, with a leader at the top sending commands down the line, or as a network, with kids interconnecting with each and only following a kid if she seems to know what she's doing? What are the implications for education?
   

Quiz 1 in Google Forms

One of the required items that we added to the syllabus on Wednesday was a weekly quiz over our class text, The Wisdom of Crowds. Last semester, I simply created a Google Doc and shared it with the class. They printed it out, completed it, and turned it in. This semester I'm using a new feature in the Google Docs suite: Forms.

You must complete this quiz before your next class session. Here it is:

Web 2.0

Perhaps nothing has done more to enable the ability of crowds to achieve wisdom than has Web 2.0, or the Read-Write Web. Part of your obligation in this class is to add to the list of Web 2.0 tools on the class wiki that you find interesting or useful. I've picked a quite arbitrary number: 3. So get to work.

You'll find a list of Web 2.0 tools and websites particularly useful to college students in a recent post to the ReadWriteWeb blog. Pursue it. And no duplicates, please.

Some questions for you to ponder:

1. How do Web 2.0 tools and resources leverage the wisdom of crowds to add value to the world?
2. What Web 2.0 tools can you envision that would add more value?
3. What is your favorite Web 2.0 tool and why?

Enjoy.

Gotta Get a Gunslinger

At its heart, The Wisdom of Crowds is challenging our attraction to gunslingers, the one superstar or superhero who can step into the gap and turn everything aright. The gunslinger is essential to the Western myth, starting with Odysseus and Achilles and ending with the High Plains Drifter, James Bond, and Rambo. After all, a good story needs a strong hero and a strong adversary. It's clean and simple, and we enjoy those kinds of stories. They make sense of our lives, and they are the way we've tended to write literature and history.

We believe implicitly that gunslingers such as Warren Buffett can make better decisions about difficult issues— such as picking good stocks—than can any crowd of people. Translated into school, this implicit belief says that you should sit next to the smartest kid in the class and cheat off her test, or at least do what she does.

Surowiecki says that, in fact, there is a better method for tapping human intelligence and wisdom: the crowd. He states rather plainly that "if you put together a big enough and diverse enough group of people and ask them to 'make decisions affecting matters of general interest,' that group's decisions will, over time, be 'intellectually [superior] to the isolated individual,' no matter how smart or well-informed he is" (xvii).

This is a strong statement, and you should probably be prepared to challenge Mr. Suroweicki. I will.

But let's fight fair. Keep in mind that Suroweicki is not talking about just any group of people. He is not talking about a mob, for instance. He says that a crowd can be wise only if it is diverse, independent, and decentralized and particularly if it is focused on certain kinds of problems: cognition, coordination, and cooperation. He readily admits that when groups don't meet these conditions or when they address the wrong kinds of problems, then they can make horrible decisions.

Some questions you might consider:

1. What problems of cognition do your classes present? What about the presidential election?
2. What problems of coordination do your classes present? the presidential election?
3. What problems of cooperation do your classes present? the presidential election?
4. How does diversity help your classes make better decisions? what about the electorate?
5. How could independence help your classes make better decisions? what about the electorate?
6. What kind of decentralization is Surowiecki talking about? Could such a decentralization actually work, or even exist, within your classes? within the electorate?
   

Fall IDST 2215 Class Blog

We've made a fine start on the class blog, but notice that the first blog for this Fall, 2008, class is Saturday, 26 July 08. Start with that one.

A Crowded Learning Environment

One of the issues that's easy for us to explore in this course is the wisdom of crowds in education. What technologies exist that allow us to leverage the power of crowds to elevate the total wisdom of a class? In other words, what kinds of things and procedures can we introduce to a classroom, our classroom, that would enable the class to work at a higher level, thus raising the level of performance of all the students in the class?

Prof. James Paul Gee of Arizona State University has some thoughts about some new learning technologies, especially games, and he shares them in the following video. Give a watch:

1. Based on your own experience with computer-based games, do you think Prof. Gee's take on games is realistic?
2. How do games integrate learning and assessment so that they are basically the same thing?
3. How do games leverage the wisdom of the game crowd?
4. What games could schools play? What games could we play?
5. What lessons do you see for schools in the way that gamers learn and master games? Is that in any way similar to learning and mastering any other skill or body of knowledge?
6. Why is learning and mastery often so much fun with games and often so miserable in school? How can we fix this situation?
   

How Do You Manage 250,000 Friends at Once?

One of the most practical issues confronting any notion of crowd wisdom, or group intelligence, is captured in the title question: how DO you manage 250,000 friends at once? Usually, if you gather 250,000 people in one place—or even 25,000 or 2,500 or even 250—they either turn into a mob all trying to talk at once with no one's voice being heard above the general cacophony or someone takes charge and makes everyone shut up and speak in order, or just listen to the boss in charge. The kind of conversation out of which wisdom seems to arise is usually very difficult in large groups. Large groups are either mobs or they are dominated and managed by some leader. They are seldom liberal, democratic communities where everyone can listen and speak and contribute.

Unless, as Wikipedia suggests, "some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision." So what is the mechanism we've developed that allows us to turn the incoherent hub-bub of 250,000 people discussing, say, wireless mesh networking into a coherent conversation that any one of us can follow and contribute to?

Some of us think it's the Net, the Cloud, the Matrix, Web 2.0—whatever you want to call it. One of the key focuses of this class is to understand this mechanism and to determine how it works, and just as importantly, how it fails.

Watch this little video from a recent TED talk by Kevin Kelly. He makes a wonderful observation that the Web is only 5,000 days old. Then he boldly wonders what the Web might become in its next 5,000 days. He describes the mechanism that pulls these millions of conversations together and makes them coherent; thus, he gives us a good place to begin our discussion. Enjoy.