Discussions started by David Millar

SCoPE: Seminars -> SCoPE Seminar: Informal Learning: May 15 - June 4, 2006 -> City storytelling and games, participative democracy, learning communities -- a short list

by David Millar -
I just discovered that the discussion continued past the cutoff date.

Attached is a list of projects I've been looking at as partial models for my proposed "Voices of Montreal / Voix de Montréal" group blog with life-stories, podcasts and music.

Other members of the seminar may find these useful examples of online community-building, at several different levels: academic research, citizen participation, public history, games.

Maybe Nancy could post it in the wiki so it can be added to, and cross-post the wiki address in IL resources.

SCoPE: Seminars -> SCoPE Seminar: Informal Learning: May 15 - June 4, 2006 -> Overview of second round, with readings suggested by participants

by David Millar -
I was away at the 2006 Humanities and Social Science conference. When I came back, I tried to catch up with the game and debrief postings, in which there were a number of fresh viewpoints. Attached is my overview of the last couple of week's discussions, arranged by discussion topic, which I hope will be helpful. 

I originally intended this only as a set of notes to myself. Apologies in advance to anyone who feels their ideas have been neglected or misinterpreted. 

SCoPE: Seminars -> SCoPE Seminar: Informal Learning: May 15 - June 4, 2006 -> Community-building principles?

by David Millar -
Can anyone point me to a checklist of ethical and group principles for setting up a collaborative online community?

I am thinking of setting up a sort of million-man/woman group blog "Voices of Montreal/Voix de Montreal" with multiethnic lifestories, podcasts and music. My concern is that ethnic flame wars can result when people start telling their stories.

Ideally, such principles would not be imposed, but discussed and freely accepted by all members of the group. Some examples, off the top of my head:
1. Ethics to avoid hate lit: participants should express their lived experiences fully and freely, without censorship. But while they may state what happened to them in detail, an entire ethnic group cannot be accused as perpetrators of a crime. Should links to other (uncontrolled, unreviewed) sites be permitted?
2. Informed consent: anyone interviewed for a life-story will have the right to review the transcript before publication. They will have the purpose and proposed audience of the VOM/VdM site explained to them. The transcript will be in English or French, and the interviewee's will have the right to correct or censor it. We also hope to allow podcasts of the interview in the original language, with music, if financial resources and/or bandwidth permit -- in order to create a wider audience. The interviewee should carefully consider the effect on their life and family of "going public".
3. Changing the rules: should be done by consensus. Further discussion may be essential when expanding the working group, so that newcomers can 'own' the principles. Should there be some fixed limit on the times when this can be done, and the amount of time that can be spent in discussion? Otherwise, a noisy minority can hijack the group and bring useful work to a halt -- as sometimes happens in NGOs, co-op houses, and women's groups.

Perhaps a secular version of the process used by Quakers?
See http://www.nyym.org/quakerism/uqp.html:
  • Recognizing that of God in everyone.
  • Affirming the Spirit in oneself and others.
  • ...fostering and preserving opportunities congenial to the Spirit.
  • Living with simplicity...
  • ...striving to deal openly and lovingly with others when conflicts arise.
  • Seeking alternatives to violence in our words and actions.
  • Listening for the truth in the words of others.
  • Speaking the truth as we discern it with cordiality, kindness, and love.
  • Avoiding gossip, talebearing, breaking confidences, or the disparagement of others [while clearly stating one's own aims or experience, one should refrain from comment, denial or direct criticism of what another has said - also a principle of American aboriginal discussion]
  • Resisting temptations to falsehood, coercion, and abuse.
  • Avoiding behavior that supports social ranking.
Other examples:
Are there other similar statements of similar process principles related to access, universality, antiracism?

Some problem areas are signalled in M. Sheeran, Beyond Majority Rule (1983) a Jesuit observes Quaker process,
and in CitizenSHIFT / Parole citoyenne http://citizen.nfb.ca/onf/info?did=1561

Can you give me examples of other problems that consensus failed to resolve?

SCoPE: Seminars -> SCoPE Seminar: Informal Learning: May 15 - June 4, 2006 -> Overview of first round, with suggested discussion topics

by David Millar -

These are my attempts (based on my own experience) to define and clarify some of the concepts under discussion. It might be useful if those with differing ideas would state not only that they disagree, but based on what experience or personal story. I have numbered the list of possible topics in case we want separate threads for them. Feel free to add to these numbered topics. David Millar, of Victoria and Montreal

Formal learning: is school & curriculum-based education (with printed texts and tests, lesson plans with fixed outcomes, disciplinary boundaries), for large groups, and age-specific. Each of these built-in assumptions denotes a severe limitation compared to other kinds of teaching e.g. discovery, peer-to-peer, the ?multiple intelligence? approach of Howard Gardner(1) Usually sets quantitative / behavioural objectives (Malcolm Knowles), sometimes with additional reference to Maslow?s schema of human needs, which are rarely defined in a way that can be verified as a ?learning outcome?.

Needs examination of drop-out rates and their causes: though research is almost entirely lacking, spotty data and my teaching as a sessional in several universities suggests that 25%-33% of all admitted students are incapable of literate and organized writing, so much so that they are simply incapable of rational exposition.Smith, M. K. (2002) 'Howard Gardner and multiple intelligences', the encyclopedia of informal education, http://www.infed.org/thinkers/gardner.htm last updated: 28 Jan 2006;

http://adulted.about.com/cs/learningtheory/a/gardner_MIT.htm

About.com on adult learning theory http://adulted.about.com/od/adultlearningtheory/

Needs examination of drop-out rates and their causes: in one DL university where I worked fewer than 20% of students (most of them highly motivated mid-career adults seeking certification) completed courses of all kinds; the 80% dropout was considered normal [sic! ]

Albert Bandura, Self Efficacy: The Exercise of Control, 1977. and Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory, 1986.

Retention will be increased by story-telling, seeing, and doing (approximations of real-life experience) Summa cum avaritia: plucking a profit from the groves of academe, Nick Bromell, Harper?s Magazine, February 2002 and Us Versus Them: Laboring in the Academic Factory, Michael Yates, Monthly Review, January 2000.

  1. The European Community?s attempt to validate informal learning, defined as lived experience in ?daily life activities related to work, family or leisure? (p.27) appears to be only paper certification of previously acquired skills or competencies (Table 5, pp.152-156) . In other words, the formal education system (state, professional or corporate) formally recognizes that learning ?outside the bounds? has been achieved. This is not news. Some crucial questions (p. 112) are raised about by whom & what power structures, and how the certification/validation/accreditation is made, which remain unanswered. EEC-CEDEFOP ?The Learning Community: European inventory on validating non-formal and informal learning?, 2005 http://www2.trainingvillage.gr/etv/publication/download/panorama/5164_en.pdf

Some answers are attempted in SEEQUEL-TQL Guide for Informal Learning, 2004 http://www.education-observatories.net/seequel/SEEQUEL-TQM_Guide_for_informal_learning.pdf

  1. The ?social networking? of radical NGOs on the internet is one of the few hopeful signs. See http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/wto/OpposeWTO.html

  2. There is a huge ongoing debate about this phenomenon in Delicious, see http://del.icio.us/search/?all=social+networking a mishmash list of software, wiki, blogs, CIA spying methods, teen and adult matchmaking. See items marked tagging, folksonomy, and social bookmarking, which are probably the most relevant to our discussion.

 

Some specific kinds of informal learning we might discuss:

  1. Discovery learning, curiosity

  2. Child?s play

  3. Multiple intelligences (H. Gardner)

  4.  David A Kolb?s ?experiential education? http://fcis.oise.utoronto.ca/~dschugurensky/faqs/qa8.html 

  5. Open-ended, lifelong

  6. ?Free university?: any good model? Success rates? In what specialty or discipline? Cf New School of Social Research NYC, Berlin Free University, Black Mountain. Danish Folkschule (I don?t know enough about them)

  7. ?free? NGO research groups: e.g. CorpWatch, PIRGs, environmentalists

  8. (other) good examples of informal learning? SCoPE participants can decide for themselves to relate them to the topics above, or establish new numbered topics, e.g.

  • Ann Busby?s post on - sharing, incidental, tacit, and unconscious learning [I could comment on various types of the the ?non-dit? unsaid, unsayable etc on which I published several papers]

  • Bryan Zug - self-correcting, stabilizing, elearning ecosystems

  • Chris Macrae - action learning

  • Stephanie Chu - definitions of  different learning communities

  • Nancy Riffer ? world internet conference [in my experience, gossip in the corridors was always the crucial element of scholarly conferences; what is the Internet equivalent? See also James Gleick?s account of gossip networks vs scientific publication in Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992)]

  • Elhanan Gazit ? learning in MMOGs and space science Futurelab website (cf. my comments above on interactive learning]

  • Gunnar Bruckner ? EEC validation [cf. topic 9 above]

 My incomplete list of other useful resources
         found while writing the above comments