Recent News – Page 2 – Self-Directed Professional Development

Fostering Self-Direction in an Age of Smart Machines

One of the last pieces that I read, when shutting down for the summer, was a column by Tom Friedman that captured many of the the central themes for our class this fall. (If you want to follow more about the design of the class, you can use the tag EPPL639 on my site. https://generoche.net/category/eppl639/) The core theme of Friedman’s piece is key to the class: an increase in the power of computer technology generated by robotics, artificial intelligence, deep learning and “the Internet of Things,” has created a world where every job worth having demands more skill AND a stronger commitment to self-directed, lifelong learning.

Friedman quotes the C.E.O of Intel about the belief that his grandchildren won’t drive their own cars. History has shown, the danger of putting too much faith in the predictions of the managers of technology companies. Still, it seems increasingly likely that we’ll see fleets of autonomous vehicles in the next couple of decades. Those vehicles may create good jobs for engineers, but doing so will have a massive impact for those who drive for a living, sell liability insurance or own parking lots.

The main catalysts for the move to autonomous vehicles are the exponential increase in power and the decreasing cost of computer power. The next generation of computer chips will allow car manufacturers to shrink the brain of a self-driving car from, “something that fills the whole trunk, to a small box under the front seat”. The result, as Friedman notes, is “a world where we can analyze, prophesize and optimize with a precision unknown in human history”

This ability will transform far more jobs than most of us realize. (We need to constantly remind ourselves that if combined computer capability really does double every year, we’re looking at increases of more than 100 times over the next eight years.) For example, when many of us think of the oil industry, we think of roughnecks, roustabouts and riggers on drilling platforms in the Gulf. That’s only part of the story. As Friedman reminds us in his description of the the control room of Devon Energy in Oklahoma City, a “half a floor of computer screens are displaying the data coming out of every well Devon is drilling around the world…if you’re working on a Devon oil rig today, you’re holding a computer, not just an oily wrench.”

The underlying reality for oil workers is that they will need be be able to use a computer AND a wrench, plus manage their learning in order to keep up with the changes in the world of computing technology. The wrench may not change much, but it’s pretty certain the computer will be telling workers what to adjust and when t should be done.

Friedman also describes one study that showed how reshaping some of our most traditional institutions (like the College Board) can foster self-directed, lifelong learning to the tune of 115 points on the PSAT:

We analyzed 250,000 students from the high school graduating class of 2017 who took the new PSAT and then the new SAT,” College Board president David Coleman told me. “Students who took advantage of their PSAT results to launch their own free personalized improvement practice through Khan Academy advanced dramatically: 20 hours of practice was associated with an average 115-point increase from the PSAT to the SAT — double the average gain among students who did not…

Practice advances all students without respect to high school G.P.A., gender, race and ethnicity or parental education. And it’s free. Our aim is to transform the SAT into an invitation for students to own their future.

As we move forward with our EPPL 639 course this fall, we’ll look at how the lessons of industries, as diverse as oil drilling and long-haul trucking, can shape our personal and professional approaches to learning. For me, Friedman gets it right when he notes that, “And that means: More is now on you. And that means self-motivation to learn and keep learning becomes the most important life skill.”

You’re In the Prediction Business

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Link

The best way to predict the future is to issue a press release. Link

As I wrote in my first post for our academic information services newsletter, anyone truying to bring about innovation and change in education is in the prediction business—like it or not. Unfortunately, as Yogi Berra supposedly[1] said, “Prediction is difficult, especially about the future”. When we make a decision about implementing a policy, buying some new hardware or software or launching a new program, we’re making a judgement based on our understanding the present and on our imagination of how that present condition might change in the future. Educational planning always involves someone’s interpretation of the future along with some judgment about what steps are most likely to influence our position in that future.

Unfortunately, must of us not very good at either accurately understanding what’s happening now or at anticipating what might happen in the future. Our goal in this class is to help you develop a effective set of tools and techniques that you can use individually and within your organization to better measure where you are and to envision possible futures.

We seem to be particularly bad when we’re focusing on the impact of emerging technologies as diverse as cars, computers or tech corporations:

1903: “The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty — a fad.” — president of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer not to invest in the Ford Motor Company.

1977: “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.” — Founder of Digital Equipment Corp Ken Olsen in a speech to the World Future Society.

1996: A Forrester Research analyst(quoted in The New York Times): “Whether they stand alone or are acquired, Apple as we know it is cooked. It’s so classic. It’s so sad.” David Pogue in the New York Times

2016 “It’s very important, if you have something really important, write it out and have it delivered by courier, the old fashioned way. Because, I’ll tell you what, no computer is safe,” President Trump on the importance of cybersecurity to his administration. People Magazine* link

My own record record in making predictions about educational technology is a little sketchy. I wasn’t impressed with wireless the first time I saw it, and when I first saw Youtube and online video, I declared pretty emphatically that wouldn’t work. (I did, however, anticipate the importance of the cable modem. My planning paper at Syracuse University School of Information Studies received a B-. The instructor commented that the the paper met the requirements of the assignment, but that my assertion that coaxial cable would become important in expanding high speed internet to the home was ludicrous.)

As Audrey Watters’ essay about the failures of technology, illustrates, of most of our commercial, not-for-profit and government institutions have been just as bad at making predictions about the future as I have—-maybe even worse. This essay and Audrey’s other writings are worth reading who is serious about educational planning. Her historical perspective is carefully researched and provides some very useful insights about how to frame the future decisions. Even though she’s careful to assert that she is no futurist, I think she is right on target when she identifies the key task for the future of educational institutions.

Therefore the task for schools – and I hope you can start to see where these different predictions start to converge – is to prepare students for a highly technological future, a future that has been almost entirely severed from the systems and processes and practices and institutions of the past.

Clearly, totally severing our connections to the systems, processes, practices and institutions of the past isn’t the role of the university. But it seems clear to me that those of us who work in higher education don’t really have much leverage to change the trajectory of the kinds of technology that will shape our student’s futures. Much of the basic science that will define the commercial technologies of the future will still come from our labs, but Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, the Chinese government and even Microsoft will still have more power to define the technologies and workspaces of the future.

As we go forward with this class, we’ll try to practice the art of developing realistic ways of anticipating the future—both individually and institutionally. The key to this technique is to train ourselves to think in terms of questions and possibilities of alternative futures, rather than predicting the success or failure of a particular technology. It makes no sense for us to be arguing about whether of jobs displaced by robots and AI will be 25% or 40%. It does make sense for us to think about how we might respond individually and collectively if large numbers of jobs are replaced by machines. (Maybe the better question is when?)

Before we start to worry, about let’s start with simpler exercise. Everyone in this class is working towards a doctorate, and you must have some expectation of what you might do with that degree once you finish.

What sort of professional and personal goals do you have for your post-dissertation life?
What changes do you predict in the world of work and education that might make it either easier or harder for you to accomplish those goals?
How confident are you that your prediction is accurate? How did you come to come to believe that future might exist?
Are there concrete actions that you can be taking right now that will help you capitalize on the opportunities that technology might make available to you?
Are there actions that you could taking now that will help you overcome any obstacles that technology might through your way?

[1] Nothing is ever as it seems, even finding simple quotes to include in presentations. I grew up thinking that Yogi Berra definitely said this, but it seems that might not be the case. The following comes from the “quote investigator:

In 1991 a marketer in the tourism industry in Virginia ascribed a variant of the saying to Yogi Berra:

Randall Foskey, director of admissions marketing for Colonial Williamsburg, probably said it best last week at the legislative dinner sponsored by the Virginia Hospitality and Travel Association.

“In the words of Yogi Berra, ‘I never make predictions, especially about the future,’” Foskey said.

In the News: Fall Seminar on Technology Planning and the Future of Work

Our upcoming graduate seminar looking at ways professionals can prepare personally and professionally for a workplace transformed by technology has made the William and Mary News.

Instead of focusing on specific skills, Roche is looking at the bigger picture — how can we design learning experiences that prepare future generations to work together and become problem solvers? This question is among those Roche will explore in his seminar course this fall on Educational Technology Planning.

As the prospectus suggests, we’ll approach that bigger question by answering three smaller questions.

First, how might the dramatic changes in core technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence and deep learning, “big data”, robotics and “the Internet of Things” shape the workplace of the next generation? If those changes come about, what might it mean to be “college and career ready”?

We’re not going to pretend to be able to predict the future here. As I wrote about in my first post to our Academic Technology blog prediction is a tough business. However, the core process of educational planning includes understanding the complexity of our current environment and then envisioning what the future might become—even when today is complicated and the future is murky.

Second, how can educational institutions at all levels design the technological infrastructures to support learning and effective administration?

The path from the complicated present to the possible future is paved with concrete decisions. Administrators have to decide how to invest in the staff, hardware and software that will prepare their students to navigate the workplace of the future. Those investments are expensive and, once you make the, it’s hard to change directions. We’ll try to find ways during this class to think about how we evaluate and purchase products and service that enhance flexibility and the freedom to learn, while avoiding career-limiting decisions.

Finally, how can individuals become better self-directed learners so that they can thrive personally and professionally in these new work environments?

Even if we can’t predict the jobs of the future or the exact types of education that the next generation of workers will need, it seems pretty likely that the central skill of the future will involve “learning how to learn”. Generations of adult education researchers have identified some of the key components of self-directed learning, and we’ll spend some time in this class looking at how to apply their insights into our own learning.

First Post as a Professor

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This is my first post as a Professor of Higher Education in William and Mary’s School of Education. This semester marked the end of a 30 year career as a college administrator and the end of my first full week in my new appointment as a full-time instructional faculty member.

For the last couple of years, I’ve existed on a diet almost exclusively of e-learning — first as Interim Director of University E-Learning Initiatives — then permanently in that position. I’m actually still excited by the enormous potential of Coursera, EdX, Lynda.com and the other innovators in that space. (Online stats courses explain regression equations more clearly than I ever have.) But I believe that really understanding e-learning demands understanding **learning** in all its richness, and it’s been hard in recent years to find the cycles to process the change we’ve been experiencing.

Defining Learning

I used to torture the participants in my adult education classes by locking them in a room for an entire class session with the task of defining “learning.” (I didn’t really lock them in, but they did end up working pretty much the entire three hours.) The white board they filled with definitions just scratched the surface of the richness of that evening’s discussion.

Some of the definitions were cognitive, behavioral, or skill-based; a fair number represented the types of changes that could only be assessed and appreciated by the learner. Some of the stories we told about our own learning captured the transcendent or transformational. We left that room in awe of the complexity of humans and a sense of humility about about abilities our as “educators” to “manage” the process. (Carl Rogers would have been impressed with the work we did on those evenings.)

I’m hoping that my new position will allow me to work on understanding e-learning while reconnecting with my past work on self-directed learning and continuing professional education . I’ll be teaching a full schedule of classes — including a sequence of online and blended courses for a new certificate we’re offering for graduate students and practicing college faculty. Right now I’m working on finalizing the syllabi and learning activities for three one-credit courses: Course Design, Learning Strategies and Technology Enhanced Learning.

In addition, I’m working on several core classes for our EdD programs. One of our goals in the School of Education is to clarify the differences between the EdD degree as focused on practice and the PhD as a degree for scholars and professors. The two courses I’m actively teaching or developing are in Data-Driven Decision-Making and Action Research.

One of my personal goals for this semester is participate in the Connected Courses initiative and to use this forum to reconnect with some of the folks who have helped shape my thinking over the years. I’m going to publish this post with the tag and category of Connected-Course to have a forum to get in the game.

It’s About Time: Intellectual Technology and General Education

The first session of this fall’s Educational Technology Planning course met last night after losing a week to Irene. The course is an elective in the Educational Planning, Policy and Leadership program at the School of Education and is made up of a students in masters and doctoral programs in K-12 and higher education administration. The goal is to look at technology decisions through the lens of the leaders who will be responsible for selecting and managing large-scale education technology projects–chief information officers or chief technology officers. It’s a difficult course, since it requires students to integrate a considerable amount of technical information into a personal vision of how information technologies might impact education in the near to intermediate future.

The course is generally built around an authentic learning project for an outside client. This year presented an unusual opportunity since William and Mary is undergoing its first review of general education requirements since the invention of the World Wide Web. Michael Lewis, one of the co-chairs of the Curriculum Review Committee, is a mathematician/computer scientist who has been involved with a number of IT initiatives in the past, and we had talked about the possibility of the class looking at the role of “intellectual technologies” in general education. Obviously, I think that computers and communications technology have transformed society in ways that pose a whole host of technical, pedagogical, ethical, social and economic questions that need to be addressed much differently than we would have addressed them in 1990. For me the broad question might be framed this way:

How much does a citizen need to know about information (educational, intellectual) technology to be considered well-educated in the 21st century?

The project that I suggested to the class was writing a carefully developed white paper where we offer some perspectives, ideas, and thoughts about that question. We have 16 students in the class, 12 weeks of class time, and an incredibly broad range of backgrounds and experiences. Michael came and met with the class to provide an overview of the committee’s work to date and provided some history on general education at WM, and left us to determine if this was the project that we wanted to take on.

The discussion was spirited, but I’m not sure if it was effective or not. My fear is that I really didn’t allow the group the freedom to decide if these was the project that wanted to work on or not. I had put a fair amount of effort into developing a structure that I thought would allow us to get organized relatively quickly, but that structure didn’t seem to work for a fair number of folks in the class. The biggest concern didn’t appear to me to be the importance or substance of the project, but rather if there was enough time to complete it. (At least that’s what I heard.) My own sense was that it was a tight deadline, but we had the time and the tools to make a real contribution to the discussion at the College if we put our minds to it.

We decided–or maybe they acquiesced to my expectation–to give it a week working within the format that I had proposed and see where it goes. We’ll see where it goes.

Adult Education Class

I suspect that over the next 10 weeks or so I’ll be writing quite a bit about the course I’m teaching this semester, so let me provide a little bit of background. The class is an elective graduate class in the Educational Policy, Planning and Leadership program at William and Mary. The title is Adult and Continuing Education Practice and Policy, and it’s framed around principles of andragogy, defined as the art of teaching adults, rather than around pedagogy, the science of teaching children.

That’s the broad framework. There’s significant discussion within the AE community about the degree to which adult learning is substantively different than other kinds of learning. I side with those who think that adult learning is qualitatively different–a learning activity with 20 folks over 35 is much different than a learning experience of 20 eighteen year olds. Neither is better–they are just different.

Malcolm Knowles, who popularized the notion (theory/framework) of andragogy, identified a core group of characteristics that differentiate adult learners. (His conception changed over the years in various versions of his writing, but the essence is captured in these four principles.)

Being an adult–in most western societies–is defined as being responsible for directing your own life, and often, those of others. Adults learn best when then they have control of what they learn and how they learn it.
Adults bring rich experience to their learning and that experience can be a powerful resource for learning. (Not always, though. Sometimes experience makes new learning more difficult without significant unlearning.)
Most adult learning is embedded in “real life” rather than abstracted in the way schools usually organize learning.
Much (not all) adult learning is problem-centered and interested in immediate application of knowledge. Some adults participate in learning activities because they enjoy the social interaction with other learners. Others enjoy the learning for its own sake.

From those assumptions, we draw three principles to start the planning process. (Many more will emerge as we learn together.)

The organization of the course has to provide ways for learners to be significantly involved in the planning and evaluation of the course activities.
Experience (including mistakes) provides the basis for learning activities. Learning activities will be richer and more effective if they are tied to direct and previous experience.
Adults are most interested in learning that have immediate relevance to their job or personal life. Learning is real life–it is not preparing for real life.

In this course this plays out in a set of procedures and processes. Some of them include:

We don’t develop the overall syllabus until after we have had a chance to get to know each other. Through conversation, structured activities and some preliminary class exercises we get a sense of the goals, aspirations and experience that each participant brings to the group.
The “course content” is highly individualized and grows out of the genuine needs and interests of the learners. We manage that through the use of an individualized learning contract which specifies the grade to be earned, the expectations for earning that grade, the learning objectives that will be completed, a rough time line, and an evaluation plan.
Learning contracts are developed by the individual learner in collaboration with the course facilitator and other members of the learning group. Because learning in real life is messy and unpredictable, contracts are subject to ongoing negotiation.
Blocks of time during class meetings can be scheduled by any class participant to address a topic of interest or to get some assistance with their learning projects. (This is an experiment in this class.)
Each learner will also work on refining a process of reflecting on his/her learning project that incorporates some combination of a learning diary, reflective journal of some sort, some method of critical reflection and whatever other components might be required.

Because the actual learning activities are so highly individualized, this reflection piece is what binds us together as a learning community, as opposed to group of graduate students working on independent study projects. There are four reflection questions that we’ll look at from a variety of perspectives over the entire duration of the course.

What have I learned today, this semester, this week?
How did I learn it?
How might I learn it differently, maybe even better, in the future?
How might I help someone else build on my learning?

We’re at the point in the course where we know each other a little bit, and most folks have defined their learning projects. The next step is to try to pull what we’ve learned so far into the construction of the syllabus.

Creativity, Inspiration and the Conservation of Keystrokes

We have at least three members of our current adult education class who are experimenting with blogs as part of their learning logs. The care and feeding of a blog can teach many things. Some of those things are inspirational; others are more practical.

As the center of your digital identity, your web site can give you of a fighting chance in creating a web presence that helps you accomplish your professional goals. Your blog can provide a forum for narrating you work and help attract a community to inspire, challenge and expand your thinking. It also can provide a way to save you some keystrokes.

As Jon Udell has pointed out, saving keystrokes can be very important, particularly if Scott Hansleman is right in his assessment:

There are a finite number of keystrokes left in your hands before you die. Next time someone emails you, ask yourself “Is emailing this person back the best use of my remaining keystrokes?”

If you can communicate with more people with fewer keystrokes before you die–that’s a good thing. I had the opportunity for the last few days to put the principle of conservation of keystrokes into practice, using another blog that I post to occasionally. Earlier this week, William and Mary got hit with a particularly nasty phishing attack and a group of faculty accounts were compromised. The resulting flood of spam resulted in William and Mary’s outgoing mail being blocked by most large ISP’s, including Blackberry. Every time someone sent email to Blackberry, the mail bounced. Every time the mail bounced, I got email asking what was going on with Blackberry.

Rather than answer each one those emails individually, I made a quick post to the SoE blog, then I could direct email to that link rather than respond individually. Using a blog entry works well in this case because I want to provide a little bit of the back story and show how important it is for all of us in the community to be involved if we want to protect our precious Internet.

Here’s a challenge for you to those of us in the EPPL 714 class. Can you find a way–high tech or low tech–to invest 1 hour in learning something that will save you 5 hours over the next month? Can you share it with 10 of your friends so that they can save some time, too? If an hour is too much, can you find a way to invest 10 minutes in something that will save you an hour? ( Want a hint of a place to look? If you use Microsoft Word, explore using named styles.)

This Blog Gonna Rise Again?

I had pretty much made my peace with being an ex-blogger. It’s been a year since the last time I posted to this blog, and, even that last post was just a speculation about the wisdom of amateurs running their own servers. For the previous four years, the blog had been center of my digital identity and the source of connection with a host of interesting, challenging and involved colleagues. It also generated a fair amount angst, since writing is a form of torture for me; I’m prone to embarrassing typos, and I’ve been told by several colleagues that the defining attribute of my writing is my “keen sense of the obvious”.

That said, I’ve never quite gotten rid of that small voice in the back of my mind that keeps suggesting I ought to revisit the decision to abandon the blog. The volume of the voice has gone up this semester as I’m teaching my adult education course for the first time since 2006. The course is a bit unusual in that it builds explicitly on adult learning principles, which immediately frames the class much differently than most other courses that the students have experienced. (We write the syllabus together after the fourth week of class, for example.) There are a couple of guiding principles that emerge that relate to blogging:

Adult educators an ethical responsibility to engage in sustained, systematic and critical reflection about their practice. One of the major goals of the class is to help students develop methods of reflection that will live on beyond this course and will become integrated into their own lifelong learning and will help guide their efforts in helping others learn over the lifespan.
If you can find the courage to do it, sharing some of those reflections in a public way can be a source of continued creativity, inspiration and professional challenge.

Three or four of the students in the class are blogging as part of their reflection efforts, so I’ve been a bit sensitized to the need to narrate my own work. Then two things happened that pushed me over the top and back into the new post window. First Gardner posted a comment on a year old post saying stating that he was waiting for something new to appear. (Curse you, Gardo!) Then, one of the member of my class signed up for a Twitter account and started following me, causing me to think that maybe it was time for me to get a little more public about my own reflections and practice. Maybe it would be good to reopen myself to some of that creativity, inspiration and challenge.

Lessons from the WordPress Worm

After reading the news about the WordPress hacking attacks of such as Andy Ihnatko and Robert Scoble, I spent more time than usual cleaning up my hosted account and trying to figure out if I were one of the folks John Gruber had in mind when he questioned the wisdom of amateur system administrators running their own WordPress installations.

I’m pretty good about keeping my primary sites updated, particularly now that WordPress makes it so much easier to install the newest versions. I did have three or four installations that I had installed for various test purposes over time that weren’t up-to-date. There was no obvious indication that any of them had been compromised, but just to be safe, I exported the data, and then implemented the ‘nuke from orbit” sanction.

That led me into the logs for my account–which scared the daylights out of me. The log files are filled with strange entities trying to run scripts, execute PHP code and access a whole host of other stuff that I have no idea what it’s doing. I can’t find any evidence that any of this is actually working, but my Linux and Apache knowledge is so limited that I can’t really be sure. I’ve always liked the freedom provided by Fantasico and Simple Scripts to just stick a new blog, CMS, or some other piece of software up, just to try it out. I’m getting the sinking feeling that maybe the ability so easily install software might have a dark side that needs to be addressed.

It may be time for coffee with John Drummond and a little tutorial about what constitutes responsible administration for a hosted account.

Beginning Digital Rehab

This summer, just before I headed out on my vacation, I finally hit bottom. My digital life was out of control, and I was powerless over my my RSS’s, my API’s, Yammers, Twitters and the rest of my life stream. The initial high that came from registering for yet another microblogging site, bookmark sharing tool, project management application, or music community was replaced with the sense that none of this was really contributing much to the kind of thinking and writing I really wanted to be doing. It was distracting, and the bit of an ego boost that comes when someone comments on my uncanny ability to be aware of the newest Web 2.0 application wears off pretty quickly. (I suspect that many of the folks making those comments really thought that it’s pretty pathetic that someone at my age was still trying to figure out whether Pandora or Last.FM was the best way to explore new music.)

The first (and easiest) step in digital rehab was to disable my FaceBook account. My small community was a attractive distraction late in the afternoon when I didn’t feel like working, but it was hard for me to move beyond fascination. Outside of a small circle of professional colleagues that I know pretty well, I never did get comfortable with merging the personal and social so tightly. The group of folks who were interested in my son’s wedding pictures and the progress on my kitchen renovation weren’t very interested in the travails of finding the right support model for online research.

Unlike some other social networking sites, Facebook is pretty easy to escape from right now, with clear instructions on how to disable the account. I officially killed the account on Sunday, and even that little step has given me a new sense of freedom. I’m also finding a bit of an anti-Facebook community–including even tech professor and guru Mark Hofer has joined the community of former Facebookers.

It will be interesting to see how bad the withdrawal becomes and how I’m able to keep connections with some key folks for whom FB really has become a key communications tool.