A presentation on my project Myths of Teaching, Learning & Technology. See also http://zenofteaching.us

1. MOOC Edition #change11
Zen of Teaching
<Myths of Teaching, Learning & Technology>
<Antonio Vantaggiato</>
Universidad del Sagrado Corazón
zenofteaching.us

2. http://slidesha.re/zenofteachingus
Everything is on-line!

3. The limits of my language
are the limits of my world
-L. Wittgenstein

4. This video says it all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WW_dBQPAeDY

6. The computer is everywhere
The cellphone is everywhere
The Web is everywhere

7. Welcome, William
Hamlet (Facebook edition, XXI Century)
http://www.angelfire.com/art2/antwerplettuce/hamlet.html

8. From NMC’s Horizon Project 10-year Anniversary Retreat, Austin, January 2012

9. "Computers won't begin to have a real impact
on education until they are seen as the
message rather than the
medium. Computers ought not be a new
means of producing a slide show.”
-R. Schank

10. Web 2.0 > Learning 2.0
The Web: Fundamental
pedagogic environment
(Suter 2005)

11. Also, a living environment

12. So, What is Wrong with Higher Ed?
I mean, is there really something wrong?
Or it’s just a media fad?

13. As quoted by G. Campbell, EDUCAUSE ELI 2012, Austin, February 2012

14. The Education Bubble?

15. Peter Thiel - unCollege
“If Harvard were really the best education, if
it makes that much of a difference, why not
franchise it so more people can attend? Why
not create 100 Harvard affiliates?” ... “It’s
something about the scarcity and the status.
In education your value depends
on other people failing.”
Peter Thiel: We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education.
Sarah Lacy, TechCrunch, April 10, 2011: http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/10/peter-thiel-were-in-a-bubble-and-its-not-the-internet-its-higher-education/

16. Quality?
Arum & Roska:
45% of students showed “no significant improvement”
over one year of study (freshmen in fall 2005 through spring
2007). 36% showed no improvement after the whole 4 years
of college “education”.
“American higher education is characterized by limited
or no learning for a large proportion of students.”
“Your So-Called Education”, The New York Times May 14, 2011; http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/opinion/15arum.html?_r=3
“Large numbers of the students were making their way through college with minimal exposure to rigorous
coursework, only a modest investment of effort and little or no meaningful improvement in skills like writing
and reasoning. In a typical semester, for instance, 32 percent of the students did not take a single course with
more than 40 pages of reading per week, and 50 percent did not take any course requiring more than 20
pages of writing over the semester. The average student spent only about 12 to 13 hours per week studying
— about half the time a full-time college student in 1960 spent studying.”

17. Still...
“Universities continue to
serve as remarkable
engines of
innovation”
-S. Johnson

18. The Myths

19. Myth Zero
Learning
Happens in the
Classroom.
Because we
deliver
instruction

20. Lecture
Etymology
14th century: action of
reading, that which is read,
from the Latin lectus, pp. of
legere "to read."
oral discourse on a given
subject before an audience for
purposes of instruction is from
the 16th century.
Verb "to lecture" ~ 1590.
c. 1350

22. ...Students “sit” through a semester
worth of lectures, while “distance”
students “watch” online.
Live vs. Distance Learning: Measuring the Differences
From The New York Times, November 5, 2010 / http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/us/05collegeside.html?_r=1

25. Myth Zero.1
...Ergo
Method is key
The Correct Method
... Learning
combined with Right
Content and Right
happens!!!!!
Teacher and...

26. Myth Zero.2
... Without studying (or action)
And no responsibility!! [Upon the student]
The Student: Namely, she who studies!!!

27. Studying
There is so little “studying” going on in Colleges
that “there is no compelling understanding among
students of why they are there. [...] They may spend
Monday in ‘19th Century Women’s Literature’,
Tuesday in “Animal Behavior’, and Wednesday in
‘Eastern Philosophy’...”
What is a college education really worth?, The Washington Post,
June 3, 2011.

28. More Study
Study, the word less used in
education.

29. “To Study”
The Road Less Traveled
Zero: Number of
occurrences of verb “to
study” within Siemens’
book Knowing Knowledge.

30. Is connectivism a learning
theory?
Who cares.
-G. Siemens

31. Myth Zero.3
At end of Lecture,
learning can be
Consequently... assessed,
by means of...
Standardized Testing!!!

32. PISA
{Not this one}

33. PISA, Finland
No standardized
testing Accountability is
something that is
Equity
left when
No word for responsibility has
Accountability in been subtracted.
Finnish --Pasi Sahlberg, director of Finnish Ministry
of Education's Center for International
Mobility
What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success
Anu Partanen - The Atlantic, 29 December 2011
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/

34. Myth
Content

35. Content & LMS
“Blackboard is itself an embodiment of the university culture that
Neary and Winn rightly find so troubling: students cycle through a
system that structurally, aesthetically and
rhetorically reinforces the notions that
education is consumption, the faculty
member is a content provider, the classroom
is hierarchical, and learning is closed”
Luke Waltzer, On EdTech and the Digital Humanities; http://lukewaltzer.com/on-edtech-and-the-digital-humanities
Neary, Mike and Winn, Joss (2009) The student as producer: reinventing the student experience in higher
education. In: The future of higher education: policy, pedagogy and the student experience. Continuum, London,
pp. 192-210.

36. Let's shutter our "learning
management systems" and build
"understanding
augmentation networks"
instead, moving away from
educational assembly lines
toward intellectual ecosystems of
interest and curiosity.
--Gardner Campbell

37. Myth
The Shallows

39. “ The enormous
multiplication of books in
every branch of
“ The multitude
of books is a great
knowledge is one of the
evil. There is no
greatest evils of this age;
measure of limit to
since it presents one of
this fever for
the most serious obstacles
writing.
to the acquisition of
--Martin Luther
correct information.
--Edgar Allan Poe
As quoted by Clay Shirky in his rebuttal article Does the Internet Make You Smarter?; The Wall Street Jornal, June 4, 2010; http://
online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704025304575284973472694334.html

40. Myth
Death of The Book

41. Death of the
Book
Ceci tuera cela (via
Eco & McLuhan)
Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame, Frollo,
comparing a book with his old cathedral,
says: "Ceci tuera cela" (The book will kill
the cathedral, the alphabet will kill
images).
McLuhan, comparing a Manhattan
discotheque to the Gutenberg Galaxy, said
"Ceci tuera cela."
Nunberg, G. (1997) The Future of the Book. Berkeley; University of
California Press. Eco’s afterword is available online at http://
www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_future_of_book.html.

42. Death of an Industry?
it makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a
publishing industry, because the core problem publishing
solves - the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense
of making something available to the public - has
stopped being a problem.
--Clay Shirky
Clay Shirky’s Blog, 13 March 2009: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable; http://www.shirky.com/weblog/
2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable

43. Change of Focus (Shirky)
Save books!
Save Society!
Save newspapers!
(Do whatever works)
(Preserve current
institutions)

44. Death of...

46. Back-door Entrance (1)

47. Back-door Entrance (2)

48. Interview
Openness
B. Schwartz Communication Institute, Baruch College, CUNY, June 2011

51. Wikipedia Didn’t Kill Britannica.
Windows Did
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/03/wikipedia-didnt-kill-brittanica-windows-did/

52. Myth
Curricula / Infrastructure

53. Departments
Departmentalization of knowledge and its effects
Mark C. Taylor, a religion scholar at Columbia University, has
a vision of a University where “zones of inquiry can be
organized around a broad range of topics: Mind, Body. Law,
Information, Networks, Language, … and Water.” Can you
imagine a Water program? It could “bring together people
in the humanities, arts, sciences... with professional schools
like Medicine, law...”
“End the University as We Know It”; The New York Times of 27 April 2009,
Mark C. Taylor

54. Dave Winer proposes
“We should aim to recreate the
environment that made the Internet
itself spring into existence, in
academic institutions.”
--Dave Winer
Scripting News, 31 May 2011; http://scripting.com/stories/2011/05/31/isThereAnEducationBubble.html

55. Myth
Teachers: Can We Be Replaced By Machines?

56. Interview
Your Job As A Teacher
Wesch & Campbell, EDUCAUSE ELI 2012

57. Myth
Technology

58. Integrating Technology into
the Curriculum

59. Technologies!
Language
Paper, pencil,
blackboard, BOOK
Humanity is our
first technology.
We are tools.
--K. Kelly

60. Technology enables modalities such as
constructivism, etc. (Norman & Spohrer
1996)
+ Significant
transformation of the
teaching-learning process (Hannafin 2003)

61. Questions Not Worth
Asking
Is online learning more or less effective than
learning in a classroom?
Who cares. That question is irrelevant. Society
answered the need to use technology through its
broad adoption of the web/internet/online medium.
--G. Siemens

62. Technology
We shape tools We shape our
Tools shape us
buildings; thereafter
Tools change us
We change tools
they shape us.
Repeat. --Winston Churchill

63. Myth
Don’t Need Internet / Twitter / Whatever...
OR
Turn Those Devices Off!

65. Jim Groom: Mother Trucking Zombies, Bavatuesdays 7 Nov. 2008; http://bavatuesdays.com/mother-trucking-zombies/

66. The Twitter-ed revolution

67. La revolución del clic

72. Myth
Science vs Humanities / STEM vs STEAM
Liberal Arts

76. Liberal Arts (1)
Liberal Arts include
Liberal, not as in Not
Mathematics, Science,
Conservative
Music, Art.
Liberal, as in Freeing
Don’t include Edu;
(the Mind)
Business; Engineering.

77. Liberal Arts (2)
Free Thinking Technical / Specialized
Burgeois value? Down-to-Earth edu
Ample culture to do For jobs
exactly what?

78. Myths
Styles of Learning
Copyright
Mobile Learning
etc.

79. Now What?

80. Now What?
Innovations

81. MOOC
“What we found was that in a MOOC, instead of
the classroom being the center, it becomes just
one node of the network of social interactions."
--G. Siemens

82. Learning
::
(create) Connections
(navigate) Connections

83. Surface
::
Depth
Baricco
The Barbarians

84. Ideas As Connections

85. Interview
We have always underestimated the value of
access to each other. -Clay Shirky

86. Papert, Minsky & Kay (2005):
• The key educational task is to
make connections
between powerful ideas and
passionate interests.
• Teach to think deeply
• Teach to think rigorously

87. “Hell is a place where
nothing connects to
nothing”
-T.S. Elliot (via M. Núñez)

88. Learning
Sense Making

89. Khan Academy
Udacity
P2PU

90. Stanford MOOCs
15.0%
11.3%
7.5%
AI campus
3.8%
AI
Retention rate
200 30 15.0% Machine Learning
AI
campus 0%
AI 160000 23000 14.4%
DB
Machine 104000 13000 12.5%
Learning
DB 92000 7000 7.6%

92. "We're going to have
detailed records on
thousands of students who
have learned these skills,
many of whom will want to
make those skills available
to employers," said Mr.
Evans, the Virginia
professor. "So if a recruiter
is looking for the hundred
best people in some
geographic area that know
about machine learning,
that's something we could
provide, for a fee. I think it's
the cusp of a revolution."

95. http://ds106.us
Digital Storytelling (Jim Groom et al., 2011)

96. What role do blogs, [_____] play
in the classroom or online
learning?
Any role you want.
-G. Siemens

97. Learning...
Learners should experience chaos
& confusion
Autonomy is key
Learners in Control of their
learning
Openness

98. Roughly: “Who, while going through the twilight or tracing a date from
the past, has not felt sometimes being lost in an infinite something?”

99. Not bad... just <99> slides!
antonio vantaggiato @avunque
e-mail me > avantaggiato@sagrado.edu
visit Skate of the Web > blogs.netedu.info
zenofteaching.us