According to the Educause publication, 7 things you should know about personal learning environments, PLEs:

• comprise the tools, communities, and services (not necessarily restricted to the online) that constitute the individual platforms learners use to direct their own learning and pursue educational goals
• and thus illustrate how individuals approach the task of learning
• because of what has been said above, PLSs are learner-centric
• as they put the learner in charge of their own learning processes
• and also promote authentic learning by incorporating expert feedback into learning activities and resource
• PLEs allow students to draw connections from a growing matrix of resources that they select and organise and thus become an extension of the historical model of individual research
• this way they require students to engage in ongoing decision making to maintain, organise and grow their learning environments (this is the stage I am at and which is illustrated by my iGoogle pages)
• but, what is more important, PLEs constitute an environment where ideas are generated, problems queried, and content created and where feedback becomes the combined output of peers, colleagues, and friends as well as experts and critics
• what I have learnt about PLEs and what I consider to be a task for me now is that my PLE should integrate the resources that include the work and voice of others as readily as a my own critical reflection and scholarly work

I hope the image below reflects what my ePLE looks like now and what changes I am planning to introduce to address the fact that I should move from just listening in and reading to actively contributing to the communities, sharing and collaborating. That would be in vein of learning by doing and teaching others in order to maximise your own learning.

You can see a PDF version here. 

A visual evaluation of my wiki migration experiment, its benefits and drawbacks plus a host of questions:

A link to a live map can be found here. There are notes explaining the features of the map (an icon next to the central bubble of the mindmap).

How I acquired a virtual life in Second Life.

Click on the image below to read on about

• my personal reflections and impressions 
• more academic implications in the areas of selfhood, co-presence and implications for education

This is what Clara wrote in her mid-course feedback:

* Reflection - Does the weblog demonstrate sustained reflection on the course

content and its application for the participant’s professional practice?

You are impressively demonstrating sustained reflection. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed seeing how you relate the course materials and environments to your own learning experiences, practice and areas of interest.

* Regularity -  Are entries into the weblog frequent and substantial enough to

demonstrate such sustained reflection? Are they spread throughout the duration of the course?

Your postings are regular and substantial demonstrating the sustained reflection required for the weblog.

* Knowledge and understanding - Does the weblog demonstrate a good understanding of the technologies and ideas introduced?  Does it show a critical awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of a range of technologies and pedagogical approaches?

You are meeting this criterion very well.  I’m left in no doubt as to the intelligent, thoughtful engagement with the concepts and technologies and am impressed with the way you draw readings together to create your own frame for understanding.  I have enjoyed your exploration of ideas beyond the strict focus on the course materials – since this course is about exploring digital environments in relation to learning, I see these as ‘variations on a theme’ rather than being off-track.  :)  I would encourage you to delve into the course readings a little more, but having seeing where you are going with this in the ‘Prenksyan polemics’ part of your wiki, I have no doubt you are on track for this.

* Communication style and multimodality -  Is the style of the weblog vivid and personal? Are the ideas discussed well-structured and well-argued? Does it make creative use of the weblog form via inclusion of image, media and linkage?

The weblog (and now wiki!) are clearly expressing a vivid and engaging personal style.  The play with creativity and visuality makes for a thought-provoking as well as aesthetically pleasing ‘read’.  I can only continue to encourage you in this vein and look forward to seeing what you will do next!  :)

The first reading or rather skimming of Dreyfus' text raised quite a lot of interest in me. I quite liked his scepticism and I thought 'Great, finally there is one person who is not raving about online learning!' and got down to reread the text more carefully, wanting to hear some refreshing arguments which would stir me to think more carefully of why I personally like online learning.

However, each time I reread the text, my head got hotter and I produced this series of responses (click on the image):

A series of shorter or longer postings dealing with digital natives fallacy can be found in the Prenskyan Polemics section of my IDEL11 wiki.

The postings are organised in the following way:

1. Digitial natives and immigrants - my take on terminology introduced by Marc Prensky 

2. Is there really a divide? - related issues and questions

• What seems to be a pervasive attitude among young people toward innovative technology?
• Does young people's increased use of technology equal their full literacy in using the innovations, including educational and professional settings?
• What is their actual attitude to the use of technology in education?
• Is introducing the terminology of the digital divide and digital natives actually fair to young people?
• Are the digital immigrants really behind in the use of innovative technologies?

3. Summary

4. Clippings

... and elsewhere. I'm finding this blog platform restricting, especially in terms of embedding multimedia (or maybe I'm just too much of an immigrant to explore the possibilities?) To treat the subjects of the first few weeks of the course, namely the digital natives fallacy and the Dreyfusian concepts of distance learning, I have created a wiki (screenshot of the home page below).

Since I am slightly more familiar with this environment (I have used it before in projects with my learners and I am going to use it again hence my need to remain conversant with the environment ) the technology is more transparent for me, which allows me to delve deeper into the discussed issues. I can also experiment with multimedia more and thus give vent to my creativity. It all started with Dreyfus' text which stirred quite strong reactions in me, to an extent I decided to break down the text into different themes which I tackled in a series of postings. Due to its chronological nature, the blog was somehow imposing a linear/vertical way of presenting the thoughts whereas I was more interested in verticality,a web-like presentation that can grow unrestricted in all directions. A wiki lent itself more to this. It also gives more freedom to the reader as they can decide in what order they want to explore the topics. The wiki is also public (that was not planned as accidentally I chose the non-education version of the wiki where I cannot create guest accounts; to make access easier for tutor's feedback and later assessment I opted for the 'public' in the accessibility settings), which makes it an additionally interesting experiment in terms of online presence, identity and visibility.

When making a decision to switch to the wiki, I was aware that I was being slightly anarchic and thus might be overstepping the mark. I knew the reasons why we were asked to reflect on our learning using this particular blogging platform and the consequences it might have in terms of assessment (although I hope that creating links between the two platforms will let me bypass any potential problems). At the same time I believe that as an adult learner I am and can be more self-directed and autonomous in achieving my learning goals. 

As mentioned in my comment to the previous post, online learners’ emotions are of paramount importance to their tutors, letting them have a better insight into what might engage or inhibit the student in achieving their learning goals. I have decided to take the previous and very informal attempt of visualising my emotions a bit further and analyse them in more detail, hoping I would be able to draw some conclusions and help myself overcome the interaction problems I am now experiencing. I am also trying to assess how such data would be useful to the teacher.

Description of the method

The inspiration was brought by the research paper written by Gilmore and Warren (2007) in which they were trying to research the emotions from the perspective of online tutors using the medium of an online chat for holding seminars and the potential influence these emotions exerted on the relationship with the learners. The framework they used was a combination of ethnography and grounded theory. The former means the tutors were participating in the seminar themselves, so becoming part of the researched community. The latter assumes collection and processing the data (marking, coding, grouping into similar concepts and then categories) prior to stating the research hypothesis.

This is how they justify their choice of their methodology and describe their data collection:

An ethnographic approach requires a sense of the ‘poetry of experience’ in that researchers often need to pay attention to data which are metaphorically indirect and atmospheric rather than literal and rational (Gilmore & Warren, 2002: 589)

During the analysis of our own and each other’s logs there was a strong sense of ‘reexperiencing’ our emotions and as such the logs were not ‘sterile’ records of past interaction to be picked apart and recombined as codes, but more akin to ‘material memories’ that evoked recollections and emotional remembrances of our feelings (Gilmore & Warren, 2002: 590)

I found this approach quite appealing and decided to replicate it in my context. While participating in the first skype chat I was trying to monitor my feelings and jot down any stronger occurrences of emotionality (a visual taster presented in my previous posting). Later I analysed the chatlog, trying to log my thoughts and feelings at the time alongside the actual chat contributions. After that, I analysed my comments and picked out any mention of emotions, either encircling them (if they were named explicitly) or extracting them from ‘in-between the lines’. I tried to restrict the set of emotions if possible so that it would be easier to count the occurrences of particular feelings. At the end, I counted all the mentions of any emotion, mentions of negative emotions, positive emotions and ambiguous emotions and mentions of particular emotions trying to establish which ones were the most frequent. See the attached PDF for more detail (this document is not public at the moment - email me for details).

Results

Any kind of emotion was noted on 34 occasions. Majority of them could be described as negative. The ones that occurred most frequently were: alienation/ annoyance, self-consciousness and embarrassment (PDF).

According to Wosnitza & Volet (2005),emotions can be analysed in regard to their direction, i.e. recipient and they have identified multiple sources emotions can be orientated towards: task, technology, performance, oneself, social environment and learning context. It’s curious that all of the emotions coded in my experiment appear to be socially oriented, mostly self-directed and occasionally other-directed (and here it seems ‘other’ stands for ‘fellow students’ rather than the tutor), so it seems the social aspect of the learning experience took over. Another odd thing is that the emotions I felt towards myself, the feelings of alienation, self-consciousness and embarrassment are closely related to the social environment. One could actually argue that for instance the prerequisite for feeling alienated is the presence of a group of which one does not feel part of. Feelings of self-consciousness and embarrassment might also have a tendency to arise in a social setting as they are linked to the issue of perception – how the person perceived themselves in relation to others, how they are perceived by others and how she/he feels about others perceiving her in a given/imagined way.

My rough conclusion in regard to my emotionality is that there seems to be a high degree of pre-occupation with that last issue, considerably higher than in face-to-face contexts.

Limitations

Of course, my ‘research’ is still very informal and its conclusions are far from being meaningful due to the following reasons:

• I have minimal experience in research
• Self-report tends to be subjective and therefore not very reliable
• The annotations were made with a few days’ delay, which might further decrease the reliability of the report
• The matter was treated in a cursory manner, without a deep analysis of how to decipher, code and group the emotions arising due to the interaction (I was just playing a researcher)
• Due to the above reasons, some important data might have got lost.

Nevertheless, the whole experiment was worthwhile and did bring some insight into my emotionality. It would be interesting to repeat this with greater care about detail and reliability as well as compare with what other chat participants felt at the time.

Now the question remains a teacher can do with such data (I am now distancing myself from it and trying to put myself in the tutor’s shoes). Could the course design be tweaked to include more social get-togethers in real time, more pairwork and groupwork to facilitate establishing closer working relationships between the students so that the comfort zone for a socially inept student is slowly extended?

Gilmore and Warren (2007) while summarising  the issues related to the virtual classroom point out that online interaction is often conceptualised in dichotomy terms of being either liberating or impoverishing, either enabling highly intimate relationships or ones that are impersonal and hostile. It puzzles me to see that I am experiencing both: the Skype experience and the blog experience. So after all, even if the student runs into difficulties in one online environment, it does not have to be blown out of proportion as long as they find their niche in another environment on the course where they can flourish and fulfil their potential.

Adult learning has been traditionally perceived as conceptual, rational and cognitive. Yet, adults undertaking studies do experience a range of emotions, both positive (enjoyment, pride, satisfaction) and negative (fear, anxiety, dread, shame). And these emotions are not necessarily a sign of insanity, as Kant would have diagnosed it (in his opinion, emotion being ‘an illness of the mind’) but essential ingredients of the learning process. Affective factors seem to play a crucial role when it comes to motivation or lack of it to pursue the subject matter of the course. Of course the view of learning and teaching now is much more holistic, trying to integrate cognition and emotion into the instructional design. However, isn’t that uncanny that expression of certain emotions might still be looked down on as a potential sign of weakness, hysteria, lack of balance?

This might be even further complicated in an online learning environment which on the surface appears to be emotionally impoverished – disembodied, devoid of non-verbal cues, blurring social and spatial boundaries, in other words ‘the ultimate disorienting dilemma (Campbell-Gibson, 2000 in O’Regan, 2003), too overwhelming and alienating to make subtle emotions explicit. And indeed students experience confusion and isolation when trying to navigate through the course site and establish contact with peers and tutors.

However, some of the rules regarding feelings must be renegotiated very soon and some users decide to disclose personal or even intimate details at some point of the course, often in the initial phase. For instance, I had one e-colleague divulging to me she'd lost a teenage son at the beginning of the second week of a 20-week course and I must say I was at a loss as to how I should react to that. The reasons for such sudden sincerity were obscure at the moment as well as the way she felt about the confession. I was in a bit of a shock and started wondering why such things happen.

Some researchers claim that what is regarded as an impoverishing aspect is actually very enriching. Lack of body language and visual cues introduces a greater degree of intimacy into online zones, often loosening users’ self-protection mechanisms and pushing them to disclose private details, including the greatest intimacies. Could that be likened to the anecdotal ‘stranger on the plane’ phenomenon? It is often considered that the body in fact exists in cyberspace – already in the late 90s Argyle and Shields (in Gilmore and Warren, 2007:593) stated that the technology mediates the body, making its expressive qualities apparent in different ways. After all, the term ‘virtuality’ comes from the Latin virtus, which stands for excellence, potency and efficacy (Online Etymology Dictionary). Although the computer-related usage dates back to the 1950s, perhaps the traces of the root meaning still resonate in this modern lexical expansion.

Another facilitating factor at play, especially in regard to tightly-knit communities, might be an increased sense of community (which might build quickly on closed courses geared to a small group of like-minded professionals like in the above described case), common cause and purpose and trust that  builds up over the course of time. I would be curious to know which mechanisms are in place when people decide whether and when they can start trusting other online participants on the course and go further in disclosing personal information, beyond the point of stating the obvious 'I like reading 19-cent historical novels and listen to trip hop in my free time'.

Another interesting aspect is how online users go about their decision regarding who they are going to open up to. Based on anecdotal evidence and mostly on my own experience, I can state that even on asynchronous courses, where there is no real-time communication built in, you can create a sense of your personality through the way you express yourself. How do we pick up on the vibes from other people online, how do we come up with this expectation: ‘Hmm, I think I can easily relate to this person but not the other. She/He has got something about them. I think we’re on the same wavelength.’ Does that require an extra plug-in in our emotional intelligence to be able to read people online or is it by pure fluke that I managed to pick out friendly souls, including my current partner, in the chaos of the online? As I said this is a sheer speculation based on anecdotal evidence from my own and my friends' lives.  I am aware of the other darker side of the net where people meddle with their identity to harm others.