Also refer to this typology for representing "contemporary" Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement by David S. White and Alison Le Cornu. First Monday, Volume 16, Number 9 - 5 September 2011 http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3171/3049 This article proposes a continuum of ‘Visitors’ and ‘Residents’ as a replacement for Prensky’s much‐criticised Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. Challenging the basic premises upon which Prensky constructed his typology, Visitors and Residents fulfil a similar purpose in mapping individuals’ engagement with the Web. We argue that the metaphors of ‘place’ and ‘tool’ most appropriately represent the use of technology in contemporary society, especially given the advent of social media. The Visitors and Residents continuum accounts for people behaving in different ways when using technology, depending on their motivation and context, without categorising them according to age or background. A wider and more accurate representation of online behaviour is therefore established.

Ahh DK I think you misconstrue the half-awake postures plus bed-heads - these "deconstructed, messy and organic" effects are very carefully constructed - and indicate an educator prepared to do whatever it takes to impress - aspirational leaders of learning. The addition of pillow creases across the face is new to me but sounds like an innovative reverse engineering of botox - an exciting development - and one that will lift exemplary to another level. Check out the effort required - How to get get great bed hair - and imagine how much more energy went into getting the half-awake pose and pillow creases sorted. You were in the presence of genius - educators whose very appearance can inspire engage others in learning - "on trend but not too try hard"

Thanks Robin - I am much enjoying the ongoing SOLO conversations they have catalysed - am thinking if it is not an attribute of the early riser (who enjoys conviviality) then it must be something CoreED are putting in the tea urn

Off topic is a much undervalued conversational space - subscribe button seems to work ok - try http://artichoke.typepad.com/artichoke/atom.xml

Is not as uncommon as you might think Allanah - check out this recent report in The Waikato Independent

Thanks for your comment Allan – tho' I am not sure that the post is deserving of your praise in the way you intend. I do not hold to your claim that Hattie’s meta-analysis into what makes a difference in teaching and learning research supports teaching as a mechanical routine or programmable children – quite the reverse in fact – I believe that the meta-analyses and evidence of outcomes are a first step in protecting teachers from ideology, anecdote and "follow this one procedure" approaches. I must also reveal that as a student and a teacher I much prefer evidence based practice over anecdote and opinion- much like if I were Ellis leaving the field last night with a nose bleed I’d be delighted that evidence based practice is now well established in medicine. PhD Panacea has some lovely examples of anecdotal - trial and error treatments for bleeding from the nostrils that - although undoubtedly creative - I am guessing we would all like to avoid. Put Hogs dung up the nostrils or on the wound or Bloodwort3 leaves Lay a large Key on the nape of the neck4 Put their hands in cold water Set an egg shell over a chafing dish of coals, & bleed into it Tye a cork, or hold the thumb just between your Eyebrows Cuping [cupping] Glases to the Leggs & thighs Cut a peice of a young Ashe & aply to the Wound Cobwebs Note if you Aply Leaches the Blood will not often stop till the Sun goes down, therfore lay them not on till about 4 in the afternoon Take a lock of the Greasiest hair you can get cut out of the nape of the neck, scorch it in the fire, till it frisles, then lay it to the wound A most effectuall remedy is to set the Leggs & feet in hot water not too hot, but warm Dry a Toad & hang about the neck in a Tifany or Gause bag Stiptick water is excellent Make a poultice of a good quantity of suger & lead & aply it to the stomack, excelent to stop Bleeding at the Nose The feedback thing is well established in complex living systems that control growth and development in animals – e.g. homeostasis (nervous and endocrine systems) so it does not seem unreasonable that evidence and feedback has a role to play in something as complex as learning in living things – I can recommend a book I have been reading on learning - Knud Illeris on How We Learn – Learning and non-learning in school and beyond – Illeris has a rather cool “learning triangle” (Figure 14.1 on page 257) - where he positions traditional learning theories and those from the latest international research (38 in all) in the spaces between CONTENT and INCENTIVE and INTERACTION. The stretch between CONTENT and INCENTIVE is mediated by developmental psychology – between INCENTIVE and INTERACTION by socialisation theory – and the stretch between INTERACTION and CONTENT by activity theory None of them preclude Hattie’s meta analyses research findings and the call for evidence based critique on what makes a difference to learning outcomes.

Thanks Derek – much as you do - I enjoy the provocation and disruption that comes from writers who question educational and societal ideas presented as being “A GOOD THING”. Gazing into the eye of the whitebait thinking. I think you would like Zygmunt Bauer’s thinking around the connections between consumerism and morality in Collateral damage – Social Inequalities in a global age – it offers another way of understanding the impact of the introduction of perpetual connectability through technologies like iPADs, netbooks, smart phones etc into our lives and into our schools. Zygmunt argues that being perpetually connected has seen . The weakening and growing frailty of human bonds. Where shopping as a substitute for “concern, sympathy, compassion, well-wishing, friendship and love” is pretty scary. An instability and insecurity of people’s place in society – questions of self-identity. He argues that questions of identity lead us to think that “to do something, you first need to be somebody” this leads us to imagine that “to be capable of caring for others, you first need to acquire, protect and retain the resources such a capacity requires.” “In short, to be moral, you must buy goods; to buy goods, you need money; to acquire money, you need to sell yourself – at a good price and with a decent profit. You cannot be a shopper unless you yourself become a commodity which people are willing to buy. And what you therefore need is an attractive sellable identity. You owe it to yourself – because QED, you owe it to others.” It makes me wonder – “How do the criteria used to determine place (turangawaewae) change when we become perpetually connected in school?” For example will we see even more “you’ve earned it’, you deserve it’, ‘you owe it to yourself’ thinking as teachers and students rush gain moral identity credits through their purchase of the latest device? Sustainability of the planet – as an unintended consequence “From the beginning of the consumerist era. Enlarging the loaf of bread was promoted as the patent remedy, indeed a foolproof prophylactic, against conflicts and squabbles around the loaf’s distribution. Effective or not in suspending hostilities, that strategy had to assume infinite supplies of flour and yeast. We are now nearing the moment when the falsity of that assumption and the dangers of clinging to it are likely to be exposed. The might be the moment for moral responsibility to be refocused on its primary vocation; that of mutual assurance of survival. In such a refocusing, the decommodification of the moral impulse seems, however, to be paramount among all the necessary conditions. All of which makes me ask – How can we develop a curriculum to decommodify the moral impulse? Is decreasing connectivity – and exploring ways to re-approach the near part of the answer?

Hi Ann Marie - thanks for the comment and for the references I see a lot of learning focused self peer and group assessment in the day job - where the schools I work with use SOLO Taxonomy to provide a generic framework for determining the level of learning outcome in the face to face - It has the reliability, validity and rigour to transfer easily into online environments - and indeed has been used to assess the responses in online forum discussion etc The tricky bit is as Roberts (2006) notes - in the re-imagining of what the evidence traces of participation and interaction look like on-line. I did some thinking along these lines a while back - looking at Why World of Warcraft is Better Than School In truth World of Warcraft offers a multiplicity of communicative interaction. Within the game you can indulge in Whispers – private messages sent to one person only. Party chat- a chat between the 5 members of your current party (a group of people working for a common goal) Raid chat – a larger group chat (up to 40 people). Guild chat – chat between a group of people allied with each other can be as small as 10 up to several hundred. General chat everyone who is playing in the same area as you are. Outside the game you will see kids txting, msn, on the phone, shouting, gesturing, laughing, scrawling notes …. and, and, and ….. Is hard for educators who are unfamiliar with the nuance of online interaction and participation to imagine possibilities. In terms of "The concern I have is how can synchronous and asynchronous e-learning settings ensure that their assessment prevents plagiarism cheating, and verifies students’ identities" bit - I reckon this will not change until we concede the need for collaborative over individual outcomes for a healthy society - then the learning task will not be able to be accomplished individually - and much like in the early development of World of Warcraft - we will see students working together for a collective outcome - with a negotiated dragon kill points (DKP) allocation and/or distribution system for recognising individual participation that supported the collective. For example the occupants off the corridor initially adopted a "zero sum approach" where the total of every raiding member's DKP is equal to zero. This system works by assigning predetermined points values to every item that can potentially drop. Whenever an item drops each person in the raid obtains the points value for that item divided by the amount of people in the raid. The people who obtain items have the points value of the item they obtained subtracted from their DKP, potentially allowing members to obtain negative DKP values. A strength of this system is its transparency, in that everyone's points are clearly identifiable allowing you to estimate when you will get your next item based on the points of your peers. I noticed extraordinary ethical conversations about how to recognise individual contribution and the unforeseen consequences - leading to modifications that recognised attempts made etc etc

Thanks for the prompt to look for the bigger picture Raisinrb – I am not sure where I will find it but it definitely exists. When looking at our current affection for evidence based learning outcomes in the context of “we do better when we are all equal” arguments and the rise in depressive conditions I think of Illich and Medical Nemesis. Perhaps that is where I can start thinking … In Medical Nemesis Illich talks about clinical iatrogenesis, social iatrogenesis, and cultural iatrogenesis. Clinical iatrogenesis - direct harm to the patient caused by medical intervention. What keeps you healthy and allows for longevity are the physical and social environments you live in – not medicine. So does our focus on finding short term evidence for learning outcomes cause direct harm to the learner? Social iatrogenesis – the medicalisation of life – how much of the GNP is spent on health care and how the availability of health care creates a demand for more health care – add to this the marketing of disease and pathology - the commercial benefits of creating new conditions that needs new drugs – which in turn create new conditions. So does our focus on finding short term evidence for learning outcomes create a demand for more and more evidence – where new vulnerabilities are imagined and new instruments and measures are created. I can see this effect in many of the presentations at the Symposium on Assessment and Learner Outcomes in Welllington this week. Cultural iatrogenesis, where we lose traditional ways of dealing with sorrow, pain, fever, and increasing age related frailty etc. could also be imagined as a consequence of our desire to find more nuanced traces of learning. What were our traditional ways of living with diverse learners. How did we value each individual and let them feel valued – belong before the institution of school and the need for evidence of learning outcomes?

Thanks Ailsa, and the alternative interests me - when students write online and opportunities for feedback and feedup comments are extended "in space, resource and time" - I seldom see any explicit identified learning outcome (ILO)or success criteria available to identify the learning purpose of the e-activity. It seems like in shifting to e-pedagogies we not only fail to look for different/new traces of evidence for learning that might be available to enhance understanding - we also neglect to note the evidence we would use in a non-digital space.

Thanks for this Bill - I liked Noel Pearson's post - his analysis of what Hattie's research might offer and the way he captures Hattie's inimitable style. THE bucket of water came all the way across the Tasman from the frigid waters of Aotearoa and it was cold. Not long into the meeting, the man pouring the thing over our heads was bracingly candid. "I'm not interested in stories about how well your education plans are going. I want to see your data that shows how effectively you have advanced the children's learning. The first thing you should show at a meeting like this is the evidence that shows the effect of what you're doing. If your effect size is less than 0.4 then you should pack up because you're not having a worthwhile impact on the children's learning." John Hattie, the University of Auckland education researcher who now heads the Melbourne Education Research Institute, visited Cairns this week. It turned out to be a most invigorating discussion.

Thanks for the comment Doug – I also love The Cryptoforestry blog and have located a copy of Nelson's Make Prayers to the Raven so I can learn more about the Koyukon Culture. I was especially taken by Stephen's response to the post "When you live in Canada, you learn to appreciate forests - not the tame forests where the animals are as pets, but the wild forest, the forest that can kill you, the forest that springs up unwanted and unappreciated and becomes your entire country, your entire culture. Learning should be like that," Learning should be like that Your take on the post is valuable - that The educationist should become an expert in stupidity and be able to prescribe specific procedures for avoiding it. It is not semantics – it is a simple idea - "Practising Pedagogical Ignorance" -and simple ideas are powerful - I think it a a grand position and intend to explore and adopt – I have played with “Ignorance Logging” (after Marlys Witte (Q-cubed Programs: What Is Ignorance?) since I first heard Witte speak about Kerwin’s Map of Ignorance in Auckland at the International Thinking Conference in 2001. The Map of Ignorance (Kerwin, 1983-) Domains of Ignorance Known Unknowns: All the things you know you don't know Unknown Unknowns: All the things you don't know you don't know Errors: All the things you think you know but don't Unknown Knowns: All the things you don't know you know Taboos: Dangerous, polluting or forbidden knowledge Denials: All the things too painful to know, so you don't Back in 2001 Kerwin’s map of ignorance startled me – I realised I was ignorant about ignorance. Since then I kept an eye of for different types and categories of ignorance - this is a good collection from Andreas Schamanek A compilation with references of some classifications, systematics and other orders of what is not known. I need to revisit this and find new ways to play with it in the context of learning.