The Dance of Technology and Pedagogy in Self-Paced Distance Education
Terry Anderson
Athabasca University, Canada
Summary
This paper describes the dance like relationship between pedagogy and technologies that creates distance education programming. Using a dance metaphor, the paper describes earlier generation of distance education and notes the evolving role of the self-paced learner as a focus of distance education. The paper argues that control of the learning sequence is an important pedagogical issue and that new tools of networked learning can afford opportunities for social interaction, while retaining self-paced programming control. The paper explores and defines connectivsim as a pedagogical lens to look at both learning activities and technologies.
Self-paced instruction of the past century challenged older models of education based upon seat time in lectures. In this century self-paced instruction challenges both seat-based lectures and predominate group and cohort based models of distance education. Though disruptive to these older models it promises a model of education that maximizes individual freedoms and choice, supports participative course designs and thus is a an appropriate new dance for the networked era.
Introduction
Although distance education educators like to assert that the pedagogy alone defines their distance learning designs, it is only in a complex dance between technologies and pedagogies that quality distance education emerges. The technology sets the beat and the timing. The pedagogy defines the moves. Both the design and the technology morph in response to developments or changes in theory and technological affordances. Further, the creative energy and context created by the participants also effects the dance. As any change occurs, the dance is thrown out of synchronization and all parties adjust their activities and their plans to return to the creative flow of the dance. In this paper I discuss the disruptive effects of a pervasive Internet and the network software applications that run upon it. In particular I look at the capacity to create a much enriched dance among those self-paced distance learners who, until very recently were forced to dance alone!
Distance education has always been primarily concerned with access issues. Access implies a host of sub factors that extend much beyond the simplistic considerations of geographic distance. As early as 1981 Charles Wedemeyer talked about access in terms of time, content, affordability, skills and efficacy (Wedemeyer, 1981). Paulsen (Paulsen, 1993, 2008) added access issues that are encapsulated in the media (affordability, efficacy, availability etc) and we have written (Anderson, Annand & Wark, 2005) about access and freedom in terms of the type of learning/teaching relationship with other learners and with teachers. Throughout the 150 year development of distance education, the dance between technology and pedagogy has taken many turns, dives and tempos, but it continues to grow in popularity and more importantly practicality, as the only means to meet emergent needs of 21st century learners in all regions of the world danie (Daniel, Kanwar & Uvalic-Trumbic, 2006)l.
The first generation of distance education was conceived of as a form of individual dance. The student was free to interpret the design and the content as they wished, within temporal boundaries set by themselves with only infrequent contact with tutors. But it was mostly a lonely experience, with none of the social support, excitement and motivation of other dancers and only infrequent and usually asynchronous text interaction with teachers or tutors. This first generation was an individual experience, because that was all that was afforded by the correspondence mail technology. Early distance education theorists (Holmberg, 1989); (Keegan, 1990) celebrated the independence that became associated with models of correspondence study and noted the intricate moves possible when a single student set the tempo for their own unique learning expression. However, the dance was confining and certainly did not meet the need of episiotomies based upon community creation of knowledge, pedagogies based on collaborative, cooperative or connected interaction, nor the learning needs of individuals with low levels of personal autonomy.
The second generation of distance education could be considered the golden age of big media. The full orchestra became available to the dancers, but like those watching the Hollywood dance movies of the 60’s the experience was vicarious as learners consumed the dance through the moves of others. These full scale productions gave rise to vast increases in visibility and exposure (ie broadcast of university programs) but still resulted in passive observations, rather than active engagement.
The third generation of distance education challenged the notions of time and sociality by introducing the beat from technologies that supported both synchronous and asynchronous interactions - most of which were distributed to cohorts of distributed learners. Dance choreographers now were able to choose from one-to-one, one to a few to one to many and all permutations to create complex structures of communications between and among learners. These new affordances created pressure from pedagogy to match these new affordances, giving rise to collaborative and cooperative distance learning pedagogies (Garrison & Shale, 1987). This 3rd generation celebrated the group synchronization afforded through synchronized technologies of audio, video and web conferencing as well as asynchronous models (computer conferencing) of group based distance education. In the rush to embrace the pedagogies of the classroom that now were afforded at distance, many of the freedoms associated with early generation of the distance education dance were lost. Most third generation systems demand that individuals wait for their study until the ballroom opens (start of the semester) and demand that each series of dances be squeezed or stretched into a 13 or 26-week semester. Moreover, this model has not been demonstrated to be cost effective (Annand, 1999; Rumble, 2004; Fielden, 2002). Nor has it been shown to be scalable - few published accounts of such cohort-based programming support more than thirty students per teacher in a class and a very frequent outcome is that teachers find such delivery dances to require more time expenditure than equivalent courses delivered on campus (Jones & Johnson-Yale, 2005; Lazarus, 2003)
We are now the threshold of a new dance and perhaps a new generation of distance education that marries the affordances of big media production, collaborative interaction and individual pacing. This next generation uses the technologies of ubiquitous networked coordination and collaboration, distributed throughout the globe and affords opportunities for individuals to find each other, study and work ensemble, support and challenge each other and yet still retain the fundamental freedoms of pacing and start and completion dates. I refer to this not as independent study but as self-paced, connectivist learning. This emerging generation of distance dance allows learners to create their own social and individual moves that meet not only their educational, but also their social, emotional and economic needs as they engage in the lifelong learning dance.
Connectivism - The pedagogy of self-paced networked learning
The pedagogy of these dances (and there are many moves and rhythms) beats to a connectivist drum. Siemens (2005) describes the following characteristics of connectivism:
* Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions: This diversity comes not only from the learning objects created and assembled by the course authors but by the comments and augmentations (in multiple formats) left by learners as they engage with the content.
* Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources: The networked content becomes a growing artifact as learners and teachers augment it with links to new resources, personal insights and experiences of the content as they are created or discovered.
* Learning may reside in non-human appliances – Learners create connections not only to new resources but also through the profiles, comments and invitations of other learners to fellow dancers.
* Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known – the emergent nature of connectivist learning underscores the transient and ever growing set of human and non human resources that augment our understanding of any complex topic. Connectivist learners realize that content is never fully mastered, but what counts is the capacity to continuously learn and as importantly to apply that learning in relevant contexts.
* Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning. Relationships begun in networked connectivist learning need not terminate at the end of a course, Rather networked learning is best located outside of restrictive firewalls of institutions, such that learners are not excluded when they graduate.
* Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill. Connectivist tools such as mind and concept maps, data mining, collaborative creation and annotation tools serve to help learners build and develop internal and external representations of connections between ideas, contexts and humans.
* Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities. Connectivist content never stale dates as it is never finished. Rather, content evolves in response to edits and augmentations that results from interactions with learners, teachers and other content sources (Anderson, 2003),
* Decision-making is itself a learning process. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong tomorrow due to alterations in the information climate affecting the decision: Self-paced, connectivist learners are not constrained to waiting until semester begins and conversely the learning semester need never end. Rather, teachers and designers build in tests and projects that allow learners to demonstrate their mastery and as importantly their capacity to continue learning the subject of the inquiry.
The near infinite potential of dancing with anyone, anywhere, anytime coupled with the vast sound tracks and light shows (open educational resources) accessible on the Net, demand that learning be an experience of connecting and applying resources, rather than memorizing particular tunes or steps. The art of improvisation, of learning to dance, becomes the life learning skill - accumulating static data or memorizing scripts becomes obsolete.
Affordances of self- paced learning technologies.
The driving technology for this emergent next generation of self-paced connected generation of distance education is based on networked social technologies. Social technologies have been defined by many - often noting the affordances of network tools to support user in discovering each other and subsequently working and playing together. I have defined the application of social software in distance education as “as networked tools that support and encourage individuals to learn together while retaining individual control over their time, space, presence, activity, identity” (Anderson, 2006). These in turn afford a variety of learning activities and personal and impersonal learning resources. After Siemens and Tittenberger (2009) I have created a matrix of major affordances of the web 2.0 social networking tools. These can be listed across the top of table and a column of social software tools can evaluated (subjectively or empirically) by scoring the capacity to support this affordance. (see Table 1)
Table 1. Affordances of networked learning tools and contexts
Content Discovery: Many of the new Web 2.0 tools provide flexible access to general purpose and subject specific search engines. However, social searchers also use the learners membership in certain groups, or networks to utilize the filtering provided by the preferences of these subsets of the whole to guide, validate and select certain valued resources. For example a bot might be able to determine the paths of successful learners and recommend them to new learners (Koper, 2005).
Presence: This affords capacity for social software to make presence visible, affords self-paced learners the opportunities to meet each, forming study buddies or study groups. These dancers may meet synchronously (chat, web , audio or video conferencing) or asynchronously(voice or text messages, email, blogs and twitter). Critical to finding each other is the concept of presence. Social software allows learners (and teachers) to find each other by the traces they leave of their activity (blog, wiki and Twitter postings) and through their visible presence in chat rooms, immersive environments and in resource data bases. Further, they may be able to meet face-to-face if geographic constraints can be overcome. These gatherings and resultant social support can become the critical social integration (Tinto, 1975, 1987) that has been shown in many attrition studies to make the difference between dropout and perservenace in formal education. For example Kember (1995) asserts that " social integration can be achieved, even in the face of an inhospitable social environment, if a time and space for study are negotiated" (p. 88). Of course, that negotiation is mostly among learners, who negotiate the time and place of their cooperative study, the focus of their work together (studying for an examination, peer tutoring, rehearsing presentations etc.) and the nature of the study group relationships that they wish and are capable of filling.
Communication: It hardly needs further celebration or elaboration to note the very drastic cuts in communications costs (through use of tools such as Skype, and other web conferencing tools) and hardware that can now be incorporated into online learning. These communications may be synchronous or asynchronous, text, audio, video or immersive and all sorts of combinations. The very rich, accessible, recordable and affordable affordances of networked communications creates opportunities for communication that rival (in choice and accessibility) if not in richness that is available face-to-face.
Reflection: Research on the value of reflection to apply, contextualize and deepen learning is extensive. However only recently has work begun on the unique affordances of blog tools to support and disseminate (within controlled audiences) these reflections. Shoffner (2005) in a study of blog use with pre-service teachers notes that “If you write it down, you have to think about it” – while offering a fresh space for reflective thought, the option of communal feedback, and the ease of electronic availability.” P. 2095. While Richardson (2006) notes the wide raging increase in attentiveness and motivation when reflections are made visible to others. The individual ownership of blogs creates a space for learners to create and develop their own web presence that is persistent and lasts beyond a single course or program.
Collaboration: Formal networked learning involves the design and orchestration of learning activities developed by teachers or instructional designers and included as a formal part of the course. The self-paced nature of student participants make these cooperative activities much more challenging in self-paced than in paced forms of distance education. Almost all of the literature on cooperative and collaborative learning in distance education assumes that students are progressing through a program of studies in a cohort that begins and ends study in a synchronous time frame. Paulsen (2008) argues that activities for self-paced learners must be “compelling but not compulsory”. They must operate on cycles so that learners can synchronize their learning schedules for short or long periods of time, in order to engage in the type of cooperative dance that meets their individual and temporal needs. Some of these activities may be completely asynchronous, but all must engage learners. Often this engagement requires the inducement of formal appraisal and course grade awarded by teachers, however the mark may also include self or peer evaluation to inform the teacher’s mark.