Learning Conversations

Link: http://moodle.ulcc.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=794

Philip Butler, Senior Curriculum Adviser for the JISC Regional Support Centre for London has produced a fascinating presentation about implementing VLEs. This was for a recent online conference about VLEs in post-16 education.

The presentations are in Microsoft Producer format, which works really well, but means you'll only be able to view them if you're using Internet Explorer.

The slide that grabbed me and my colleagues was half-way through Part 3.

This paints a perfect picture of what is required when you implement any new system - whether its technology-based or not - and what to expect if you don't do it properly.

Thanks Philip.

Link: https://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/edu/features.html

I'm sure this is getting a lot of airplay in the EdTech world. But with Google now offering a free solution for any educational organisation (including with customised logos), why should schools, local authorities etc buy into a VLE? Pretty much everything I can do in a VLE (except for multi-choice assessment tools) is now possible with a Google account.

So, technically I now don't need to buy into a VLE. But the decision needs to be based on wider issues than that. The main one being trust... can I trust my service provider to maintain the level of service I need, with the level of privacy and security I require?

I'm not sure how Google will do in this market. They're obviously looking for more users on which they can base their highly successful targetted advertising, but how they do that whilst still maintaining the trust of school administrators and teachers remains to be seen.

Link: http://it.coe.uga.edu/itforum/paper92/paper92.html

There is a lot in Stephen's recent paper that I don't yet understand. At some point it will be interesting to explore the links he provides to delve into the various philosophies and theories that can be used to understand learning. But, for the moment, I'm going to focus on some of the implications that arise from his reasoning and try to work out how his theories fit into the realities that we work within.

There has been a lot of thinking recently about "learning networks". I have followed Stephen's thinking on it over the past couple of years, along with the work done by George Siemens. This fed into my paper this year on Social Networks & Teacher Professional Development where I tried to analyse, based on theories of developing social capital, how social networking tools can support teacher CPD.

Using network ideas to support learning seems to be an ideal way forward; it fits my understanding of how learning actually happens, and fits what I see happening in the real world around informal learning - people learning through the connections they make with resources and other people.

Networks are about people

What I find hard to do is to square the current state of "formal" learning with network ideas. By formal, I mean where there is a curriculum or an agenda set by a person other than the learner. For example at school, in college, or in the workplace.

Networks consist of individual nodes, each of which can make connections with other nodes. In a computer network the connections are made by virtue of software seeking out other nodes, or through hardware that has been used to join the node to the network. When we talk about networks of people we need to remember that every individual has a choice as to whether they connect and who they connect to. When the connections are made information can flow; conversations can happen. But there must be a level of motivation to make each connection - the individual will need to have some sort of knowledge of "what's in it for them". The level of intrinsic motivation (and confidence), required to contribute to a network, is vast. How is that change in culture going to going to happen?

When an organisation is setting the learning goals for a group of individuals (or nodes in the network), how do they persuade those individuals to make the appropriate connections? How do they encourage them to begin to allow the flow of information to happen? I suppose it's the role of the teacher/mentor/facilitator to devise appropriate activities that will engage and support connection making. Terry Anderson and Donna Cameron's work on developing "collaborative learning activities using social software tools" is very useful in this scenario. It's similar, in a way, to the face-to-face facilitator who is trying to encourage a group of people to collaborate/network in a training room. The difference being at least you've got people motivated enough to come to the training room in the first place!

The mentor/facilitator role is going to be critical in this new world; playing, as Stephen describes, the role of "aggregator, assimilator, analyst and advisor". In the workplace this is perhaps the role of the manager (but in the knowledge that that role may be usurped at any time by any other person on the network)? The question then is how do organisations standardise on policies, procedures and practice that are essential for the organisation to run effectively? And how do those standards get "pushed out" to the people who will apply them - which is the focus for a lot of workplace learning at the moment?

Research & Evaluation

Stephen's paper ends with a description of how we might research the effectiveness of learning in a networked environment. The current causal models of evaluation - where researchers try to establish links between variables - are just not possible when dealing with chaotic, non-linear systems. Instead we need to bring in the research methods used by fields such as meteorology - modelling, simulation, pattern recognition etc.

But, at least with meteorology and other non-linear sciences, there is a behaviour or output that can be measured, such as the height of a wave, or the strength of a storm. What is the equivalent when we talk about human behaviour? Perhaps we need to be using "intelligence" techniques that analyse thousands of conversations, looking for patterns. So, rather than saying "we need to measure x", instead, as Stephen describes, we need to look at everything, conversations, links, activity etc and see what patterns emerge.

Will these patterns emerge only in large networks, eg. the network of bloggers? In which case, how do you "measure" the effectiveness of a particular intervention in a small organisation? Or with an individual? And if networks are inherently self-selecting, are we actually measuring how effective we have been at marketing the network?

Lots of questions, no answers yet - but I'm starting to see where my dissertation might be heading...

Link: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/rome/index.shtml

Thanks to Leon Cych for this.

Personally, I'm not a fan of most of the stuff that I see out there purporting to be elearning. I've got a very short attention span, and most of it just does not engage me, and usually puts too many barriers in the way before I even get started.

But this, from the BBC, has grabbed me totally. No learning objectives. Not even any indication it's about Rome (except for the URL). But, now I'm getting the idea of what it's about, and I just want more!

It's a narrative. It's an adventure game. It's got suspense. But it's also got the "normal" learning things, such as questions and information sources. But in this case the questions have a purpose - I can't go further in the narrative without finding out the answers. The information sources aren't necessarily inside the narrative (eg. they seem to have set up a TypePad blog specifically to support it), and they're not just the standard text/graphics resource. The radio in particular was a stroke of genius - how better to set a time/location context than a radio that you could tune yourself?

Got to stop writing now, and get back to the game, sorry, learning.

[Edit] Fascinating this. I've just shown the BBC Rome game to my wife, and she couldn't see the point... if she wants information about Rome she'd just look it up on Google, why does she need to "faff around" with a game? Hmmm... does this sort of thing depend on either a) innate curiousity and fascination with new things or b) a teacher figure who is saying you need to learn such and such, and here's a fun way to do it?

I was talking to someone earlier today about VLE's, social networks, blogging etc and we talked about a feature of their organisation's in-house VLE that is almost unheard of anywhere else. The VLE in question automatically shows who has read which messages; so that I could post a message in a forum, for example, and see who has read it.

Which leads to the question, just because we can, does it mean we should? I mean, just because we can now track who's opened which pages in a particular learning resource, and who's read which messages what does that actually tell you? That they've opened a particular piece of data in a database - not that they've done anything with it.

The reason given for this functionality is that it's a data protection issue - the writer must know who has read their messages. But it could be argued that this is invading the reader's privacy (I nearly always ignore a request for read receipts on emails). And anyway, isn't it a bit like bolting the stable door after the horse has gone? It's too late - your post is no longer private if the wrong person has read it.

I have two assumptions when I put anything in writing, particularly online:

1. I can't guarantee that once it's been sent, posted, mailed etc that only the person for whom it was intended might read it.
2. I can only guarantee that someone has read what I've written by the response they give me.

So, what are the implications of those assumptions?

1. Be very careful what you write online
2. Respond, respond, respond

Link: http://confusedofcalcutta.com/2006/08/31/musing-about-mail/

Does email increase productivity in teams or does it actually decrease productivity? JP Rangaswami, an investment banker muses on this... well worth reading for anyone working in or managing project teams.

Link: http://elgg.cpdconnections.net/berthelemy/weblog/140.html

I know it's odd to link to your own blog posts, but I'm starting a series of blog posts on CPD Connections which are intended to stimulate the site a bit. The series will focus on people who are using blogs & blogging to support their own CPD (Continuing Professional Development).

As this is likely to be the subject of my dissertation, I am hoping to develop the series by including interviews, questionnaire results & surveys which will form the basis of my research into social networking and CPD.

At some point, when I upgrade the Elgg software, I'll be able to post things here and have them duplicated into CPD Connections, but for the moment they are two separate systems.

I was really pleased I managed to get to Edinburgh for yesterday's Curverider Conference. As others mentioned during the day, it was like a meeting of people who've known each other for a while. Even though I had never met any of them before, there were so many people there who's blogs I read regularly, I felt I knew them already.

Here's a quick run down of the day - with some of my key learning points highlighted. I had to leave before Ben Werdmuller's keynote at the end, so I'm looking forward to picking that up when it goes live on Google video.

We started with a presentation from Terry Anderson on Institutional Adoption Issues with Social Software. I've been following Terry's work for a while; his open-source book on "The Theory & Practice of Online Learning" has been a major influence.

Athabasca University has a totally different model to most if not all educational organisations, in that they operate continuous enrolment - you can join a course at any time. This has great advantages (in that you learn when you need to learn, not when the organisation says you can learn), but great disadvantages, particularly around building groups of collaborative learners. Terry sees social software (and specifically Elgg) playing a part in solving this problem. Even so, there are always barriers to adoption in the mainstream part of the organisation. He led us through some of the models & theories around innovation - which need a lot more thinking about than I've done so far.

One thing that Terry said, and formed the basis for quite a bit of informal discussion later, was about the demise of the VLE/LMS - at a point when a lot of companies & schools are only just starting to work out what a VLE is good for. I think he's right, but I also think that moving straight to a social networking environment for supporting learning might be a step too far for many organisations - given the complete paradigm shift and reassignment of control that it entails. [And anyway, I've got too much tied up in Moodle to give up with it that easily. :-) ]

Learning Points:

For social software to work well you need to have a critical mass of contributors.

Papers to read:
Learning, Technology and Educational Transformation

Examining the Ed. Tech. Metamorphosis:
Emerging Butterfly or Deleterious Root Worm?
http://education.ed.pacificu.edu/bcis/workshop/adoption.html

Adoption of learning technologies in schools and universities
http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~lsherry/pubs/newadopt.htm

Terry's presentation will be available from: http://www.athabascau.ca/html/staff/academic/terrya.html

Misja Hoebe presented his experiences at CHN University in the Netherlands. CHN is a global university, with a common curriculum, with many students travelling between campuses for different parts of their programmes. They are re-emphasising their philosophy which puts Problem Based Learning as the main means of developing learners. With this approach, the student is in the centre of everything, and any system that is used to support learning needs to take this into account. It sounded like Misja is on a quest to find a small toolkit of preferred applications - one of which is most probably going to be Elgg, which is based totally around the individual.

Learning Points

Elgg can integrate with LDAP - which is critical if you need to get a lot of people, within an organisation, into the system very quickly, which is necessary to gain the critical mass required to sustain the
"community". Not so helpful in our CPD Connections context, which isn't tied to any particular organisation.

www.cpdconnections.net

Stan Stanier from Brighton University was next up. Brighton will be the largest implementation of Elgg, with over 30000 users. They are integrating it into StudentCentral, which is their portal for students (mainly based on Blackboard) and has the strapline "Cool, funky & georgeous", which sort of shows the attitude that the university is taking towards it. They're trying to make it as attractive and fun as possible, not necessarily functional like many organisation's VLEs.

Learning Points:

Clear branding is essential to build a sense of community. Even if people don't like the branding it needs to be there. A design that polarises people is better than one that is bland and unappealing.

The required critical mass for social networking is dependent on the culture of the group. If people don't want to post stuff online they won't. It's about people not technology. As Elliot Maisie highlighted a few years ago, success in elearning is 1/3 support, 1/3 motivation & 1/3 marketing.

Chris Sessums (from Floriday University) is another person who's blog posts teach me so much. He is involved in Teacher Training, and has a huge amount of insight into the ways in which social networking software can support teacher professional development. To be honest, I can't remember what his talk was about - I'm going to have to pick it up when it gets published. But even so I did learn a lot!

Learning Points:

As an example to use of a teacher using reflective writing to improve her practice, Barbara Ganley is probably one of the best.

http://mt.middlebury.edu/middblogs/ganley/bgblogging/

Banksy is a brilliant source of images - I'm not sure of his licensing policy though :-)

http://www.banksy.co.uk/

Most action research takes place in a vacuum, with teachers going through a cycle of: experiment, reflect, learn, experiment etc. What social networking does is allows the teacher to pick up ideas easily from other teachers who are trying similar experiments, or in similar situations. In a similar way to Stephen Downes' concept of teaching resources never being finished, instead they are improvements on the previous person's ideas, the same happens with teaching ideas.

Chris McKillop gave a presentation in which she highlighted the need for structure in reflection - giving people a scaffold, based on a story-telling idea - within which they could begin to reflect on practice. These prompts are along the lines of:

• Tell me a similar story to this one...
• What is your viewpoint on this story...
• I wonder what would happen if ...
• What have you learnt?

Next up, after an extended lunch break (thanks Ewan!), was Miles Berry. I'd spent a lot of time during the breaks with Miles and Terry Wassall and knew that we have a lot in common in the way we think about education , but I hadn't realised quite how similarly we think... You see Miles puts things in terms of journeys, landscapes & maps, which, for me, is a fantastic metaphor to use. It's a way of describing how learning happens in peoples' heads; that you build up a mental picture of how things fit together, just as you build up a picture of a new town (just as I did first thing in the morning when I wandered through and explored Edinburgh).

Learning Points:

Moodle (or similar systems) are useful to help take school to home.
Elgg (being based around the individual) is useful in taking home into school.

After Miles, we raced through a couple of presentations from Bill Fitzgerald & Kevin Jardine.

Bill was talking about building class web sites using Drupal. In a similar way to Misja he is focussing on the learners at the centre, and with the teacher as a co-learner. The beauty of doing it within Drupal instead of Elgg is that Drupal allows you to have fixed vocabularies as well as free tagging and then to extract particular groups or types of items based on the vocabulary used. I just wish that the admin side of Drupal was slightly easier to use. That's the problem with such a flexible system; unless you know exactly what you want to do with it, just playing often leaves you frustrated.

Kevin demonstrated a couple of exciting developments: OpenID and SSE feeds. OpenID means that you can set one application to authenticate users and then other applications just feed off of that single point of authentication and also get user profile information. It wasn't quite single sign-on, as you still needed to put in your OpenID username, but it's getting there. SSE feeds are similar to RSS, but they also contain information about updates to the data, and so can be used to feed search engines. Thus allowing one search engine to search multiple sites. The possibilities are endless... as demonstrated by the interest shown from the delegates at the conference.

To wrap up, thanks to Dave, Ben & Misja for organising a really good day. It was great to be able to put voices to the names & the pictures.

I've just got to sort out two things now - using what I've learnt:

• How to revitalize CPD Connections
• How to pull these ideas together into a cohorent plan for my dissertation on social networking and CPD

Link: http://www.siconversations.org/shows/detail1040.html

I've been hearing a lot about Al Gore's travelling presentation on climate change, but until now not really had a chance to listen to the man myself. Stanford Business School recently hosted him and the presentation was recorded by the Social Innovations Conversations (which often has some excellent, thought-provoking content).

Al Gore didn't disappoint. Even without the visuals for which his talk is renowned his ideas came across clearly and persuasively. His closing section on looking back at Earth from the Voyager spaceprobe in order to see things in perspective was particularly powerful - although, depending on your worldview, it could either lead you to do great things or send you into the depths of depression!

Listening to this, and reading TearFund's recent magazine brings me back to a question I keep asking myself: "How can IT, the internet, computers, learning technology, my skills & experience really help towards solving some of these big issues of climate change, TB, AIDS, etc, etc? Am I just wasting time on stuff because it's interesting & because it pays the bills, or is there a way in which that stuff can be channelled for the greater good, not just for those people who can afford the technology?"

I've been asking that since I started teaching ICT 20 years ago, and still haven't come to a definite conclusion. It's a matter of trying to link the "Why am I here?" question with the "What am I doing about it?" question....

Link: http://www.buildingbiggerpeople.com/index.php?id=48

Ali Mesher is a new blogger, beginning to experiment with the internet and how it can support her coaching business. Yet in her first post she goes to the heart of what blogging means to a lot of people:

As I sit to write some thoughts on this blog, I automatically have the thought that what I write will be no good, or boring or insignificant, or of little use to anyone. 'Whose going to read it anyway' immediately comes up as a barrier to even starting, closely followed by 'what is the purpose of the blog?' Is it to engage new clients, to inspire and motivate? to touch someones heart who might be browsing on the web?

Do you know what I'm not sure what its purpose is-I am writing into the unknown, with no attachment or expectation of what might come back, or what interest it might generate.

I do notice though that when I write I feel very content, very focused and I suppose I get into that zone that athletes might call flow. It's something I love to do, it helps me clarify my thoughts, my state, my mood, it helps me to be more aware of what I am doing, and why I am doing it. Even if I don't know the answers to my own questions the process moves me a little nearer to that point of clarity and with clarity comes the motivation to act, to move forward towards a goal, sure of it's intention and fully assured of its inspiration.

So I write this first entry on this blog unsure of my goal in having a blog-perhaps its not a marketing tool, a communication tool, perhaps its not so that I can reach you but so that I can really reach me!

You'll have to go to her site to find out more. Based on what I know of Ali she'll be worth adding to your subscription list.