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My box of sand

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Characters

If your keyboard can not make these characters, please feel welcome to copy any of these, and paste into your own document.--Phil Bartle 18:01, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

А Б В Г Д E Ë Ж З И Й К Л М Н O П Р C Т У Ф X Ц Ч Ш Щ Э Ю Я а б в г д e ë ж з и й к л м н o п р c т у ф x ц ч ш щ э ю я

♪ ♫ ☺ ☻ ♀ ♂ ♠ ♣ ♥ ♦ ▬ ▲ ► ▼ ◄ ● ◊ ◙ ← ↑ → ↓ ↕ ↨ ∆ ۩ © ۝ ۞ –

☻

Welcome to Newcomers

• Very nice to meet you in the class. It is a very warm and fuzzy community. (♥) . If there is any way I can help you, please let me know. Come visit my user page.

Tutorial Participants

Participants in the tutorials:

• eL4C19 Participants
• eL4C21 Participants or a different page
• eL4C22 Participants
• eL4C23 Participants
• eL4C28 Participants

Testing New Links and Procedures

Feedback icon

Making podcasts

Developing a teaching resource

Creating a template

My sandbox
Description:	?
Subject:	?
Topic:	?
Type:	?
Sector:	?
Audience:	?
Level:	?
Complexity:	Intermediate
Creator/Reviewer:	Phil Bartle
Date:	28/11/2009
Source:	?
License:	CC-BY-SA
Contributors:	See: History
Tags/Keywords:	Wikieducator, Learning design, Professional development

Draft Composition

Rant in Preparation

I am now thinking about my next rants. I do not put these out on a regular basis because, when I have to write to a deadline, the writing becomes forced and quality suffers. I prefer to write when the muse possesses me. --Phil Bartle ◊ –

. . . <in process> . . .

Work in progress, expect frequent changes. Help and feedback is welcome. See discussion page.

The following are not yet ready. I develop them here before putting them up on my user page.

How Much of a Community is the WikiEducator Community?

We call ourselves the WikiEducator community. We know that it is not a traditional face to face community, and that we interact on line, but what characterizes a community, and how much does the WikiEd community have those characteristics? Is this an advantage or disadvantage in reaching WikiEducator Goals?

◊ Is calling ourselves a community only a means of giving us an identity and making us feel happy and loyal about being members, or are there genuine elements of being a community?

◊ To get to some answers, we turn to the sociology of communities. Tönnies' pioneered the study with his concept of the difference between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. Strictly translated the German word gemeinschaft means community and gesellschaft means society. But in this context, we can see them more as adjectives than nouns, and the degree of gemeinschaft as the degree of "community-ness" and degree of gesellschaft as degree of "society-ness."

◊ Gemeinschaft is the degree to which a human settlement is informal, face to face, where everybody knows each other, where rules are not fixed or written, where social control depends on informal responses like gossip rather than police and courts of law. The simplest community is a family. Warm and fuzzy.

◊ Gesellschaft is the degree to which rules are formalized, where we interact with strangers and see them in roles rather than as whole persons. Instead of recruitment being one hundred percent through nepotism, it is preferred to be through meritocracy. Cold and hard edged.

◊ Gemeinschaft characteristics are associated with our earliest and rural societies, while gesellschaft is associated with urban and more modern times. Because of the agricultural revolution, social organization became based more on non kinship principles, and larger and denser populations gave rise to increasing interaction with strangers. The inevitable march of the human population is away from gemeinschaft and towards gesellschaft. Colder, more formal, more logical, more rule of law, more complex.

◊ But we are animals that evolved while living in small face to face groups. We have had little biological evolution over the last 50,000 years during the agricultural revolution and its transformational effects on human social organization. We appear to be physiologically, mentally and emotionally designed better for small face to face groups rather than the impersonal anonymity of urban mega cities. To counteract this inevitable shift from simple to complex, rural to urban, we have been inventing substitutes for community that can function in urban social systems.

◊ One of those inventions which goes well back into history and the development of cities, is associations. Perhaps the Masons was, as they claim, derived from masonic unions of the pyramid builders. This may be our first important clue about whether we can call the WikiEd membership a community. Associations are "constructed communities" where membership is not by kinship principles, but by other principles, common interest, common job, common social class, common level of wealth. The Hells Angels Motorcycle Club is a constructed community, as is the Girl Guides.

◊ Since we feel more comfortable in face to face interaction with people we know, we find an interesting phenomena. People learn and use the names of others in cities that they need to know only as roles, partial persons rather than as whole persons, bus drivers, postal couriers, grocery clerks,

◊ The rise of neo-gemeinschaft. All these inventions, and you can probably identify more, combine to be a force that counteracts the rise of urbanism and cold and formal social interaction. We call that neo-gemeinschaft.

◊ So we are a "community" in the sense of being a constructed community rather than a traditional community. We are not recruited through birth or by kinship. But we have few formal rules of interaction (we have some, such as registration and following the rules of wiki editing). We are informal in our interaction, we do not have a rigid hierarchical or organizational structure (Wayne is more like a guru or older brother than a CEO). We are getting a bit more formal as we organize such things as policy work groups.

◊ Randy talks about "The WE magic." As I see it, the magic is the effort that members put into making and keeping the membership a community.

◊ There is one last characteristic of the WikiEd community which we must mention. We do not meet each other face to face (F2F). Well, only very seldom. What is lost and/or gained by being on line?

◊ By having user pages with our basic personal data and photos, we lower the cold formality of knowing each other only on line. By giving each other support and encouragement in our discussion groups (although disagreements and factions are very much a part of traditional communities) we increase loyalty and a feel good attitude about our membership and each other.

◊ My recommendations: WikiEducator membership is growing rapidly. Inevitably it will have to become more formal in its rules and protocols. The formation of work groups to work out various procedures is a good idea and appropriate now, but we should not be in such a hurry to become more formal than we need to be. That reduces our "community-ness" and therefore a strong element of our membership.

See and collaborate with the WikiEducator open educational resource (OER), The Sociology of Communities.

Do the Wikis Support or Hinder Creative Thinking and Discovery?

It is not easy to get new ways of seeing things accepted, first by colleagues, then by the public. Will WikiEducator and other wiki sites increase or hinder that access?

◊ The story of The Worm Runner's Digest. A PhD student in psychology, Jim McConnell, sought entry to a New York university, He had noted that psychologists study rat psychology and chicken psychology, so he wondered how far down the phylum one could go. He decided on flat worms. Now flat worms are interesting animals. If you cut off their tails, they will grow new tails. If you cut off their heads, they will grow new tails and starve to death. He wanted to study how they learned. The university rejected his proposal. Being stubborn (Oh, should that be "persistent?"), he went to a Michigan university where his proposal was accepted. He subjected the worms to mild electric shocks, but first sent them a light. The worms soon learned to avoid the light should it suddenly appear, He also found that if he ground up the educated worms and fed them to other worms, the other worms learned more quickly. He tried to publish his report, but could not find a journal that would accept it. Too flakey. So he started a cyclostyled crude journal, called The Worm Runner's Digest, where he attracted all sorts of unorthodox and odd research. It became so popular that eventually he got a publisher and produced a glossy journal. The issue is, for this rant, his work was appropriate and valid, but he was barred from doing it by people in power who should have known better.

◊ Look at the stories of Galileo, Darwin, and Einstein. We know the troubles Galileo had with the authorities of his day, yet his perspective is taken for granted today. If Darwin did not have many supporters outside the discipline he would never have been accepted, and imagine if he were living among the Christian Taliban of USA today? Einstein's teacher thought he was retarded, and he could not get a job in an academic institution, working instead for a patent office, because his thinking was so far advanced for his time that the authorities thought he was a brick short of a full load. The important point is that these thinkers did not have very new information; they had new perspectives that were so different from what was accepted at the time, that they were not taken seriously.

◊ Academic journals use a process called "Peer Review" for deciding if an article is to be accepted and published by them. The name of the author is removed and the submitted article is sent to about four reviewers who judge if the article should be published. This filters out the flotsam and jetsam. But a few babies get thrown out with the bath water, too. Which four reviewers are chosen might be a lottery; some cannot recognize genuine creativity. The biases of the reviewers are not always known by the publisher. The top people in the field are usually too busy to review new articles, and those not at the top may be fearful of unorthodoxy, and would tend towards conservatism. Although journals support progress in their field, they are not equipped to recognize unorthodox or revolutionary progress. Truly creative new perspectives do not have a fair chance.

◊ The most famous wiki, Wikipedia, does not use a peer review process, and one might first imagine that it is therefore more accepting of truly creative new perspectives. It is not. Vetting by Wikipedia is through a more democratic process; anybody can judge a new article. Unfortunately that means it is worse than peer review. Like the tyranny of the majority in democracy where the majority can discriminate against a minority, a similar bias operates in Wikipedia. The first filter of a new article is if there are references to support it. If it is genuinely new, there will be no references (just as Einstein used no bibliographic references). Secondly, whenever a new article is submitted on an existing topic, those authors who have already submitted to Wikipedia will be notified, and they may have vested interests in hindering a truly new perspective on that topic.

◊ I do not know what the answer should be. Perhaps you might have some ideas. We do want high quality information and other educational resources, but we do not want to set the bar too high or too low so that it hinders creative and innovative perspectives.

OER and the Principles of Primary Health Care

Primary Health Care (PHC), as a set of principles and practices, has some important lessons for us in the creation and development of Open Education Resources (OERs).

◊ The principles of Primary Health Care (PHC) were developed by the United Nations World Health Organization. It began by recognizing that developing countries did not have huge budgets available for health care, and that health care practices ranged hugely in terms of how expensive they were and how many people were affected by each disease. The principles were designed to make the most efficient use of limited resources for the health benefits of the most people.

◊ Among many principles, the most important part of Primary Health Care, to us, is that limited resources were aimed primarily on a small number of diseases that were most common. Thus expensive neurosurgery operations were excluded. Treatment of malaria and water borne diseases were included.

◊ To implement this, a large number of partially (or basically and elementarily) trained and lowly paid practitioners were deployed to provide health care to the public for those common diseases (referring patients to district or regional health facilities for diseases that they were not trained to treat).

◊ Triage (I might not include this topic)

◊ Very nice, but what has all this got to do with our developing open educational resources?

◊ We have a stated goal, to provide educational resource material for every course from K to PhD by 2015. Recently we have heard that, well, 2017 would be OK, too.

◊ Highly unlikely.

◊ So if we are going to take some time to do it all, and we will do it all, why not develop some guidelines for what courses to develop first? Since we depend upon voluntary labour to produce the resources, we can not dictate, but we can recruit accordingly and we can develop a policy guideline for those courses and other resources with the highest priority. This, like the PHC choice of the most common diseases, if it works, will maximize the use of our limited resources.

◊ Costs and Benefits: The cost of doing this will be the resources needed to identify the highest priority courses. Another cost will be that a few potential contributors will not see their specialty on the priority list, and refrain from contributing. The benefits will be a higher utility of the service for the greater number of teachers and students.

Earlier Rants

The following have now been transferred to the latest rants on my user pages Phil's rants or on to the archives.

• ► Alternatives to Orthodox Classroom Methods

• ► Education versus Socialization

• ► Ageism, Sexism, Racism

• ► Methods of Learning are Not the Same as Methods of Teaching

• ► Language Learning; a Lesson about Learning

• ► Functional Literacy → Functional Anything

• ► Alms, Altruism and Ability

• ► Agricultural Revolution, Culture and Open Education

• ► Epistemology

• ► Education and Empowerment

• ► Teachers and Taught

• ► Are We Making Educational Institutions Obsolete?

Abandoned topic:

• ► Learning by listening, by looking or by doing. At first it looks like a debate about learning methods. Some are saying everybody is different, there is no "one size fits all," and we have to determine what methods best suits each learner. Others are saying that one or another is best: listening to a lecture, watching a video or presentation, interacting or dialoguing between teacher and student, vs doing something to learn how to do it.

♦ I am going to abandon this topic as a rant. The more I think about it, the more it looks like a thesis length and the more it looks like some serious research is needed.--Phil Bartle 10:16, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Earlier Compositions

Discussion about NFE

Leaving Usable Records

New Languages

Greek Notes

Ελληνικά

User = χρήστης (Yes, Christina says so)

The URL code for Greek is el

The CE colour code for Greek is pale blue

Community Empowerment in Greek

My Greek User Page

Practice for Bulgarian Background

Български