Learning as risk, exploration and reward

The June issue of National Geographic carries an article on risk taking. It looks at explorers, photographers and our ancestors who walked out of Africa and suggests that dopamine, and not adrenaline is what drives risk takers. Adrenaline may help us in fight or flight situations, but for gutting it out over the longer term, dopamine is what helps us through.

Psychology Today defines dopamine as

"a neurotransmitter that helps control the brain's reward and pleasure centers. Dopamine also helps regulate movement and emotional responses, and it enables us not only to see rewards, but to take action to move toward them. Dopamine deficiency results in Parkinson's Disease, and people with low dopamine activity may be more prone to addiction. The presence of a certain kind of dopamine receptor is also associated with sensation-seeking."

So dopamine plays a role in rewards. This made me think of the risks we take in education. We risk looking foolish (e.g. answering questions wrongly or asking questions others may perceive as stupid), we risk having our world views or ways of doing challenged, we risk discovering we are not as smart, capable or wise as we thought. So does dopamine play a role in education? I think it can, and more so perhaps if learning experiences are gamified with clear rewards beyond the certificate or degree at the end.

With regular rewards, clear goals, etc, there might be more pleasure for students in their learning. By analogy with explorers, if students feel they are navigating new and exciting territory, this too may help them (if they need this help) to see learning as a voyage of discovery.

I'm looking forward to our local Moodle installation moving to 2.5 and playing with badges!

There is no excuse

I realise that there is nothing as pure information, pure fact uninterpreted. You only have to look at Fox News and the twisting of the climate change debate to know that the media can be subject to very heavy bias. I suspect if I read Green Left Weekly with any regularity I'd see the same. So information needs evaluation - both of the source's worldview and our own to understand how we regulate what comes in.

Despite all of the hype, the internet is the same - information doesn't appear ex nihilio simply to be curated, bookmarked or taken blindly. We need even better information evaluation skills than ever before.

However, there is now no excuse for ignorance, for sitting back and remaining uninformed, for not being challenged, stimulated, stretched intellectually. With sites like Fora, YouTube, Open Culture, Ted, iTunes U, free MOOCs and so on, there's oodles of stuff to give the brain a workout. There is also plenty of cheap stuff too (Regent Audio is a fave of mine for Christian lectures, and often has half priced sales). Then of course there is online book shopping - for which I am complicit in driving local bookshops out of business (for a bad situation with books in this country). Abebooks is one of my faves because I love second hand (and a number come from Australia) and of course Book Depository, though I buy locally new books too at times.

So in an 'information age' make the most of the great fire hose that is the internet, but do so in a way that promotes a 'wisdom age', an 'understanding age'. Read, listen and watch broadly and deeply, fast and slow as befits what you are doing. There's no excuse!

MOOC-HING about

I'm doing a MOOC on e-learning and digital cultures, as well as two other MOOCs (philosophy and astrobiology) and now find myself pontificating on the nature of MOOCs. It's kinda meta-MOOCing which is hard! What does it mean to be open? What difference does it make that the course is online? How does it being massive make it hard to navigate? What's the point anyway?

One of the MOOCs I'm doing (astrobiology) because I'm interested in the topic, because I'm preparing two papers for a colloquium and hopefully paper-based publishing, and because (and kind of as an afterthought) it intersects with something I teach on paleoclimate. The MOOC on philosophy is pure indulgence I guess, but it may find a place in my thinking - I mean who doesn't want to think about how to think rightly (well ok plenty of people). This MOOC on e-learning and digital cultures I'm taking because in some way I'm meant to be an e-learning guru (well no, and I don't think that as such) or more properly a guide or adviser and tech-head.

Two of the MOOCs are a straight transfer from trad ed to web with vid lectures and quizzes. Kinda yawn but material is of good quality, of interest to me and at least in some cases inspiring (well done Dave Ward for making thinking about thinking worth thinking about). But is that it Clay Shirky? Is this all I can expect? Is Aaron Bady right that a MOOC is one step better than nothing? After all, I can read, Google, get hold of a book, find a web article etc? Why does a video make it any better? Can and will MOOCs evolve beyond this? As Gardner Campbell challenges, will we move up the scale of hierarchies of learning?

As I intimated before, the videos at least can inspire. I like a passionate teacher and I try to be the same - without the illusion that the act of teaching means learning will occur, and yet there is no reason to expect it won't. Information is communicated (though only one way) and the good thing about video is the pause button (think time). In real life face to face teaching, questions, learning activities, exercises and (if they can be done) problem based learning provide the real grist for the mill.

But most MOOCs for now run well short of this, learning in a small class with a mixture of modes (my class I have for 10 months is 15 this year). Yet this is better than nothing if I can hear what an expert has to say on a topic. Expertise takes time, it just doesn't appear to be some freely floating object on the WWW that is then freely available. Much talk of open access seems to miss the point that facts are discovered, knowledge constructed and wisdom hard fought for, some times ex nihilio, but that it just doesn't pop up on the net without cost at some time, to some one. At some point it is culturally shared by the world (all IP issues aside) but it came from sweat and toil and experience. The WWW flattening of knowledge should not be reduced to the nonsense spouted in the NMC Horizon report - 2013 Higher Education Edition which said 'As authoritative sources lose their importance'. Such crap has resulted in climate change denial, the spread of childhood diseases in the vaccination boycotts and the ID/evolution debates on school boards!!!!

But the e-learning and digital cultures MOOC is something more, a level up. Videos that illustrate ideas and themes rather than simply teaching them; articles that real people read rather than just academics and discussions using a variety of social media. I've had many Twitter adds and really feel like I'm building a PLN in the process (and I hope others are when they add me!). The chat groups for philosophy (perhaps at a stretch the astrobiology course) extend me as a learner well beyond the material by connecting me with other learners and helping me to think (about thinking). Now that is metacognitive. This isn't replacing experts but placing me into a rich web of experts in the making.

So MOOCs need social media - not because videos of experts are wrong but because learning comes in communities of learners and practitioners reflecting on their learning and what the experts have said. After all, if teaching is sharing expertise then learning is gaining that expertise by practicing what has been shared, reflecting on it and sharing it ourselves.

Ok, I'm rambling now - but I do think MOOCs have a future. I don't know that they are the future.