Category: learning

Quality and Authority

~ joanvinallcox ~ 1 Comment

Tony Karrer, in his blog eLearning Technology, explores a question that is often raised about the quality of information added on social media web sites. After watching the Wikipedia “debate” and hearing groups of academics, mostly communications teachers, boast about forbidding its use, I have come to believe that they aren’t talking about quality but about authority.

It takes time and effort to learn about how the social media work and how they can add to the impact and efficiency of knowledge workers. But to simply partake in the chorus of rejection without seriously exploring the possibilities is, IMHO, irresponsible. In my own explorations of the web and how it can be used to help learning, I have noticed two academic reactions. One is the quality card being played, without examination or research, but with confidence. The other is a collection of the most amazing intellectual explorations of this new media environment. I cite the work of Professor Michael Wesch:

This brief video should be studied by all knowledge workers, especially academics who study and teach communication skills. This video, to my mind, displays the excellent intellectual quality of Wesch’s work.

Wesch is an academic, and his work on YouTube can be labelled as good quality because he’s an authenticated authority. The quality of his teaching can be seen in his studying the context of his students, (because it’s a different era from even 10 years ago):

One final citation of Wesch and an anecdote. I stumbled across an hour long video of Wesch presenting at the University of Manitoba. The video is worth several hours of study in what it reveals about teaching, the social media, and students’ learning. – http://umanitoba.ca/ist/production/streaming/podcast_wesch.html

After I watched this video, I went to Twitter (http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter) and asked if anyone knew which kind of wiki he was using with his class, as I was intrigued by one aspect of it. The same day Michael Wesch himself answer my question. Now that’s good quality communicating! And there are others, academics and non-academics, who are providing work/information of excellent quality using the social media. They are sharing, but you have to find their work, and be capable of recognizing its quality for yourself.

The people who question the quality of work avalable on the social media are actually talking about whether the information is accurate and up-to-date. What they are revealing about themselves is that they are neither accurate nor up-to-date. What we should be teaching and practising in this new communications era is critical thinking, so we as idividuals can distinguish quality without being confused by authorities, who might not be presenting good quality information.

We May be on the Cutting Edge/Signs of Hope

~ joanvinallcox ~ 4 Comments

Rainbow

http://www.freefoto.com/preview/15-27-2?ffid=15-27-2

  • I have a friend who is updating a well-known business writing textbook. She wants to add an assignment where students have to using podcasting or videocasting, and wants my help in figuring out how to set it up. I see an inroad into college and university communications courses – provided, of course, that the teachers use the assignment.
  • The board of a volunteer organization I work with has set up a wiki and begun using it to plan, record and communicate.
  • A provincial math education organization is using a wiki to plan. (Ontario is a very, very, very big province and CommonCraft has described the problems with planning by email – http://www.commoncraft.com/video-wikis-plain-english).

I see these as signs that people are becoming more conscious of web 2.0 possibilities. It may not have gone viral – yet – but it may be starting to. Work Literacy has been developing frustratingly slowly but maybe, just maybe, the tipping point is approaching.

Old Skills and New Know-How

~ joanvinallcox ~ 2 Comments

After reading Michele Martin’s post, Knowledge Workers as Craft Workers, I began to think of other crafts and skills that have been changed by technology.

My grandmother grew her own vegetables, collected eggs from her chickens, and knew how to produce and preserve much of the food she prepared for her family. She baked on a wood stove, knowing what kind of wood to use for what kind of baking, and when to start it burning so the right level of heat was available at the right time to get hot food on the table. My Mom grew some of her vegetables, collected recipes, canned some fruits, and cooked on an electric stove with an oven where she could set the temperature. I use a microwave, prepared food, and eat out a lot;>

Office work, knowledge work, has been going through the same kind of transitions as new technology has created conveniences, and allowed “outdated” skills to be dropped. Imagine someone used to cooking on a wood stove trying to find their way around a microwave, a gas stove, and a modern grocery store. The skills gap would be debilitating, even though the modern technology makes everything “easier”. Without the pressure of needing to eat regularly in this new environment, going back to, or sticking with, the old ways would be very attractive.

How would my grandmother have learned to use the new food-preparing skills? She would have needed to learn them the same way she learned the old skills, by, in the words of Robert Frost speaking of getting an education, “hanging around until she caught on”. She would have needed to do the work with an expert to guide her, a mentor.

The same style of learning is needed for knowledge workers, but the digital natives don’t know the stages of preparation that the older workers learned by seeing each step of the production and talking to all the different craft workers who helped supply each step of the process, as described by Jim McGee.

I started consulting before the advent of the PC. When you had a final presentation to prepare for the client, you started with a pad of paper and a pencil and roughed out a set of slides. You could see that it was a draft and the erasures and cross outs and arrows made that even more obvious. This might be two weeks before the final deadline. Then, you took it to Evelyn in the graphics department down on the eighth floor. After she yelled at you for how little lead time you had given her, she handed your incomprehensible draft to one of the commercial artists in her group. They spent several days hand-lettering your draft and building the graphs and charts. They sent you back a copy of their work.

Then you started another iterative process of correcting and amending this product. Copies got circulated and marked up by the manager and the partner on the project. At the end, the client got to see it and you hoped you’d gotten it right.

All along the way in this old style process, the work was visible. That meant that the more junior members of the team could learn how the process unfolded and how the final product grew over time. You, as a consultant, could see how the different editors and commentators reacted to different parts of the product.

The digital native, who can use the new tools, have experienced the creation of a project differently.

While today’s tools have made the journey from germ of an idea to finished product so much easier, they have also made it harder by making it less visible. It’s my sense that most of us don’t even see what we’ve inadvertently given up. It takes a conscious act of will to think about how to use today’s tools in ways can give us both the productivity of the new and the process value hidden in the old accidental visibility.

Let me give you a personal example. In the 1980s I, through stubborn determination and being positioned in (though I didn’t know the term then) a community of practice, learned how to use word-processing but I used it as though it were a type-writer. I had no idea about the impact of design on readers; I wasn’t even aware of the layout skills a good typist knew tacitly, let alone what graphic designers knew. Luckily a student alerted me to those skills by mentioning Robin Williams’ The Non-Designers’ Design Book, which allowed me to know what I didn’t know, and learn some of it.

When I watch people learn how to use word-processing, what I see them doing is learning how to push the buttons, but I don’t see them learning about the basics of designing for readers. I also see web masters in love with Flash and apparently unaware of Jakob Nielsen‘s reader-friendly information on scannable text. People are often learning only the technological buttons, and not the art that makes the information effective and powerful.

So knowledge workers have two problems in learning to use the new technology. One problem is learning the technology itself. The other is the invisible problem; it’s learning how to go through the stages and what other craftspeople, now removed from the process, knew.

So those who have the old skills need to work with those with the new know-how, and those with the new know-how need to listen to and learn from the pre-digital workers. I didn’t learn how to use a wood stove from my grandmother, but I did learn what a good meal was, even if part of it was heated in the microwave;>

Who’s the Audience and Where are they?

~ joanvinallcox ~ 3 Comments

In response to Michele Martin’s post, Developing Work Literacies: Who’s the Target Audience?

I keep thinking about how information spreads. I’ve watched it spread online and know where to watch to keep up. I found the phrase that was going round the web a few months ago interesting: “News finds me!” and it’s true that web-savvy people set up networks that push the info they’re interested in at them. But what about offline? How does information spread there?

I thought about this yesterday as I picked up some cookies in an upscale market. There was a cooking show on the screen you could watch while waiting in the cashier lineup. Free ideas for meals! I thought about how people get inspired to learn while I was in an Apple Store attending a free workshop. The session had too much information to learn effectively but you could see the possibilities of Keynote, especially if you were familiar with PowerPoint (I am) and if you’d already played with Keynote (I have).

(An aside: if anyone knows how to change the font of a theme for the whole show rather than one slide at a time, I’d appreciate the information. Same thing with setting transitions for the whole show rather than one at a time. Other than those, I love Keynote.)

I thought about how people pick up ideas to try out while listening to friends and my husband discuss cooking shows. Then I thought about the strategy of a used car saleman (I think they know audience behavior;->) I used to teach with. When our office layout was changed, he always ended up next to the coffee. He said that it was the communication hub. They don’t have department coffee spots any more where I used to work; they have a Tim Hortons and a Second Cup. Maybe a Starbucks too by now; I haven’t been on that campus for a couple of years. The principle continues; people now meet in the coffee line-ups and chat. And there are notices, ads, and even screens with slideshows repeating themselves positioned around the lineups.

Word-of-mouth is powerful and can be stimulated by well-placed, well-designed media. If flyers and ads on the benefits of web and computer applications were as omnipresent as cooking shows and essay mills, if people were alerted in line-ups to one simple, short series of actions that could make their work easier or more interesting, wouldn’t that speed up the adoption of Work Litracy behaviors? If the posters or shows were rotated a couple of times a week, so there was both novelty and repetition, …

If there can be coffee franchises, why not Work Literacy franchises? Or have I gone too far into fantasy land again?

Email Survival and Work Literacy

~ joanvinallcox ~ 6 Comments

Does a Knowledge Work Skills Gap Exist?

Work Literacy asks the question; “Does a knowledge work skills gap exist?“ I answer: “You bet!”

Example Problem

For example, let’s talk about email. I find almost everybody knows about the existence of email, and most can use at least a simple version. However, for many people, anything beyond composing a simple message, opening a message, replying or forwarding, and possibly adding attachments, is an unmapped wilderness.

Many professionals feel swamped and victimized by their email load and haven’t developed effective strategies to deal with it. Many don’t know where to find out how to get more control over their inboxes, and where to get help. Their IT support, if it exists, doesn’t really know, or has a more technical approach than they can understand. And besides, everyone needs to find a strategy that works for them in their own particular situation.

http://www.43folders.com/2008/06/14/nyt-businesses-fight-email-monster-they-helped-created

NYT: Businesses Fight the Email Monster They Helped Create | 43 Folders via kwout

I haven’t seen much information about how to deal effectively with business email publicly available. (By “publicly” I mean something people who aren’t sophisticated in their online exploring can easily find.) The blogosphere has rumbled with information about GTD – Getting Things Done – and there’s even a way to add it to gmail, but it’s a system that’s really more aimed at geeks, according to the 43 folders blog

http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/08/getting-started-with-getting-things-done

Getting started with “Getting Things Done” | 43 Folders via kwout

And Getting Things Done may be good for many geeks, but I have developed my own approach.

Example Solution

The solution I’ve found to my email dilemma has been to forward all my email addresses to gmail, where I can add one or more labels, some nicely coloured, to the emails I want/need to keep and then archive them till needed, secure in the knowledge that –

  • I have lots and lots of storage space, and don’t need to worry about filling up my quota; and
  • When I have to switch computers, whether it’s short term (I’m at my friend’s and want to check my email) or long term (I just bought a lovely new machine!) I can still access all my email on my gmail account.

In my opinion, the easiest strategy to take control of email is to use gmail. However, I have to admit that it’s my geek tendencies that have allowed me to find help by using Google to search and find –

How many people who feel lost in the online world would think to search for a solution to their email problems there?

Using gmail is a possible solution but the real problem is, how to help knowledge workers find out what they could be doing to make their lives easier. Many say they just don’t have time to learn new stuff or even look for help.

Knowledge Skills Work Gap Problem

So we have circled back to the beginning. Strategies and solutions are available, but how do we get the information out to the people who don’t know what they don’t know?

WebTools for Learners, this blog, is my attempt to help share the knowledge, but sometimes I think I’m preaching to the choir. Those who already know, approve of what I say, but do any of the real learners actually find this blog and benefit from it? I keep trying and keep looking for ideas and suggestions about how to connect with those who need to know.

Any suggestions?

Autodidacts and Web 2.0: Are Universities Still Needed, Part 2

~ joanvinallcox ~ 3 Comments

As I thought again about being an autodidact and what universities could do for learners, I realized that universities have been part of my Personal Learning Environment. (If you are an autodidact, you have to have your own PLE. For years mine only included books and other people. Now it includes bloggers, social bookmarking, the way I’ve organized my computer, other people in person, and books, probably in something like that order;->)

That wasn’t true for my undergraduate degree, or only partially so. I took the courses I had to and the ones I believed I could pass. But while I can recall nothing from my Astronomy for Humanities Students except the professor’s disdain for Astrology, I did learn which is which. Of some importance I guess;->

What I learned in the courses I thought I could pass was that some courses (in my stronger areas} that I took because they gave me a nice schedule, could open up into new insights, understandings and interests. I came to appreciate that courses could have hidden treasures for me, that some academics had an approach and a breadth of knowledge that I could learn from, that they weren’t just showing off their knowledge so they could win some obscure “I know more than you – ha, ha” game. I learned that, sometimes, struggling through ideas and information allowed me to construct a complex web of understanding that was deeply meaningful to me in my life. It was a thrilling discovery. That and a mate who habitually reads, questions and wants to know more, have made me a learning addict (and an autodidact).

I have spent my life trying to figure things out. Both my graduate degrees unlocked new understandings for me, and both were part of my PLE. I signed up for each because I had a question that the books and the people around me couldn’t answer. Both times, some of my courses were blind alleys to endure, and many were quests that left me with new treasures. And both times, I chose what I wanted to learn about and continued my learning outside my studies as well as inside.

So my attitude towards universities and learning is that of a frustrated idealist. I know I learned deeply and richly because universities have been part of my life, but why are the pockets of innovative and exciting learning/teaching about communications so few and/or so hard to find in this era of explosive change in communication tools and concepts?

Autodidacts and Web 2.0 – Are Universities Still Needed?

~ joanvinallcox ~ Leave a comment

“Autodidact” was, at one point, a mocking term. Someone who had taught themselves was someone who didn’t really know because they hadn’t learned in the authority-approved, academy-approved, institutional manner. They were “undisciplined” because they were outside of the academic disciplines. Yet the connotations around this word are shifting. As the web, with the immediacy of its access to information, becomes more and more a part of our lives, more people are learning outside of the traditional institutions. Being an autodidact now has more caché, and more real value.

Most people who are web 2.0 savvy are autodidacts because they have taught, and are continuously teaching, themselves about what is available and what can be done with it. All kinds of people are learning outside our educational institutions. Some are now skillful learners despite having struggled to learn inside the institutions. And inside our educational institutions, the most exciting and dramatic changes in human communication EVER are often being ignored and avoided by many who should be leaders in learning. In my opinion, universities and colleges are just not keeping up.

Don’t get me wrong; there are amazing people out there doing amazing things in their classes. I loved Virginia Yonkers’ description of a course she developed; it blew me away. It’s a course that everyone should take, IMHO. We all need to know about “communication (mobile communication technologies such as cell phones, pda’s, video conferencing), information sharing (pod and vodcasting, visual information software, blogs, pageflakes), collaboration (wikis, groupware), and networking (facebook, LinkedIn, Ning)”. I admire the hands-on action research approach she uses with her students, but what I admire most deeply is the framework she has created so her students are learning the complexities of the impact of the new communication tools – (read her post!)

Yonkers demonstrates something very important with her design of this course, something that educational institutions should be paying close attention to because it is the value-added aspect of the expensive education they are meant to provide. It is easy, now, to find information on the web, and tutorials, both free and with a price. All kinds of people offer books and videos for sale on all kinds of topics on the web. But what Yonkers offers, and what universities should/ could be offering, is a rich learning context lead by a fellow learner who is skilled in shaping learning for herself and her students. Her students are learning applications, and the communications implications of these new tools, in a rich social learning environment. (A comment of hers on her post reveals that the technical environment wasn’t that rich.)

I have taught myself at least basic use of most of the applications she has her students use. I am an autodidact where web 2.0 is involved. I chose what blogs to follow, I harvest links from Twitter and my Bloglines account, and I use del.icio.us (and diigo) to be able to re-find links I value. But when I read this –

http://connecting2theworld.blogspot.com/2008/06/lessons-learned-from-new-communication.html

Connecting 2 the World: Lessons learned from New Communication Technologies in Organziational Life via kwout

I know that I need deeper, richer, more contextual learning than I can get from being alone f2f with my computer screen. I need a learning community to bounce ideas off and learn new possibilities from. I envy Yonkers and her students. I’ll leave you with Yonkers list of what current and future workers need to know, and a question: How widespread, do you think, is the teaching and learning of these work literacies?

http://connecting2theworld.blogspot.com/2008/06/lessons-learned-from-new-communication.html

Connecting 2 the World: Lessons learned from New Communication Technologies in Organziational Life via kwout

Personalizing Web Access

~ joanvinallcox ~ 3 Comments

Sometimes a bunch of experiences mash together and inspiration results. A couple of day ago I received a comment on one of my posts – #2 by Virginia Yonkers where she said “Try working on another’s computer! Just as we have idiosyncrasies in the speech, how we do math, writing (think of handwriting), we develop different patterns for tools and how we use them. If we can see how to modify a tool or how it is used to achieve our goals, we are more motivated to ask for help, persist through problems”. That has been my experience in my own learning.

Later in the day I was working with some people who were not that efficient at using the web and wanted to show them what I regard as an essential web tool, del.icio.us, the social bookmarking application. I reached out to the laptop, not my own, to try to open up my del.icio.us account so I could show them why it was so useful. Two problems:

  1. Although this was the same model as my laptop, the owner doesn’t use a mouse, and I do. I have to think to use the trackpad and that slows me down and klutzes me up;
  2. The owner’s desktop looks different and so do the applications because she has them set larger than I do mine, also disorientating.

Both of these reminded me of Virginia’s comment, and an often overlooked factor in encouraging people to expand their web efficiency. I think knowing how to set up and manipulate our tools is essential to any skilled artisan, knowledge workers included. Which computer we use is important, but knowing how to set up our PLE (Personal Learning Environment) or, the term I prefer, our PLWE (Personal Learning and Working Environment) is foundational. To work efficiently and effectively, you need to streamline your access to the different software and applications you are going to use. You need to fit your tool to your use.

Because I have a laptop, I can travel with it and use it for presentations. Because I am on it for several hours almost every day, and because I am impatient, I have researched and developed my own idiosyncratic setup.

Working SetUp

So let me explain, starting at the top left:

  1. I use Apple and Firefox because experts I know talked about how easy and handy they were, and that has been my experience too; I like them.
  2. I have my applications dock on the left side where I am less likely to “bump” into it. What can I say; it works for me.
  3. Most importantly, I have a personal toolbar, right under the address bar, where I keep all the links I regularly use. I use the Bookmarks feature to put these in the order I want them in, and to shorten their names so I can squeeze more on. I add other links I frequently use too, but allow these to be beyond the “>>” at the right end of my personal toolbar. When I click on the “>>” a long list of these medium important links appears and I can choose from them.
  4. Most of my “Saved for possible future use” bookmarks, I don’t put in the Bookmarks feature of my browser (Firefox) because they are then tied to my computer, and when I get a new one (yum!) or have a crash (the pain! the pain!) or use another computer (awk-ward!), I don’t have access to them. Instead I use an online application for social bookmarking, usually del.icio.us, (although I’m also checking out diigo). I can access my del.icio.us (or diigo) accounts from any online computer, provided I can remember my user name and password. (Not always that easy ;->) So I always have access to the links I’ve saved. Saving to del.icio.us is easy using the (circled) icons (which I dragged onto my address bar from the del.icio.us site) to the left of the URL field. The checkerboard, when clicked, opens my del.icio.us account so I can find previously saved links.  The  tag icon that says “TAG” on it, when click opens a small field in front of the site I’m saving, and allows me to add tags so I can easily re-find the site when I want it.
  5. I have a Google toolbar even though it takes up screen space on my small laptop screen because it has an icon, circled, that allows me to open a new tab with one click. I like having lots of tabs open so I can switch from site to site with ease, which brings me to my final PLWE essential >
  6. When I took the screenshot above, I had seven (count ’em!) tabs open in Firefox. Often I have more because it makes my work easier. When I finish this draft, I will add links, and what I usually do is open the site I want to link to in another tab, copy the link address, return to my draft and add the link. Multiple tabs – I love ’em!

So there you have it, some of my secrets for making my work efficient and easy to manage, for setting up my PLWE, my “tool”. All learned, I’ll add, over years of chatting with others and reading about what the possibilities are in this ever changing web world.

How To Get Efficient at Using Your Computer

~ joanvinallcox ~ 4 Comments

Well, that may be a title for a book rather than a post, but I have many very smart friends who declare themselves Luddites or troglodytes when it comes to anything beyond email. I keep thinking that there must be a way to entice them into learning more about the computer and the web.

I know I don’t help them by whizzing around the screen and doing stuff in front of them (but knowing that doesn’t always stop me from doing it). I know telling them how easy it it just causes the, voiced or unvoiced, response, “For you, maybe” and cynicism. I created my thesis, Following the Thread, as an exploration of how I managed to move from hating and fearing the computer to my current absorption with it. I discovered some things:

Then

  1. I was forced to use the computer as part of my job. Having no choice is very motivating.
  2. I learned from my students. I could make “deals” where I earned my teacher “cred” by coaching students in their writing, and they earned their learner “cred” by showing me how to use wordpro and the web. (It worked in the mid-Nineties but it might not as much now.)
  3. My college had ongoing half-day hands-on tutorials that I could take over and over till I “got” it. I think was especially useful because using the computer and the web required a fundamentally different understanding, and I needed a lot of guided repetition before it started to make sense to me. In a way, it was like learning a new language where it takes a while to “think” in it. Before I could get “fluent”, I had to grasp the pattern, and it was radically new. (I find it interesting that many ADHD sorts “get” this new pattern faster than the more academically inclined. My most helpful students were often dyslexic and really struggled with writing, but they grasped computer and web understandings very quickly.)
  4. Having real-life projects drove my learning. I found weekend courses on creating web sites excruciating, but I was happy to work on material for my teaching all weekend till I figured out how to make stuff work. (I soon discovered a great passion for WYSIWYG, the essence of user-friendliness in my opinion;->)
  5. Having a loose network of friends with expertise in different aspects of using the computer and the web allowed me to ask for help when I was stymied for too long. Joining the committee that created P.D. events to help teachers learn how to use the web for teaching (and volunteering to share what I knew) was a great leap forward for me, because I had a more structured network of experts to get help from.

Because I was one of the pioneering teachers on the web, these approaches helped me learn, however, I think the landscape and culture have changed, and some of the approaches would no longer work.

Now

What changes in this list might work now?

  1. Having a strong reason/desire for having to use the web is essential. If a group decides to use a wiki, or a family decides to set up a Ning network, or friends start using Facebook or Flickr, that might be the kind of pressure that encourages learning. Work demands are always “encouraging”.
  2. Learning for social reasons also creates a situation where you can learn from others; asking questions from your fellow learners or the group’s “experts” works really well. (I remember, when I was learning wordpro, just asking my cubicle neighbour the same question over and over, and she graciously answered me over and over.)
  3. Repetition is highly under-rated as part of academic learning, but dancers, musicians, athletes understand its value. If you want to learn something that’s difficult, repeat it as often as you can. Using Slideshare, you can repeat watching presentation as often as you want.
  4. Agree to take on web projects that stretch you. (Make sure someone can answer your questions; ask either someone you know or make sure you know where the “Help” button is – it might help.)
  5. Having a network of people you work or play with is still very helpful. The biggest change since the early stages of my computer and web learning is all the help that is now available online. Search for sites to learn from and bookmark blogs that offer on-going tips for whatever it is you want to learn. If you follow a few blogs regularly, and comment occasionally, you may find yourself part of a “community” and comfortable asking questions in comments or by email.

My blog is aimed at providing helpful information for those who are learning more about using the web. Finally, I suggest you set up a del.icio.us account, if you haven’t already, and an RSS reader, either Bloglines or Google Reader to use the web to help yourself learn about it.

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