1. Opening, Mentoring and
Connecting: Harnessing the Net
for Teaching and Learning
Boyer Lecture, March 2009
Terry Anderson, Ph.D.
Canada Research Chair in Distance Education

2. Presentation Overview
• Robert Frost’s poem on vicarious
communication
• The Impact of Openness on teaching and
Learning
• Relationships and the Net
– Groups
– Networks
– Collectives
• Openness, mentoring and Empire State

3. The Tuft of Flowers
Robert Frost (1874–1963).

4. The Tuft of Flowers
I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.
The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the leveled scene.
I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.
But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been, - alone,
‘As all must be,’ I said within my heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’

5. But as I said it, swift there passed me by
On noiseless wing a ‘wildered butterfly’,
Seeking with memories grown dim o’er night
Some resting flower of yesterday’s delight.
And once I marked his flight go round and round,
As where some flower lay withering on the ground.
And then he flew as far as eye could see,
And then on tremulous wing came back to me.

6. I thought of questions that have no reply,
And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;
But he turned first, and led my eye to look
At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,
A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.
I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly weed when I came.

7. And fell a sprit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;
But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;
And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.
‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart’.
Robert Frost (1874–1963).

8. Athabasca University,
Alberta, Canada
Fastest growing university in
Canada
34,000 students, 700 courses
100% distance education
Graduate and
Undergraduate programs
All English, but many course
Athabasca credit equivalencies with TÉLUQ
* Athabasca University
University
Master & Doctorate – Distance
Education
Only USA Regionally
Accredited University in
Canada

9. Values
We can (and must) continuously improve the
quality, effectiveness, appeal, cost and time
efficiency of learning.
Learner control, choice and freedomare
integral to 21st Century formal education and
life-long learning.
Education for elites is not sufficient for
planetary survival
“Today‟s learners want to be active participants in the learning
process – not mere listeners; they have a need to control their
environments, and they are used to easy access to the staggering
amount of content and knowledge available at their fingertips”
EduCause Horizon Report 2009

10. The compelling Case for Openness
Imagine a world in which every single
person is given free access to the sum
of all human knowledge.
That's what we're doing. –
Terry Foote, Wikipedia

11. Ernest Boyer (1928-1995)
• quot;if a balance can be struck between
individual interests and shared concerns,
a strong learning community will result.
We believe six principles -purposefulness,
openness, justice, discipline, caring, and
celebration-can form the foundation on
which a vital community of learning can
be built. Now, more than ever, colleges
and universities should be guided by a
larger vision.quot;

12. Charles Wedemeyer (1911-1999)
Open Learning
• Learning centered
• Diminish dependencies
• Open curriculum
• Open accreditation
• Ultimate learning environment
is the learner themselves –
Personal Learning Environment
• Concern with learning more
than instruction
• Must be cost effective
Charles Wedemeyer (1973)

13. Charles Wedemeyer (1975)
• “the system accepts the learner and his
environment as the environment for learning and
concentrates that environment instead of
developing specialized teaching environments”
– p. 4
• Now the need to move from independent study
to learner controlled, cooperative learning

14. Academic
Regulations
Social
Prerequisites
Collaborative,
Cooperative and Time to degree
Connected Activities
Open
Education
Time & Space
Autonomy
Context in Use
Freedom
Affordability
Paced &Unpaced
Democracy

15. Empire State
• Innovative, Open model
• Successful
• However “essentially the learning model has
not changed much in 30 years, (Williams
2008)“ correspondence plus email!
• Does the Net hold promise for a new vision of
openess and innovation for Empire State?

16. Educational Change
• ”To eradicate that intolerance of variety in
educational practice so characteristic of
the academic man of the past, and to
diminish in future generations his equally
characteristic opposition to changes
involving adaptation to new conditions, is
to render one of the greatest possible
services to educational progress.quot;
• Norton, A. (1909) A History of the Medieval
University. p. 3

17. ESC Master Plan 1976 A. Chickering

18. The Mission of Empire State
College
• enables motivated adults, regardless of
geography or life circumstance, to design a
rigorous, individualized academic program
• Committed “To develop, implement and
assess new approaches to learning that
recognize the strengths and needs of adult
learners.”
Empire State College – America‟s First Open University

19. • Does Individualized deny opportunity for
social processes?
• in·di·vid·u·al·ize
1. To give individuality to.
2. To consider or treat individually; particularize.
3. To modify to suit the wishes or needs of a
particular individual
from Latin in- ‘not’ + dividere ‘to divide’.

20. Taxonomy of the ‘Many’
Dron and Anderson, 2007
Group
Conscious membership
Leadership and organization
Cohorts and paced
Rules and guidelines Metaphor :
Access and privacy controls
Virtual classroom
Focused and often time limited
May be blended F2F
20

21. Formal Learning and Groups
• Long history of research
and study
• Established sets of tools
– Classrooms,
– Learning Management
Systems
– Synchronous (video &
net conferencing)
– Email
• Need to develop face to
face, mediated and
blended group learning
skills

22. Groups as Communities of Practice
• Wengler’s ideas of Community of Practice
– mutual engagement – synchronous and notification
tools
– joint enterprise – collaborative projects, “pass the
course”
– a shared repertoire – common tools, LMS, IM and doc
sharing

23. LMS and Distributed web 2.0
Group Tools

24. Problems with Groups
• Restrictions in
time, space, pace, &relationship - NOT
OPEN
• Often overly confined by teacher
expectation and institutional
curriculum control
• Usually Isolated from the authentic
world of practice
• “low tolerance of internal difference,
Relationships
sexist and ethicized regulation, high
demand for obedience to its norms
and exclusionary practices.” Cousin Paulsen (1993)
&Deepwell 2005 Law of Cooperative Freedom
• Group think (Baron, 2005)
• Poor preparation for Lifelong Learning
beyond the course

25. • Groups and Empire State’s Distance Education
programming
• Groups are necessary, but not sufficient for
quality learning.

26. Network
Shared interest/practice
Fluid membership
Friends of friends
Group
Reputation and altruism driven
Emergent norms, structures
Activity ebbs and flows
Rarely F2F
Metaphor: Virtual Community of Practice
26

27. 2. Formal Learning with Networks
• Networks create and sustain links between individuals
creating flexible communication and information spaces
• Networks link diversity, span boundaries, enable
communication among disparate individuals
• Each of us may belong to many networks
• Networks can connect self-paced and independent
learners to cooperative study activities
• Networks last beyond the course - basis for ongoing
support and advise from alumni and professional
communities
Network:
An integrated system of resources and people 27

28. Networks
– Provide resources from which students’ extract
and contribute information
– In school one should learn to build, contribute to
and manage one’s networks
– Transparency provides application and validation
of information and skills developed in formal
learning
– Provides role models for new students
28

29. “People who live in the intersection of
social worlds are at higher risk of
having good ideas” Burt, 2005, p. 90

30. Networks
Communities of Practice
• Distributed
• Share common interest
• Self organizing
• Open
• No expectation of meeting or even knowing all
members of the Network
• Little expectation of reciprocity
• Contribute for social capital, altruism and a
sense of improving the world/practice
through contribution (Brown and Duguid, 2001)

31. Creating
Incentives to
Sustain
Contribution
to Networks
The New Yorker September 12, 2005

32. Building Networks of Practice in Education
• Motivation – marks, rewards, self and net
efficacy, net-presence
• Structural support
– Exposure and training
– Transparent systems
– Wireless access, mobile computing
• Cognitive skills – content + procedural,
disclosure of control
• Social connections, reciprocity
– Creating and sustaining a spiral of social capital
building Nahapiet&Ghoshal (1998)

33. Network Pedagogies
• Connectivism
– Learning is network formation: adding new
nodes, creating new paths between people and
learning resources
– “Learning can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization
or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information
sets, and the connections that enable us to learn are more
important than our current state of knowing.” Siemens, G.
(2007)
• Complexity
– Learning in environments in which activities and outcomes emerge in
response to authentic need creates powerful learning opportunities
– Learning at the edge of chaos
– Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity and Education
See the Networked Student by Wendy Drexler
33

34. Network Tool Set (example)
Text
Text
34
Stepanyan, Mather & Payne, 2007

35. Access Controls in Elgg

36. Voicethread.com

37. Network
Group
Collective
„Aggregated other‟
Unconscious „wisdom of crowds‟
Stigmergic aggregation
Algorithmic rules
Augmentation and annotation
More used, more useful Metaphor:
Data Mining Wisdom of Crowds
Never F2F
37

38. 3. Formal Education and
Collectives
“a kind of cyber-organism, formed from people linked
algorithmically…it grows through the aggregation of Individual,
Group and Networked activities” Dron& Anderson, 2007
• Collectives used to aggregate, then filter, compare, contrast and
recommend.
• Personal and collaborative search and filter for learning
• Smart retrieval from the universal library of resources – human and
learning objects
• Allows discovery and validation of norms, values, opinion and “ways of
understanding”
38

39. Collective Tools
39

40. • Explicit recommender systems:
Explicit
40

41. Collective Examples for Educational
Application
• Artifact Ranking systems: Google Search; CitULike;
• Tag Clouds: What do collectives find of interest?
• Recommendation Systems: People like me, like …..
• Wikis: Contributions from the crowd
• Folksonomies: Bottom up and emergent
classification systems
• Voting and auctions: Perfect market?
• Prediction Markets:
• Net based psychology and sociology

42. Collective Examples: Determining our
Effect
• Analysis of blog postings using semantic and
matching techniques
Potential uses:
uncover suicidal ideation
mental health of the community
understand evolving communication genres
measure impact of popular memes
understanding and predicting early adopters
See Mishne, & de Rijke (2006)
Capturing Global Mood Levels using Blog Posts
42

43. Hive mind? Borgs?
Group consciousness?
• Collectively managing planet Earth
• What does it mean to be aware of each other?
Collectives operate as mirrors to monitor and learn from
our collective selves (Spivack, 2006)
43

44. Collectives, Privacy & Identity
• Best way to protect personal integrity is by creating a
robust but realistic web presence.
• Your actions are being mined, best to be a miner rather
than a lump of coal!
• Active social net users are more socially active and
integrated than non users (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe,
2007)
• Use of Blogs reduces feelings of alienation and
isolation among online learners (Dickey, 2004)
• When perceived interest and benefits increase,
willingness to provide personal data increases (Dinev&
Hart, 2006)

45. Web Tool Affordances
Content Presence Communi- Reflection Collabor-
Discovery cation ation
Blogs
Social Tagging
Twitter
Web Conference
Web CT

46. Role of the Empire State Mentor
1. Designs programs and
contracts
2. Offers appropriate
instruction
3. Assesses and evaluates
4. Manages and Develops
Instructional Resources
5. Counsels and Advises
– (Bradley 1975)

47. The emergent role of the Tutor
• Tutor’s Role: To encourage and “facilitate the
process of developing the “whole learner”
meaning development of
knowledge, intellectual
capacities, values, attitudes, behaviors, psycho
social maturity, and integration. “ Wallace
2008
• this study seeks to determine the
competencies of successful online mentors in
the Center for Distance Learning (CDL) at ESC.

48. • “Despite the fact that mentors and students
now engage in email communication as a part
of their mentoring, largely to replace postal
mail as a means of turning in papers as well as
to set up appointments to speak on the
phone, essentially the learning model has not
changed much in 30 years, and therefore the
competencies of mentors working in these
programs have not changed either”. Williams
2008

49. 1.Designs programs and contracts
• Net tools help develop, plan and archive the
Learning Plan?
– Cloud computing
– Filing
– Versioning,
– Permanence,
– Ownership
– transparency

50. 2. Offers appropriate instruction
• Appropriate:
– Anytime
– Any need
– Individual & grouped
– Archived
– Voting
– Texting
– App sharing
– Develops net efficacy
Web conferencing – like Elluminate.com

51. Offers Appropriate Instruction
• Transparency – Allows monitoring,
encouraging, supporting high expectations
• Students as content creators
• Participatory Pedagogies
Does mentoring become more or less
powerful when shared among more
than one learner?

52. 3. Assesses and evaluates
• E-portfolios for assessment
• Assessment/feedback
beyond the group
• Authentic assessment
• Mobile technology in
service learning
• Peer review and evaluation

53. 4. Manages and Develops
Instructional Resources

54. Open Education Resources (OERs)
Vision + Affordance
• “At the heart of the open educational
resources movement is the simple and
powerful idea that;
– the world’s knowledge is a public good in
general
– the World Wide Web provides an
extraordinary opportunity for everyone to
share, use, and reuse that knowledge.”
Hewlett Foundation Smith, & Casserly. The promise of open educational
resources. Change 38(5): 8–17, 2006

55. OER Granularity
– Diagrams, photos
– Articles (Open access publications)
– Games, simulations, activities
– Units of learning (IMS LD)
– Units and courses
– Programs
Special Issue of IRRODL edited by Dave Wiley fall
2009

56. OER’s are Open (Mostly)
• Meaning you can:
– Augment
– Edit
– Customize
– Aggregate and Mashup
– Reformat
– Re-published
• But they need to be licensed –
– not just put online See Scott Leslie‟s 10 minute video at
http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/opened.htm

57. The Emerging Political Economy of
Peer Production: Michael Bauwens
• a 'third mode of production' different from for-profit
or public production by state-owned enterprises.
• Its product is not exchange value for a market, but
but use-value for a community of users
• “produce use-value through the free cooperation of
producers who have access to distributed capital”
www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499

58. Prod-Users - From production to
produsage - Axel Bruns (2008)
• Users become active participants in the production of
artifacts:
• Examples:
– Open source movement
– Wikipedia
– Citizen journalism (blogs)
– Immersive worlds
– Distributed creativity - music, video, Flickr

59. Produsage Principles
produsage.org
• Community-Based –the community as a whole can
contribute more than a closed team of producers.
• Fluid Heterarcy – produsers participate as is
appropriate to their personal skills, interests, and
knowledge, and may form loose sub-groups to focus on
specific issues, topics, or problems
• Unfinished Artifacts –projects are continually under
development, and therefore always unfinished;
• Common Property, Individual Rewards – contributors
permit (non-commercial) community use, adaptation,
and further development of their intellectual property,
and are rewarded by the status capital they gain
through this process

60. Open Educational Resources
Produser Model Produser/Consumer
Ex. WikiEducator Ex. MIT OCW
Open participation Restricted participation
Emergent governance Staff production
Unrestricted licensing Institutional governance
Mass growth potential Non commercial license
Mora, M. (2008)

61. 5. Counsels and Advises
– Benefits – convenience The online environment
minimises social cues,
– Travel costs
creating an illusion of
– Access privacy that may decrease
– Confidentiality perceptions of interpersonal
risk and make it easier to
• Student Online Support communicate about
groups and networks emotional issues (Wellman,
1997).
– Online counseling: a descriptive analysis of
therapy services on the Internet. Chester &
Carolyn A. Glas (2006)
Can you Counsel online?

62. Building relationships with the
‘whole learner’ through social
software
• Through sharing of profiles, tags, reflections,
photos and artifacts, enhanced
teacher/student relationships are afforded -
leading to transformative learning??
• See McCarthy, (2009) Social Networking
behind student lines with Mixi
– Breaking barriers new cost effective ways to work
with, motivate and mentor students

63. Value learning-mentoring
processes that:
• emphasize dialogue and collaborative
approaches to study;
• support critical exploration of knowledge and
experience;
• provide opportunities for active, reflective,
and creative academic engagement.

64. • Importance of the Competency of Constancy
“constancy” is defined as the mentor’s ability to stay
engaged with the student for all of the steps―
• reliable, loyal, and never too busy to be available to the
student. (Williams, 2008)
• Technology affordances re constancy
• Archives
• Organization
• Capturing (utube, podcasts etc.)
• Transformative learning “takes longer to occur than the
time these students spend with their mentors or spend
in reflection”

65. Changes required for
21st Century Learning
Students’ not teacher’s role to:
Define problem
Retrieve data, human and learning resources
Validate information
Sensemaking
Negotiating, collaborating, producing with others
Applying to authentic problems
Creating and building artifacts
Reflecting

66. Conclusion
• Though successful yesterday and today, the
use of new net based tools will propel
teaching and learning at Empire States to new
accomplishments, increased transparency and
openness, efficiency and effectiveness.
• The adoption of these disruptive technologies
is worth the gain!

67. • “The pessimist complains about the wind, the
optimist expects it to change, the realist adjusts the
sails.” William Arthur Ward (1921 – 1994)

68. quot;He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes;
he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever.”
Chinese Proverb
Your comments and questions most
welcomed!
Terry Anderson terrya@athabascau.ca
http://cde.athabascau.ca/faculty/terrya.php
Blog: terrya.edublogs.org