Blended Learning Index

You might call Boston the capital of f2f learning with its pedigree of physical campuses (Harvard, Boston University, MIT, Northeastern, Suffolk, etc.) yet it also seems to me ideal for a blended learning environment. The elements of a good blended environment include:

-- Human capital including those with good learning and technology skills
--Collaborative environment (Facebook was created in this milieu, as Boston is ripe with young people with a social agenda and the need to interface).
--Good public transpiration, so people can move around
--content rich environments, like museums, capital building, libraries, freedom trail, etc.
--Complex grids, paradoxes in the way things are done, creating environment for questions and various narratives.
--Wifi and strong public access to computing technology

Learning Vitamins

Prompt/Precognition process, as with reading a question about French Revolution and then having your mind make connections via subconscious, etc. Patterns are found.

Reflective Observation -- David Kolb

Learning organizations -- what they look like/feel like --teach for understanding, not judgement. Problems are solved through understanding rather than judgement.

Experimental -- taking/rewarding appropriate risks.

Learning as being the invitation of the uninvited guest.

Building the Power of Information and Increasing Its Possibilities for Social Engineering and Other Forms of Learning

Information/knowledge is often not something you directly see but you only indirectly see because it influences us in the way we behave. I was thinking of this when I was working with the person working on my roof and he pointed out that a leak in one place was caused by water coming from a completely different area (not directly above the leak) but from another place entirely. Information/knowledge is the unseen force in many actions/behaviors.

The information prompt/question will lead in so many different directions based on the person, the experience, etc. One way to build on this is to think in abbreviations and keywords. Let your mind do more of the work and increase the power/influence it can have and thus build its effectiveness.

We can build on the power of reading, for example, for by taking keywords from different articles and putting them together to form different meanings. Today I was looking at a number of articles in the Wall Street Journal and rather than focusing on whole articles, I looked for certain keywords that attracted my interest and then merged them with keywords from other articles that interested me. The words included: modernism; marginal costs; flexible, decentralized economy. With this fusion, I created a more dramatic, content-rich, information environment. 

Massive Online Open Classrooms (MOOCs) and Learning

MOOCs (massive online open classrooms) are often viewed as a threat to the traditional higher education because the free tuition and easily accessible content might be very appealing to students in lieu of tuition-based institutions. However, there are also scenarios that incorporate MOOCs into the existing structure with benefits to students, faculty, and the institutions themselves. 

We might adapt MOOCS into a blended model,  using the online portion to deliver online, well-produced content and mixing it with class time for labs and other group-based work. But, using the same technology and platform, we can re-engineer the concept so that these classes can also be used to personalize education and allow more targeted class to to taught. For example, I teach a class on librarians and instructors collaborating in the classroom. This class has a niche audience and the class does not always run as scheduled due to low enrollment. By offering the class in a larger online environment, we can scale up and attract participants from a larger geographic region (all over the world) and these classes will get the required enrollment more often. There are obviously administrative issues to be worked out, such as out of state tuition, etc., but offering these targeted classes will give faculty a chance to teach classes based on their particular expertise and build on the local attributes of a campus. Why not have a class featuring the biological diversity of a particular campus, for example? Campuses and faculty will be able to differentiate themselves based on content and in this way improve student interest in classes and therefore student retention. Faculty, of course, will have more teaching options and a more dynamic environment where a more diverse curriculum will include a more international student body (from around the world). For those interested in this concept of smaller personalized content as a way to drive student/faculty retention there is a small but growing literature concerning TOOCs (targeted online open classrooms).

MOOCs are one way to personalize an experience and also we can modify our f2f classes into modular formats so that students can work at their own pace. Some might say that the MOOC model could be threatening to higher education institutions because the free model is so alluring to people and the flexibility is also a great benefit. In terms of massive education, I believe we should surrender onto MOOCs what are MOOCs. That is to say that large, general classes (BIO 121, ENG 122) might be the type of thing delivered effectively online with well produced lectures.

We might think of MOOCs as the wholesale aspect of the learning industry. Just as companies like Aldi's and Wal-Mart upended the retail industry by providing products with a lot of general application (emulating to some extent wholesale enterprises), so too can MOOCs provide non-perishable content in terms of lecture content that is not subject to rapid change, such as mathematics, biology, history, and most other topics as education is foundational.

The retail portion of education, f2f learning, especially in competitive schools, certainly has its role, but we need to experiment with as many different environments (laboratories) as possible. Some will be more conservative than others almost by definition because f2f schools often have traditions that must (and perhaps should) be served.

I am currently taking my first MOOC and thus far I have been impressed with the level of interest and learning shown by the over 20,000 students taking a course on the French Revolution. I see a lot of value, not only for students but also for the institutions.

In terms of the institutions, in this case the University of Melbourne in Australia, there is the benefit of promoting awareness of the school itself; the instructor; and the quality of the program. There is also the indirect benefit to the students already at the institution because it raises the awareness of the school for those students that might wish to work internationally. People all over the world now know about the school. There is also the direct benefit to students because they get a chance to help with the class. For example, in addition to Professor McPhee, who teaches the class, there is also a doctoral student recognized as working on the class. I imagine this is going on her curriculum vitae, but more to the point it is probably part of her doctoral thesis. What a wonderful doctoral thesis project, for example. It is also possible that the people videotaping the professor's lectures and working on the weekly study guides are also getting credit, along with invaluable authentic learning. 

Obviously, I am learning content on the French Revolution, but I am also noticing how MOOCS reward certain academic/professional behaviors in the learning process-- critical reading, the rewards of positive posts as it builds class rank, reaching out to different people to build community.

I also really enjoy the international aspect of the MOOC. I am interesting with people from all over the world (in English of course) and in this way we can learn about other countries' education systems and other things indirectly. What do people from other cultures respond to in the French Revolution may be different from what I, as a U.S. citizen respond to. For example, there is peer grading for select essays in the class. I was struck by how vehement some participants were in challenging what another participant might have said about essay grades even though in theory there classes are not for professional credit and there is no tuition. I wondered if the people responding in a critical, entitled way (in my opinion) came from the U.S. or other more academically competitive environments where students expect their comments about grading and fairness to be listened to. Would a participant from a more authoritarian culture respond in the same way.
I wonder too how the Australian professor was responding to all this. Was he learning about international academic community in a different light than a professional conference?  

In terms of student composition, participants might also complete MOOCs with their friends, colleagues, and coworkers. It could be used as a form of team building in organizations, as it could be a shared intellectual exercise.

MOOCs also seem particularly suited to an opening up on some social restrictions. There seems to be more openness to accept things like learning online, just as there seems to be an increasing acceptance to open up to ideas like gay marriage and legalizing pot. A continuum of ideas are expanding.


MOOCs provide a way for education to scale up and address the needs of a diverse population because the content, assignments, and engagement model are fluid and easily adaptable to a variety of learning situations. For example, someone can start a class at a different time because they have access to the modular development of material.

One way that MOOCs might interact with more formal learning opportunities is by providing supplemental support, such as being used as by students during the summer or to supplement for-credit classes. 

I sense that MOOCs are in a basic way a very pure learning environment, as teaching and learning take center stage. There are no student services issues, no physical buildings to maintain, no sports teams, and very few administrators. The dynamic is all about teaching and learning, helping participants get the most out of a course.

Conceptually, the MOOC is open in so far as anyone can join it, but it also feels open in the sense that  it is more integrated into the non-academic aspects of the participants' lives.  With traditional college classes, the learning seems to be separated from family/work. With the MOOC, I have been talking about the class to friends and trying to look at current events and other learning processes in light of the class, the French Revolution. Friends have shared some of their ideas on the topic that I have used in developing my responses and understanding. The MOOC is an organizing principle more than a shell for dispensing information.  It is like being on a game show in a way.

If we look at some of the basic characteristics/elements of learning: looking for patterns; sharing interesting observations; asking questions; writing down what you see;  and taking time to wonder.  There is nothing that suggests a f2f classroom is the only place to experience these conditions. We might expand this search for characteristics to the urban environment, as we pick up elements crucial to community and a vibrant sense of engagement: gardens, libraries, colleges, transportation, architecture. Success is describable.

Learning in a classroom may be seen as more symmetrical, more uniform, but perhaps it is the asymmetrical, the irregular which will yield the best results in some (if not many) conditions. Asynchronous rather than synchronous.

Education is an industry that is inherently future oriented because the results of the education is so many years in the future. This is diametrically op[posed to the law and medicine, for example, which are concentrating on today's solutions. This is not to say that medicine and law are not forward thinking it is just that education has the responsibility to be more forward thinking because of all the fruits of its labor will take place in the haze of the future.
 
Smaller institutions, like community colleges, should develop expertise based on their faculty and/or geographic considerations such as location near mountains, urban areas, etc. Local institutions can built interest in their programs by doing the type of things that MOOCs can not do. Why should all community colleges offer the same programs? Let specific colleges offer programs unique to its environment and faculty and other colleges do the same. Allow students to partake in these unique classes at the same relative tuition, if possible, just as MOOC expenses are not tied to where the content is created or the participant lives.

MOOCs seem to be a strong alternative as education evolves from the importance of answers (more instructive based) to importance of questions (constructive based) because MOOCs add value through creating the curriculum, which is a intellectually demanding task. With good prompts, MOOCs contribute good questions, another vital part of constructivism, and, of course, with appropriate evaluations, MOOCs add the third vital part of constructivism, "gentle judgments."

Without good questions and gentle judgments, it might seem like someone is holding their hands over a map and not letting you see how things are connected. This is sometimes the feeling that the  instructive method inculcates.

MOOCs can be described as "patient" continuing to evolve, first perhaps forming a supplemental position to online/f2f higher education but then moving to a more instrumental place, like the Third Estate in the French Revolution, waiting for Royalty and Clerics to recognize they were indispensable.

Although we can describe MOOCs in a lot of complicated ways, there has long been the drive to utilize technology in education and other aspects of our lives. In Politics,  written about 350 BCE, Artistotle describes a future where all manual labor will be done by robots. Because Aristotle spoke in Ancient Greek, his rendition might sound something like this (or not).   

Responding to Nowhere & Everywhere -- Social Practice, Culture, and Learning

Social practice is the sequencing of actions that allow us to function in the material world. We need to be able to understand what is going on in a society to effectively function within it. Actions are not only interpersonal but are constituted in a society. They are patterns of actions--practices. As a society we must be able to understand these actions, such as hide and seek a game not a way of avoiding police.  

Education is a vital part of creating and interpreting social practice. When we share knowledge there are a number of paths it can take. We can see our goal as trying to add to the cumulative knowledge of each individual and/or the distributed knowledge within a given community. That is to say that the cumulated knowledge of the individual, when shared as the distributed knowledge (what all the individuals of a community know) becomes something a lot more powerful. Distributed knowledge is more diffuse and generative.  In the education system, we tend to assess knowledge only in its individual cumulative form (testing an individual) when a more accurate evaluation might be how a community solves and anticipates problems through distributed (accumulated social practices) knowledge. Distributed knowledge is a lot more powerful and radical because it implies that when we share knowledge we help each other solve problems, both personal and societal.

A sophisticated society uses all its media to distribute knowledge. Music, literature, this is what a culture does, it attempts to distribute knowledge. Some cultures/societies might try to block the distribution of knowledge, especially when technology has created so many ways for people to distribute (pool) their understanding and problem solving capabilities. Knowledge is not cumulative in the individual but distributed to the community. This is how it should be judged and evaluated.

When we talk about a particular culture/society we might say we are talking about the dominant culture mostly, but there are also so many subsets that also work within this framework. The subsets (ethnic communities, subcultures, others with under narrated stories) operate within the greater community but also have their own distribution systems, some more effective than others. These subcultures often struggle mightily to develop and distribute information that is important against the barriers/colonialism of the dominant culture. When unique wisdom is distributed from a subgroup or an individual into the wider culture that is reason to celebrate. It is the Black Fantastic of Richard Iton, who posits that the solution for a culture that is denied love from the greater community is to distribute/generate it and then share it outwards. Music is a prime mover in this effort. We must use our own indigenous culture and thought to fight against the cultural colonialism of the dominant power (s).

The politics of difference and how cultures interact in a dominant society describes both the modernistic progression and also a postcolonial phase where there is a disruption between what is defined and how that is changed. These interventions by the subset can be seen as not only being black, but feeling black. That the change agent is the idea, not the person behind the idea. The feeling not the feeler. The artist does not only describe or show what is "real" but responds to it and agitates for or against it--when they do this within capitalism they might be described as capitalistic orphans. The instrumentalized roles that the system wants us to portray or complete without an understanding versus the autonomous roles that we can do more creatively.

For Iton and others, this struggle for distributed knowledge is an attempt to redefine personal and collective histories and bodily descriptions. The ego is not that important collectively but individually it might be important as a generative agent-- so we can experience and embody ourselves and our communities differently. It is all about agency and grooving until the end of time.

By turning the colloquial into the academic, we can work towards getting social practice more tightly woven into the curriculum. We can also use this understanding to improve our teacher intelligence, that is our ability to turn authentic and applicable objectives into engaging activities and assessments and then letting our students build on that, free of unnecessary power relationships.

In terms of what this force of integrating social practice might look like in the classroom, we can use some of the description of Bell Hooks from the Wikipedia article about her "In her book Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, Hooks investigated the classroom as a source of constraint but also a potential source of liberation. She argued that teachers' use of control and power over students dulls the students' enthusiasm and teaches obedience to authority, "confin[ing] each pupil to a role, assembly-line approach to learning.”^[16] She advocated that universities encourage students and teachers to transgress, and sought ways to use collaboration to make learning more relaxing and exciting. She described teaching as “a catalyst that calls everyone to become more and more engaged”.^[17]" 

One way to liberate learning from some of the inherent contradictions and limitations of the classroom (and expose learning to different contradictions and limitations to further its growth) is to blend together the academic and vernacular. That is to try and build learning experiences into content rich experiences from day-to-day experience. We can use activities that create content that the students have a role in describing. In that way we can build social practice into the education process in a more dynamic way then simply reinforcing cultural tropes. For example, we can have students use an online source like the Wall Street Journal to identify a current event article and then have the student use that article title to find full text of the article in a library's Wall Street Journal index. In this way we are introducing the concept of using both public and private databases to create value. Students (and faculty) see the benefits of using both types of resources, and librarians create learning objects to reinforce this relationship and teach students how to do it, as shown through this tutorial. We use the social practice of scanning the Wall Street Journal homepage for news into an academic exercise of using library databases to build on the value. 

When I thought of Jorge Luis Borges' quote about heaven being a library, I imagined it was an expression emblematic of the instructivist notion that wisdom is inside a source outside oneself and you acquire this wisdom (a little bit of heaven) through absorption and application. The author is the teacher and the reader is the student. It made me a bit melancholy but also helped me understand that many librarians saw themselves as traditional teachers, presenting information/library collections and reference service in an objective way as our main educational goal. Helping students and others know about and find books and presenting programs about subjects and strategies for acquiring learning. 

As I read a little bit more about Borges and his poetic representations of learning and knowledge I thought perhaps he did embrace the constructivist notion that I am more comfortable with, as this quote makes clear: "the fact is that poetry is not the books in the library … Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book."  This suggests Borges had a more constructivist model of engagement/learning that it is not the book that is heaven (or knowledge) but rather our interaction with the book that creates the paradise. This suggests that librarians can take their spot along with other activists and educators as creating programs, content, and other teaching/learning opportunities that encourages engagement with knowledge and formulation of content and relationships that not just reflect the world (past, present, and future) but can actively encourage people to change themselves and the world (past, present, and future).  Librarians are not objective teachers only presenting content and programs through books and other materials and programs but can be engaged in presenting scenarios to be solved through interaction with knowledge and tradition but also, perhaps, to transcend it. 

This is, for me, the essence of constructivism, as the instructor identifies key objectives, develops activities that develop those objectives, and then create the mechanism so that participants can construct their understanding of the objectives based on the activities and feedback from themselves and others, with oversight of the instructor.  

Education and the Social Practice  

Research skills initially mirrored the information skills necessary to participate in the economy/politics of the time (Prussian). These skills included: to evaluate information, to compare it with other information, to synthesize information from different sources, to identify the most crucial pieces of information available (critical thinking). These were the skills needed by citizens (white male landowners and perhaps a few others) to give them the skills to fully participate as citizens.  

Today, those participatory citizens skills are no less important, but they have gotten more expansive, as society has become more advanced technologically and culturally.
These skills are necessary not only for those involved with traditional higher education, but also for self-directed/self motivated learners that might not be looking for a graduate degree. 

Here are some questions around the contention that education mimics the culture that creates it:

What are the privileges of learning and how are they distributed? Do the right people have access? do others have access? Amount of free time. Economic creativity. Why should capitalism have all the options of solving the problems? Who has access to the tools of learning -- production of learning opportunities. Always the power, the instructor. Should students create an assignment for the next class.  Do we need to have technology skills as well, not just to learn, but to create knowledge, which is becoming increasingly important?   

Subject specialist changes meaning when there is so much knowledge available on the Internet. We will need our instructors to guide much more in the shared economy and often this will include guiding us to other experts. There can be no fear of job replacement in this scenario as it is wealth creation. No one way to have fun and learn.

The educational possibilities of the shared economy are very deep and varied. For example, Air BNB opens up travel feedback to a whole slew of the population that before did not share their views with other parts of the population.

One of the challenges of online/blended learning is to appeal to the sense of place that f2f has. People want to come together.  In Boston, for example, there are so many people that want to see and experience the Harvard campus (such as rubbing the foot on the statue of John Harvard). Blended and online will become less foreign as they develop their own emotional centers with their traditions and their own sense of place.

Social practice and learning can also interact around the concept and process of the question. The question is a time-honored part of any traditional learning structure. An expert/speaker presents information/analysis and then the audience has a time for questions. This questioning is an important part of the process as it gives the audience a chance to connect thoughts and ideas, interact with the speaker and each other, and add content to the gathering.

Generally in the question and answer period, there is a question or series of questions and then a response. How powerful it was when there was a presentation and there was a whole series of questions that did not necessarily get responded to by the speaker, as there would not have been time for all of the questions if matched with a response. The questions stood as content on their own, as the audience and speaker treated them as content on their own. Some audience members responded to other people's questions and in this way it became more like a discussion board in an online environment.  In this regard, questions are not a source of confrontation or clarification, but of audience members contributing to the creation of knowledge.

Social Practice is also deeply involved with unsuccessful learning. Administrators and others may be quick to focus on outside interventions, such as tutoring, bridge programs, and the like. And, these are all good as long as these practices are sustainable and do not detract too much from the teaching and learning in the classroom. After all, learning and teaching were the original interventions to the challenge of progress. We can not water that reality down too much.

We tend to view research as being good for academic grades and life-long learning, but it turns out that there are cognitive reasons to do research. The brain loves to adapt and learn new things. It turns out that research is the type of active learning that increases brain functioning over time, with skills like memory, critical thinking, and word skills. So, when you think you are doing something for the present, it turns out that we are doing something for our cognitive futures as well. 

Problem-Based Learning; Curriculum as Problem Solving

One way to strengthen the current learning model based on subject content is the integration of problem-based learning. This is obviously not a new idea as schools like MIT give their students problems that they have to solve based on available resources/new ideas.

Problem/Scenarios work, I think, because they create a tension that participants have to solve and therefore helps students see and apply relationships or develop their own. If we look at subject content as the "notes" then the learning becomes the "space between the notes." Scenarios, based on subject content, then becomes the vehicle for participants to engage with the content and create their own ways of expressing and modifying their learning.

Scenarios are effective because they build on the reality that our brains have more capacity than our ears/eyes. We process information faster than we can express it. Our brains are always trying to fill in the gaps and scenarios let us experiment with solutions while we are still listening/reading. Mind the gap is where the learning is.

We might rather look at issues around problem solving. Problem solving, I think, has a more specific application in terms of situations. What do I need to do and then how should I do it. Helping our students to correctly identify a problem and then solve it in an academically appropriate and sophisticated way is still a challenge. But, when we view our classes as a series of problems to be solved (in creative ways) as we provide the tools for solving the problem, this can help us communicate challenges in a clear and solvable way.

The key would be devising interactive relevant problems to solve. Interdisciplinary instructor teams would set these up and then market the problems to the students to convince them they were the ones that were needed. Instructors would use statistics, their personalities, logic, etc. to show students why their problems were necessary for the present and future. History instructors would justify their curriculum to the community (rather than a curriculum committee) based on what their problem was, how important it was, and how qualified they were to solve it. Instructors could also set up interdisciplinary teams to address these issues collectively and in some ways help the students visualize a path towards a solution.

One possible problem might be to develop a database for other students to use. The students would have to get others on their team to help with the skills they need or acquire the skills themselves. They would have to justify what they were doing within the time and expense of doing it. A final solution would be evaluated based on how well it responded to certain parameters. These problem sets would give students more value than a traditional class.

The problem-based approach helps us see the distinction between learning and work. Some of the most effective learning I have done is when I am tying disparate ideas together to create something new. That is not work in the traditionally academic meaning, in my opinion. It is doing my own personal blending of ideas. Kind of like putting together a puzzle may seem like a lot of work but in actuality it is a series of inspirations followed by looking for new patterns.

In his book The Rise of Superman Steven Kotler posits that achieving the state of "flow" is the way to get optimal creative and athletic performance. There are many words for flow, but it constitutes the ability to focus our attention and effort in such a concentrated way that we optimize performance. We can not perform miracles in this state, but we can steadily improve about four percent each time if done properly. In the radio interview I heard, Kotler explained that a surfer could go from a 20 foot wave to a 25 foot wave in a series of flow event trainings, eventually leading to more better performances.

Kotler says there are 17 trigger events for flow and they are tied to our biological survival urge. When we can channel this energy, we can grow physically and intellectually. The events need to draw us into the now as we challenge ourselves to improve our performance through concrete physical and mental goals. We need to create tension and then resolve it.

The key to these trigger events is that they should not really create fear, etc., but get our minds to mimic and respond to these situations. We need to be stimulated and this is why learning environments need to challenging and stimulating without being too much so.

In "Why Jim Harbaugh is Still Throwing" in the Wall Street Journal coach Jim Harbaugh talks about how he plays a game of catch with prospective quarterbacks to get a sense of their competitiveness and other intangibles. This reminds me of the biblical story of how a leader will evaluate potential warriors by watching them drink water from a stream and judging potential warriors with how they drank, either by cupping their hands so that they are always ready or by putting their mouths in the water, which left them vulnerable.

Scenarios as a method of solution visualization worked for me as I was trying to figure out how I felt about the situation in Gaza, with the conflict between Israel and Palestinians. I could not describe how I felt, but rather came to a greater sense of equilibrium through a series of questions I asked myself. Do I want a long term solution? Does this seem like part of a long term solution? Is war preferable to dialogue? As I asked myself these questions, I became more comfortable with how a felt about the situation and how to describe where I wanted to be going with my thoughts and feelings. I did not feel trapped into an either/or proposition or solution.

We might also think of curriculum development as a form of problem solving. We can develop activities and learning objectives to help people gather information and make decisions. I was talking to someone about an interpersonal situation where people were not jelling as a team. I suggested some processes/activities that would get us working together or at least possibly working together. Once the process starts, we can use reflection and other strategies to modify or change the curriculum.

Dualism and the Open Classroom --Different Ways of Seeing?

Adopting and/or changing narratives to create a dualistic approach has important implications for education.  I am thinking that at first in the United States we had the theory of the melting pot, where different nationalities/people gave up something of themselves so that the greater good would function. This was followed by the concept of multiculturalism, where different nationalities/people would each contribute what they are, what they have, without sacrificing who they were. We would become a collection of identities. Now, perhaps we need to come to the point where we need to be able to hold dual narratives spontaneously. We need to be both individuals and collectives simultaneously.

I heard a speaker on critical theory, Professor Jürgen Habermas, University of Frankfurt, discussing how we have both a civic solidarity and an informal solidarity and we need a way to expand our consciousness to include both as with a nationalism (dedication to the state as our collective/democratic problem solving entity) and also a supra state that  exists beyond our state to enable us to resolve those collective problems that can't be solved on the national level. His example of this supra state would be the European Union, a collective. The United States, is, of course, a federal system, which brings together states in a power sharing arrangement. A federation of states.  Whereas France was created as a unity state. He suggests we need a transnationalization of democracy to address the systematic problems that nations can not solve independently. I suppose he means things like climate change, nuclear proliferation etc.  The nations would still enforce laws, as they do in the EU, but there would be an avenue for solving problems based on a common overarching model.

A speaker on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict,  Dr. Yakir Englander  also talked about the importance of living with dual narratives. This for the different nations but also for the different communities within Judaism. We must not try to solve another's problems directly because that solution might create dangers for those more intimately involved with the struggle. For example, it is not helpful when an American Jewish tourist goes to Jerusalem and wears an IDF t-shirt. This is hurtful to the Palestinians. We need to be careful with our holiness because there is violence in holiness.  Englander has set up an organization that works with Palestinian and Israeli youth to help them develop this dual narrative.  There is also this need for separate groups to create a dialogue with each other -- women in Judaism, denominations within Judaism. Is is a chutzpah for people to try and solve others problems without first developing an ability for this kind of dualism. Not all issues can be resolved through fundamentalism -- as with accepting gay Jews while also accepting Torah's teaching on the lifestyle.

This duality will help us see that there are two areas of conflict that need to be resolved. The actual conflict, those lived by the people engaged in the situation, and our image of the conflict. Dialogue in these situations is vital but only if seen within the context that dialogue is part of action. Action is the way to resolve conflicts. People with a different image of the problem are the ones most likely to call others naive or more derogatory names; those involved with the actual problem are more open to different types of solutions.

Often these dualities can be upsetting because they can represent many aspects of a situation. Rather than adopting them completely we might consider using them as simulation exercises. Taking data and putting it into a scenario in our minds -- much like scientists use simulations of data (such as years of coordinates of the movement of planets) to help them see where things are going. We might play these dualities into the future to see which might lead to the best results.

In education, perhaps we can see this narrative in terms of the open classroom, where individual teachers and local schools retaining curriculum control is one side of the coin where the common core, with national control of curriculum being the other side of the coin. We must, I suggest, be able to integrate these two narratives in a way that is authentic. We can focus not on self improvement but on selves improvement.

In the education sense, perhaps libraries can show the way as resource sharing, where one library holds an item and shares it with other libraries and other techniques might be adopted by colleges/universities whereby we integrate instructors from one college into another college or have instructors from two (or more) institutions teaching together in an expanded notion of classroom. There would be an open classroom motif, where we stitch together a collective from the accepted notion of individual control of the classroom. We grow through some of the issues of curricula prerogatives because we need the collective dynamism without giving up the individual responsibility.

The common core curriculum might be expanded to the common core resource pool. Perhaps everyone would accept Google (or another search engine) as the common resource pool and then create subsets of data (databases) to supplement and add to the classroom.  Google as the master index (common core) but create subsets of this index to build local control (information of specific concern to a teacher or set of teachers).

Dualism is a good tool as we go forward into the shared economy. Where we can accept people both as they are and as we want them to be. Where a wide variety of sources can be seen as legitimate and authoritative.

What better tool to carry with us into the shared economy than information and access to it in such a variety of situations.

Dualism is not new. We have had conflicting political social ideas as cultures have evolved and in many ways, it is our ability to work with and accept dualism without resorting to judgement and control that leads to a flowering of ideas and culture. Jane Addams, the social and peace activist, spoke of "tolerated puzzlement," which was a way to encounter new ideas and people without the need to be judgmental. It is this spirit of openness and acceptance that creates the creative infrastructure we need to peace and learning to flourish and forms as a foundation for the American Pragmatism movement that holds a key as we continue to encounter (radical) uncertainty. We can confront uncertainty with ideas not impulses. You don't need to change people, you need to hear them.

Perhaps "tolerated puzzlement" was a precursor to the "Yes, and .." theory of improv as a way to create linkage between people and ideas.

Internet Knowledge Builds on Old Knowledge/Traditional Knowledge

The Internet is, of course, the largest repository of information ever created. At any given time though, what is on the Internet is comprised overwhelmingly by information within the last five years. This puts a premium on new knowledge, which is undoubtedly very important, but leaves out the vast majority of information ever created and even most of the knowledge that most of us know from school, life, etc.

These categories can be called Old Knowledge, that which is in books and other materials created in the past. This is the vast majority of knowledge.

There is also Traditional Knowledge, the knowledge that is in people's heads and may not even be published. There is a role for traditional knowledge in many academic and non-academic activities. For example, there is a lot of talk in the career/job hunting world about "building your brand." In terms of information and competitive intelligence, we could think of our brand as knowing something (be it a skill, an idea, a strategy, etc.) that someone else needs/wants to know and then being able to find that person (s) and creating a mutually-beneficial transaction.

Essentially, if we can think of ways of creating something unique -- what we know that can help someone else -- be it a skill, idea, etc.-- and then finding someone that needs that information/skill, then we are in business. For example, if we want to teach English as a Second Language and we have that skill, then we need to find someone or some organization that needs that skill and can pay us.

This is a form of the supply/demand concept, where we become the supplier of information/knowledge or a product that someone else demands. Of course, this can be tricky as sometimes demand is only created when something new and profitable is supplied.

Don't Underestimate the Past

I was teaching a group of traditional students and I mentioned that while the future undoubtedly has a wealth of opportunities for professional opportunities, the past also has its power in terms of its lessons, experiences, and untapped potential (some older technology/non technology items, for example).

One student chimed in that he would use my quote of "don't underestimate the past," so I am thinking that the idea had found some credence. It reminds me of the Talmudic dictum of "remember the past, live the present, and trust the future."

Within culture we often go backwards for our inspiration. There is the jazz ensemble that the Wall Street Journal noted is "modernizing Morton" (Jelly Roll Morton, that is) by updating his classic jazz piano sounds from the early 1900s. There is also the Jack Delano photograph project as shown at the Chicago History, which features a photography update of Delano's classic 1940s photos of railroaders in the Chicago area in which Pablo Delano, Delano's son, takes photographs of the descendants of those in the original photos. 

I think we all need to be forward thinking in all aspects of our lives, however, the most powerful lessons integrate the future with the other elements of our reality.

We might take the issue of climate change as an example. According to Mark Bittman's "The Aliens Have Landed" we have already missed our chance to stop many of the negative effects of climate change, as many of the results are already here. He leads his article with a reference to how France felt they could contain Germany in World War 2 with their Maginot line built for World War 1.

And, then there is the more poetic response, as with Prout's "Remembrance of Things Past," where much of the book highlights how a certain action or event can bring us back in time and reveal many thoughts, feelings, and ideas, that might otherwise lay fallow.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's book "Plato at the Googleplex" is a testament to integrating the new with the old. Her premise of Plato applying his philosophy to our current tools is revealed as he compares niche websites in relationship to the Myth of the Cave, insofar as a fragmented society only listens to its own experts.  

The past might also be a powerful learning device in our use of counterfactuals. For example, I read a book review of Joseph Raskin's The Routes Not Taken that discussed how much of the development of the city of New York (and its surrounding areas) were directly influenced in terms of density and economic success by the subway system. What would have happened, the book muses, if different routes had been built, such as between suburbs rather than to Manhattan? How would economic development have been affected, etc.?

Within the field of education there are many examples of past being prologue. There was the 1919 Winnekta Plan (Crow Island school) that emphasized progressive tenants of learning through individualized learning plans, project based learning, student-friendly classroom design (color on walls, design innovation). These are all movements today as well, as we look to technology to promote individualized learning, for example. 

Using Culture in the Curriculum -- Blended Learning as Artifact

In addition to being very accessible, blended learning is capable of great poetry and melding of expressions. For example, Charlotte Salomon, the Holocaust artist and victim, created an illustrated biography that was stunning in its intensity and poetry. The work, titled "Life? or Theater?" featured over 1,000 paneled illustrations that discussed her life before and during the Holocaust, during which she fled from her native Berlin to a small town in France, from which she was deported and murdered in a Nazi death camp. She was only 26 years old when she was killed.

Her illustrations are so very remarkable -- the work is a graphic novel on a grand scale, but what makes it especially poignant to me and brings out the blended nature of Salomon's talent is that there are notes that refer to musical scores that she wants the reader to visualize and listen to (if only in their minds) while reading the text. The text refers to these musical scores, but one can imagine if Salomon would have lived in our day and age, she might have provided links to these musical scores.

For a glimpse at a remarkable woman and a remarkable artistic achievement, take a look at the webpage dedicated to "Life? or Theatre"/"Leben? oder Theater?".  Blended  certainly is a poetic means of expression.

There is also the work of contemporary Iranian artist Shirin Neshat in his Turbulent, 1998 Black-and-white video installation that combines video and text to stunning effect revealing blended to be a very modern movement, as it combines to create something new. 

We can also use popular culture to teach in a blended fashion. For example,  I was working with an English instructor who uses rock and roll songs/lyrics as a way to get students writing about cause and effect and other descriptive/evaluative responses that help constitute upper-level thinking. He wanted me to introduce websites to the students that might help them with their analysis. I found that Amazon.com has some very detailed and appropriate reviews, many of them written by people with the same demographics as many of the students-- giving them a certain credibility and language that the students could recognize as authentic.

I also introduced the students to how to use Google (certainly a popular culture tool) most effectively to mine other popular websites, such as Rolling Stone (rollingstone.com). Rather than search the rollingstone.com archive for terms, which results in thousands and thousands of hits, I showed them how to use Google advanced search to search rollingstone.com and then specifying the same terms, resulting in fewer yet more relevant citations.

In our drive for academic credibility we might not always recognize the authentic voice as academically legitimate. As long as the voice has an authentic reason for being in a paper/project, it can be considered academically appropriate. Authentic might not be scientific but it is also not false, untrustworthy, or invalid as an academic source.  

Using popular culture references. popular web sites like Amazon.com that incorporate reviews and other material that has an academic use can help reinforce the principle that formal education can build on personal learning. It can bring that important energy component into the classroom, be it face-to-face or online.

Of course, online reviews, so much the vogue in popular culture also lends itself to more academic analysis, thereby providing a bridge between popular and academic cultures. In the New York Times "Online Reviews? Keep This in Mind" writer Kim Severson describes research by Saeideh Bakhshi and Partha Kanuparthy that tied online reviews to the weather when the review was written, the price of the menu (the higher the price, the better the review) and the education of the reviewer all figured in the review. As try as we might, we can't get bias out of what we do. As they say "plus les choses changent"

And, as a Chicago Reader review of a Smart Museum exhibit highlighting "Performing Images: Opera in Chinese Visual Culture" notes how popular culture has a long history: "In the U.S. we tend to think of pop culture as our thing: a recent, Western phenomenon based in rock music, hip-hop, Hollywood film, and maybe the occasional YA novel. The Smart Museum's exhibit "Performing Images: Opera in Chinese Visual Culture" demonstrates just how parochial that view is. The show features a dazzling array of materials, from the 1700s to the present, that surround the stories and pageantry of the widely popular form. This includes production artifacts, such as costumes and instruments, as well as a series of jaw-dropping paintings, some of which served as reference for stage makeup, in which snakes, crabs, scorpions, and birds dramatically drawn on an actor's face obliterate the person's features."

And, then, of course, there is the reality that many subjects can be handled more effectively outside the academic environment-- an environment build on argumentation and facts. Some issues are best explored within the theatrical environment, for example, an environment more suited for nuance and discursive presentation. A review of a play in Chicago "Principal, Principal" shows how the play itself can be a catalyst for so much learning -- the evidence in the play is non-academic, but certainly vital to any classroom experience.

Symphony orchestras can also play a part in the educational use of blended. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the Philadelphia Orchestra has utilized video images to enhance certain pieces. As the article said: "Mr. Rosner's work—in Philadelphia, performed with Benjamin Britten's "Four Sea Interludes"—shows how symphony orchestras are collaborating with video artists to create immersive, multisensory performances that reimagine the traditional concert-hall experience."

Architecture can also have a blended element. The Bauhaus movement, which sought to combine form and function into a unity was a change (progression) from discrete single pieces and could be seen as an extension of the move that blended makes to a whole environment approach rather then single lectures. 

We might also view curriculum itself as a cultural artifact. The curriculum is a soundtrack at its best, letting all students (artists) imagine/reflect their own ideas onto the core-- the content and activities and interaction unleashing intellectual/cognitive creations. Just as artists often constantly rework their artistic expression, refining it and building on it as they and society grows, so too the curriculum becomes the vehicle for continued growth and development for the instructor and his/her audience. 

And speaking of blended and culture, aspects of blended are generally part of early education, with field trips and plays being a main part of elementary education and some high school programs. It is only as students enter higher education that traditionally we have moved to lectures  to center stage of the curriculum and moved many of the more varied learning environments to extra curricular activities. 

This movement of video and other blended aspects into higher education might be one way to get other blended strategies into higher ed.

The Thermodynamics of Learning-- Before, During, and After

There are three temporal conditions to engaging/encountering a content-rich event (a possible learning experience): before, during, and after. This is of course, somewhat prosaic because this is the way we experience all events. From an educational standpoint, we don't always have the benefit of knowing when we will have a learning experience so the anticipatory aspect might be lost and so sometimes we might not know we have had a learning experience, so the reflection aspect might be lost and then, of course, we might not know we are in a learning event, so the participatory/awareness aspect might be lost. 

Preparation for an event, the event, and the aftermath of the event. Yet, from an educational standpoint, we put so much pressure on the event itself. All expectations are placed on attending the lecture, viewing the painting, etc. Yes, without preparation so many angles might be missed and without reflection (the aftermath), there are also a lot of concepts and ideas that might not be developed.  

There is, also, the added element of learning as activism, that we essentially construct our own learning experiences, with the prerequisite before, during, and after. Every possible event (both physical and otherwise) is a content rich experiences for somebody or something. The learning process is not simply a matter of structuring possible learning experiences but can also be seen as recognizing possible learning experiences. Rather than trying to hit a target with an arrow, we might think of putting the target where the arrow has already landed. We don't just wander around looking for possible content rich experiences -- as with a course catalog -- but rather engage the environment with a set of principles that activate possible scenarios of content. 

And, then we have the added ingredient that the content rich experience has both "student" and "teacher" or any collection thereof. Do we need a "teacher" for learning to take place? Perhaps we need a teacher to set the parameters but for the anticipation, participation, and reflection to occur we probably do not need a teacher, except to somehow guide or evaluate the process. And, I wonder, if we need a student for learning to take place or is there this giant collection of content rich experiences ongoing there for the discovery, so are processed and the majority are not?  

There is also the question of what is the best combination of student/teacher for learning to take place? Are groups often the best way to construct meaning? Sometimes yes and sometimes no, just with individual encounters bringing out meaning most effectively in many instances. 

And, events are experienced (or not experienced) in much different ways. We can think of this as the antecedents of now-- our actions/learning are responding to something in the past and future through the present (or not). We view events through antecedents and that is how the past becomes prologue, but not perfectly. This is where the learning comes in when we see alternatives or reasons that our alternatives are blocked in our response. It is the teacher's responsibility to set up the right scenario to challenge antecedents and recognize when transformation has occurred? 

As instructors we sometimes think that knowledge is patently obvious. That students should recognize what is important and how to integrate it. But, this is not how learning works. In art, images don't show us how to process images; data can not tell us how to process itself. Knowledge does not announce itself. Learning does not come with instructions on how and what is important and how to organize it. That is why constructivism reflects reality much more effectively than instructivism.  

Learning/teaching is a complex system, with the teacher being the learner-in-chief. In a constructivist environment, the teacher does control the learning from the top down but rather facilitates it through instructional design, interactive assignments, and cognitive presence and responses. There should be a process by which the collective builds knowledge before, during, and after a content rich event and that collective is built and shared within the instructional design and interactive assignments towards additional cognitive presence and responses. The local discovery of the individual student is turned into systematic discovery on the part of other participants. 

The constructivist principals change the focus of the creation from the one to the many. It is much more democratic, not in undermining the relevance and importance of the teacher in providing content and context but in recognizing the participants as more equal partners, as citizens more than subjects.  

One way that an instructor can undermine his/her authority in a positive way is through instructional design. Instructional design is a form of social engineering around content.  Often, it seems, the instructional design is what people are responding to as they go looking for the content and their relationship to it. It is odd, sometimes, to get confused by learning when we want so much to get liberated by it or at least we want clarity from it. The role of instructional design, setting the parameters for learning but also setting the parameters for the way people set up affinities and relate to each other and the content. Successful classes have a mechanism for participants to relate to the content as designers, as information/knowledge is often not something you directly see but you only indirectly see because it influences us in the way we behave. Participants want to have some of the control and this control of adding content is vital to the integrity and evolution of the class content. 

In a traditional sense, learning and teaching require the transfer of energy in various formats, from the instructor developing the lesson plan to the delivery of the content to the completion of assignments, etc. You might even include the transportation necessary for attending lectures or the electricity necessary to power computers and the Internet.

Another way we might view learning as an energy exchange is that we are transferring abstract concepts/lessons from the past.  An abstract lesson on the American Civil War might be said to make the energy expended during that time unnecessary because we are able to transfer and build on that process that comprised the use of many resources (created by energy). 

Sometimes we might view the knowledge itself as the content, but I prefer to think of the activities as containing the content. For example, during a visit to Turkey many will view Turkey itself as the content, but the activities that I take to learn about Turkey and the assignments (formal or informal) that I undertake are really the content. This is what they mean, I suppose, by the expression "the music is not in the piano." The music (content) comes from the interplay between the activity and the subject/object of the activity.

Are there methods that are most efficient in this energy transfer, not only from a reduction in the amount of energy used in the process of creating and sharing knowledge, but also in the ability to create new processes and strategies in others and ourselves; measurable results, we might call learning/energy, because learning/energy are equivalent in that they use energy to create potential or kinetic change.

This energy exchange will look different to different learners. Situated learning, or the knowledge picked up within an event, differs from person to person. What I get out of a particular learning situation, say visiting the Art Institute, is very dependent on what I bring to the lesson; what I focus on during the trip; the effectiveness of any organized teaching that takes place, etc. A big part of what anyone gets out of a situation is influenced by a priori learning, what people bring to the lesson in terms of expectations, focus, prior knowledge, etc. Learning is also heavily influenced by experience. There is a term for knowledge generated by experience and that is  knowledge "a posteriori." 

This is all to say that learning is by nature a blended affair in all cases, as situated learning is heavily influenced by what comes before and after. Experience, exposure, and other factors, all blend together to help create the unique acquisition of new facts, strategies, ideas, etc. 

The basic premise behind blended learning is that there are many viable and important ways of teaching/learning outside of the traditional classroom within the traditional modular time. We can use other elements of time and space and other elements of interaction than teacher/student to facilitate the movement of information and pursue across the spectrum. Sometimes the classroom "space" can be a location of tension and even conflict, as when teachers and students do not see eye to eye in terms of content, motivation and accountability. Sometimes the way to work around that issue is through changing the space -- why be in that particular location when the goal is not geography but learning. There do not have to be physical borders to an intellectual interchange, necessarily, at least not at all times and under all circumstances.

For example, I was visiting a colleague at a public library and he was working with a user who did not have much experience searching for books using the general catalog or Worldcat. I wondered if it might have been possible to have created a screen capture video (using JING or Camtasia) as he searched the catalog and requested the book title through interlibrary loan. Both long term teaching goals and short term service goals might be accomplished with this approach, as the interaction would result in an interlibrary loan request and also a video (with a link to the video emailed to the user) would be created to be used for user generated requests or just a better understanding (authentic learning) on how the interlibrary loan process works.

There are also many learning situations in libraries that might be developed by utilizing the cognitive time before and after the learning event. For example, I went to a technical training program at my public library for a one hour tutorial on how to operate some software.  Perhaps that class could have been enhanced with pre-learning modalities, such as sending a reading or video to prompt us to prepare on certain concepts and then there could have been post-learning scenarios as with the instructor following up with class participants and providing guidance on projects to further develop software skills. There could also have been a user group of sorts so that the participants could have built on the cohesion of the class.

While the subject of non-traditional students (returning adults, military veterans, ESL students, etc.) and blended learning are important to consider within the traditional teaching/learning environment in schools, colleges, and universities,  I have been excited by blended learning opportunities within non-traditional learning environments (such as public libraries).

For example, I was visiting a colleague at a public library and he was working with a user who did not have much experience searching for books using the general catalog or Worldcat. I wondered if it might have been possible to have created a screen capture video (using JING or Camtasia) as he searched the catalog and requested the book title through interlibrary loan. Both long term teaching goals and short term service goals might be accomplished with this approach, as the interaction would result in an interlibrary loan request and also a video (with a link to the video emailed to the user) would be created to be used for user generated requests or just a better understanding (authentic learning) on how the interlibrary loan process works.

There are also many learning situations in libraries that might be developed by utilizing the cognitive time before and after the learning event. For example, I went to a technical training program at my public library for a one hour tutorial on how to operate some software.  Perhaps that class could have been enhanced with pre-learning modalities, such as sending a reading or video to prompt us to prepare on certain concepts and then there could have been post-learning scenarios as with the instructor following up with class participants and providing guidance on projects to further develop software skills. There could also have been a user group of sorts so that the participants could have built on the cohesion of the class.

This is all to say that we can import some of the traditional learning organizational tools into nontraditional learning environments and build more creative and productive learning outcomes, whether participants are being formally evaluated or not.

Just as blended learning in traditional learning environments may have benefits because of increased access/flexibility and/or an increased detriment because of lack of computer access or computer skills, so too blended learning within non-traditional environments should be considered within these lights.

This is all to say that we can import some of the traditional learning organizational tools into nontraditional learning environments and build more creative and productive learning outcomes, whether participants are being formally evaluated or not.

Just as blended learning in traditional learning environments may have benefits because of increased access/flexibility and/or an increased detriment because of lack of computer access or computer skills, so too blended learning within non-traditional environments should be considered within these lights.

This is not an argument against formal learning -- schools, degrees, accreditation, etc., but a discussion of a set of principles that might illustrate how and why learning occurs. Are there communities, such as communities of inquiries, that are more effective in transferring energy and creating change and teaching?

In many ways, classroom teaching was, is, and will be inefficient. We have to develop techniques to reach so many different types of students with so many learning styles. Why should be expect it to work?  Is the best teaching wordless and the best learning affirmation?