Note #1: The following story was cut from my 2009 book (as were dozens of other stories), "The World is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education." Last month I wrote an article for a journal from New Zealand based on my talk there in April. It was cut once again. So I thought I would finally publish it in my blog given that former President Bill Clinton spoke at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia last night. I have seen Bill Clinton speak live twice...once in 2008 here in Bloomington, Indiana when he was stumping for his wife Hillary Clinton and once in 2001 as a keynote speaker at an online learning conference in Los Angeles (see below for that story). Smile.
Note #2: This is the first of a two -part story that originates from a recent talk in Hamilton, New Zealand. I will post Part 2 later today (or so I hope). Hang on...
From Men on Stilts
to Bill Clinton
When I was a new faculty member at West Virginia University in the late 1980s and early 1990s, one of my graduate students, Padma Medury,
and I conducted a national survey of collaboration and groupware tools. We
found five different levels of tools from simple email exchanges to what we
labeled as cooperative hypermedia (Bonk, Medury, & Reynolds, 1994). Little
did Padma and I realize at the time the extent to which Web-based collaborative
tools would help shape and elevate various newly emerging fields, including
online learning, computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL), and computer-supported
collaborative work (CSCW).
In pilot testing one of the more powerful collaborative tools
at the time, Aspects, we were excited to see that people in different cities
could work on the same document at the same time. And Aspects did not just foster
for text collaboration; it also allowed for the online sharing of pictures and
other visual illustrations in multimedia documents. It was one of dozens of
such tools.
When I arrived at Indiana University in the late summer of 1992,
there was a cadre of doctoral students interested in research on such collaborative
tools. We compared asynchronous and synchronous discussions (e.g., Bonk, Hansen, Grabner, Lazar, &
Mirabelli, 1998). We coordinated case collaborations among students in
Finland, Peru, the UK, Korea, and various universities in the U.S. (Kim &
Bonk, 2002). We observed explorers in the Arctic interacting with kids in
schools around the world (Bonk & Sugar, 1998). If there was a collaborative
project or idea someone came up with, we researched it. Much of these efforts found
their way into a book called Electronic Collaborators: Learner-Centered
Technology for Literacy, Apprenticeship, and Discourse (Bonk & King,
1998).
Shortly after the Electronic Collaborators book was
published, online learning survey data began pouring in from two of my follow-up
national research projects. In September of 2000, I presented some of the
results at the Online Learning 2000 Conference held in Denver (Bonk 2002a,
2002b). I soon found myself in a convention that was anything but ordinary. I
should mention that it was a full year before 9/11 and in the heyday of the
dot-com bubble. Still there were warning signs of a pending crash which no one
wanted to talk about, let alone believe.
What were the signs? Well for one, many vendors were
talking about potential products, not actual ones. They were quick to pass out
the t-shirts, coffee mugs, and tote bags, but had minimal product information to
share. I remember walking through the massive exhibit hall at the start of the
conference with Bob Cole, Vice President of Corporate Sales from JonesKnowledge
(which was connected to Jones International University; among the first fully
online universities in the world). Bob looked at me and then spoke honestly
about the vendors, “Curt, it is just a lot of trinkets, toys, and trash that they
are handing out. My wife tells me to quit bringing the stuff home.”
And so it was. I watched vendors in booth after booth
trying to bring people in to see what they had. There were magicians doing card
tricks, flame eaters, jugglers, men on stilts, and, of course, a cadre of pretty
women in the booths. Not content with the potential business such trickery
would draw, there were laptop giveaways every hour or so at one or more of the
booths. I vividly remember a guy on stilts coming into the men’s bathroom. I
wondered how in the world he would complete his mission.
As an education professor and former accountant, I was not used to all this
hype or the amount of money being tossed around so freely. What I soon realized
is that the phrase of the day was “burn rate,” and they were all attempting to “outburn”
the competition. It was burn, baby burn! That was the time when companies were
flush with money or venture capital from someone else. Employers also created
their own jobs and job titles. Many of these companies were showcasing quite
exciting ideas, but unfortunately were short on viable products. Something had
to cover up that fact. It was a giant shell game. In addition to magicians and
attractive booth attendants, there was expensive signage and colorful handouts,
none of which fostered the learning of the people of this planet.
The names of the companies at the time added to the
charade. If you did not have one of the following words in your company name:
“intelligent,” “mind,” “brain,” “collaborative,” “knowledge,” “learning,” or
“smart,” and, better still, placed the letter “e” somewhere near the front or
back of one of the above words (e.g., “Smart-E,” “e-Brain,” “e-Telligent,”
“e-Know,” and so on), you were not cool and would likely not survive. But if
you could combine two or more of these words or symbols together as in “SmartKnowledge”
or “LearningSmart” or “E-MindCollaboration” or “e-LearningBrain,” your product
was deemed superior to everyone else despite not yet having a product to sell.
I wanted to shout “E-nough”! And so I did. After the Online
Learning 2000 conference in Denver, I created a PowerPoint presentation to be
embedded in my upcoming keynotes, including the E-learning Summit in Hamilton
in April 2002. I titled it, “There’s no learning in e-learning,” while mocking
the situation with the lyrics and a sound clip from Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody
song playing in the background as each slide automatically played; “Easy come easy go, will you let me go?
Bismillah! No, we will not let you go. (Let him go!) Bismillah! We will not let
you go. (Let me go!) Will not let you go. (Let me go!) Will not let you go let
me go.” The examples in PowerPoint went on from there, but, suffice to
say, what I was attempting to convey is that one could not get out of the
booths once you entered. You were stuck there for at least 15 or 30 minutes and
they had nothing to you could actually buy. And I had proof with dozens of
pictures I had taken from wondering through e-learning conference exhibits at the
time (see below for pics from Online Learning two years later in 2002 in Los Angeles).
It was clear from a few hours walking the hallways of such
conferences that there was no learning in e-learning. In fact, it was highly
doubtful that many of the people placed in the booths even understood what the
words “learning” or “collaboration” meant. And they definitely had no clue as
to the true learning impact of the tools that they had for sale, or, at least,
hoped to sell one day. There was no discussion of the range or types of
collaborative interaction that was now possible as in the five-level online
technology collaboration scheme that my colleagues and I had developed about a
decade earlier. Still, the conference was bulging with attendees, and only the
people walking around on stilts could really get an accurate head count.
About a year later, that same conference was held at the
Los Angeles Convention Center. As a sign of the venture funds backing up
companies in this space, Bill Clinton (who, at the time, he was charging about $120,000
per speech) was the keynote. Unfortunately, because the 9/11 disaster had
occurred some three weeks prior, the conference had nearly as many vendors as
attendees. This was the first event in the LA Convention Center after the
tragedy in New York. Clinton spoke at 6:00 p.m. on October 1, 2001.
I arrived late and was carrying two tote bags, two laptop computers, an LCD
projector, and other props from a talk that I had given earlier that afternoon.
I expected to be in an overflow room, but I got right into the main room for
Clinton’s talk without anyone inspecting my belongings. It was just three short
weeks after 9/11, the former president of the United States was speaking, and
no one opened my bags to check what I had.
Almost everyone attending Online Learning 2001 was in the
room, yet many seats remained open. Unfortunately, for the conference organizers,
the annual Online Learning conference had drastically shrunk in size from the
year before in Denver. It was downsizing in a major way. Suffice to say, I no
longer heard people bragging about their burn rates. The causes for this
shrinkage included the 9/11 crisis, worries about travel, slashed travel
budgets, and the implosion of most dot-com companies; especially those lacking viable
products. Along with all this turmoil, it seemed to be the end of an era where
magicians and men on stilts could distract people from a lack of quality e-learning
products. I sure miss those men on stilts and ladies in the booths attempting
to define the words “learning” and “collaboration” for me, let alone
“E-MindCollaboration” or “e-LearningBrain.”
Despite such flaws, the e-learning boom did accomplish
much. It raised the consciousness of the planet about collaborative technology
and the flexibility of learning online. Now millions of people were aware of
the importance of online collaboration and knowledge-sharing. It was a new era
for education, training, and society at large. Collaborative tools changed the
way in which we worked, learned, and socialized. Such was the state of
e-learning back when I visited New Zealand the first time back in 2002 (see next blog post...later today). I was
caught off guard, however, when asked about it on national television and
radio. While jugglers, flame-eaters, and magicians are no longer needed to draw
attention to this field, it would likely have made for interesting press
releases and news stories had I remembered to tell the above anecdote.
References:
Bonk, C. J. (July
2009). The world is open: How Web
technology is revolutionizing education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, a
Wiley imprint. (see book homepage for freebies: http://worldisopen.com/)
Bonk, C. J., Hansen, E. J., Grabner, M. M., Lazar, S., & Mirabelli, C.
(1998). Time
to "Connect": Synchronous and asynchronous case-based dialogue among
preservice teachers. In C. J. Bonk, & K. S. King (Eds.), Electronic collaborators: Learner-centered
technologies for literacy, apprenticeship, and discourse (pp. 289-314). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Bonk, C. J., &
Khoo, E. (2014). Adding some TEC-VARIETY:
100+ activities for motivating and retaining learners online.
OpenWorldBooks.com and Amazon CreateSpace. Retrieved (FREE) from http://tec-variety.com/
Bonk, C. J., & King, K. S. (Eds.). (1998). Electronic
collaborators: Learner-centered technologies for literacy, apprenticeship, and
discourse. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Bonk, C. J., & Sugar, W. A. (1998). Student role play in the World Forum: Analyses of an
Arctic learning apprenticeship. Interactive
Learning Environments, 6(1-2),
1-29.
Labels: 911, Bill Clinton, collaborative technology, CSCL, CSCW, dot-com era, online learning, Queen |
