Here we are again, a new term and a term module, this time it's "Understanding Learning in the Online Environment" led by the incomparable Hamish Macleod. This is my third module to date and its looking good. My only concern is that 10% of the course assessment is based upon me writing something worthwhile on the discussion board on a reasonably regular basis.

Interestingly, I have just read in Section 2 (B5) of the QAA (2004) "Code of practice for the assurance of academic quality and standards in higher education" that students should have:

"where appropriate, regular opportunities for inter-learner discussions about the programme, both to facilitate collaborative learning and to provide a basis for facilitating their participation in the quality assurance of the programme"

One of the other assessed pieces of work is the "Learning Challenge" which contributes about 20% of the overall mark. Some of the examples of a learning challenge included juggling three balls; performing a conjuring trick; origami; writing a computer program; or tying a complex knot. Given that my sense of balance and eye / hand co-ordination is shot to pieces, any notion of doing juggling or riding a unicycle was quickly dismissed as a bad idea. Having programmed in a variety of different computer languages over the past 20 years or so didn't fill me with any great sense of desire.

The combination of not being in the scouts and being a fan of "The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook" led to the appealing idea of trying to attempt to perform a range of knots that could have practical applications should I find myself inexplicably castaway upon an exotic island, a bit like the cast from "Lost".

Based upon Damien DeBarra's initial idea of using social bookmarking for the course, Hamish Macleod suggested that we could give Diigo a try. Unlike Delicious (which I use a lot), Diigo allows users to create public / private groups for people to collaboratively work in - sharing resources and research material. Diigo, also, has the ability to highlight and comment on pieces of text. So I created a list of bookmarks on Diigo to support by learning challenge with knots - the list goes by the unimaginative title of "Get Knotted".

So, I've got the guides and tutorials that I need to perform the difficult knot exercises; but I was lacking that one vital piece of apparatus - the rope! I dutifully went off to C and H Fabrics where I purchased myself about a metre's length of soft cord. This wasn't without incident either; the shop assistant gaved me such a funny look over my purchasing of this piece of cord. Heaven knows what went through her mind as she was serving me.

I now have everything I need for my 10 (more like 8 to 9) week learning challenge. I shall be using the blog to record my thoughts about the actual cognitive processes involved in tying a knot and the strategies that I have employed to try and master the exercises.

References

QAA, (2004). Code of practice for the assurance of academic quality and standards in higher education. QAA [online]. Available at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/codeOfPractice/ [Accessed 23 September 2008]

It was going to be my intention to keep a semi-regular-ish posts on my engagement with the "Effective Course Design for e-Learning" module. As you can see - this didn't happen!

The first week introduced us to some of the current theories around styles of course design (Toohey, 1999) and how some of them might have been adopted based upon personal preferences or, even, encouraged by external political pressures and agencies.

Weeks 2 to 4 explored the different approaches, that were:

• Traditional or discipline-based approach
• Performance or systems-based approach
• Cognitive approach
• Experiential or personal relevance approach
• Socially critical approach

Using a combination of different readings and a wiki to collect and collate thoughts about the readings, looking for real-world examples of these different approaches in action and suggesting additional resources to help build up a coherent bank of knowledge - I found myself quite enamoured with the socially critical approach that attempted to look at a particular issue that needed to be debated and discussed with a view to making significant changes to how that issue was currently operating.

Whilst I felt that this module would be enormously valuable to me as a learning technologist who is advising and developing staff to use the University's learning systems like Blackboard to the best of their abilities - I also felt hampered that I didn't have enough traditional teaching experience to actually get to the nitty-gritty of some of the concepts and ideas that were presented. Something that would have quite a profound effect upon my assignment.

In weeks 5 to 7, my peers were put into groups (and named after fruit) to discuss, devise and develop a miniature "learning event" around a topic or theme that was of interest to us and using one or more of the approaches that we had been looking at for the past 4 weeks. The other members of the group would then take part in the "learning event" and feedback upon it. I wanted to do something that involved the socially critical approach and was rather inspired by the work done by Turnley (2005). I wanted my participants to look at the developments within the so-called "Web 2.0" phenomena and how that would impact upon and enhance their research practices - I called this concept "Research 2.0", being a pun upon how people have used the notion of versioning to try and attempt to describe something that was different (and in some cases better!).

I used the Holyrood Park Elgg site to deliver the event and asked my participants to write a little critique - whilst they said that they enjoyed it; it was debateable as to whether any actual "learning" occured. These experiences would then form the basis of the reflective report - the feedback from that report suggested to me that I was being overly ambitious with what I wanted to achieve, especially with my lack of teaching experience - so I had probably chosen an approach that was best adopted by someone with considerably more teaching experience than myself.

Week 8 looked at assessment and how that was partly defined by well constructed aims and learning outcomes. Weeks 9 to 10 covered course evaluation and course usability; again my peers could have chosen which topic to spent 2 weeks exploring in some depth.

Finally, in weeks 11 to 12, we spent that time working on our assignments which involved writing a course outline; a course rationale that explained our thinking and some semblance of a course that was constructed within some kind of learning environment. Despite the rather good mark for this assignment; I personally felt that I didn't spend enough time to do the course any justice - illness, project meetings across the country and a much needed holiday got in the way of that.

The big thing that I learnt from this module is that online courses don't start with the technology - it begins using pen, paper, a whole lot of thinking and several cups of coffee later as to what you want to try and achieve with the course and what you expect people to get out of it, in terms of what is learnt and what you want them to experience and how you challenge their thinking in the process. 

References

Moon, J., (2002). The module and programme development handbook. London: KoganPage 

Toohey, S., (1999). Designing Courses for Higher Education. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Turnley, M., (2005). Contextualized design: Teaching critical approaches to web authoring through redesign projects. Computers and Composition. 22(2), pp. 131-148.

I liked this paper's no-nonsense approach (and it was written in a style I could access easily). Several good bits of content:-

From the paper:-

 The essence of the challenge for all educators in the 21st century is to get the learners to:-

• read more widely
• see more clearly
• think more clearly
• (why am I thinking of the song "Day By Day"?)
• challenge authority on every occasion
• more importantly get learners to challenge themselves

 The aim is to promote the free-flow of information and ideas in the interest of all and to promote a thriving culture, economy and democracy.

 Information Literacy is the ability to deal with complexities of the current information environment - it must

• subsume all the skill-based literacies but not be restricted by them
• not be restricted to any one technology / technology group
• centre around understanding, meaning and context

 So much e-learning remains as e-teaching (the provision of lecture material online) - is this due to poor information literacies amonst the tutors?

 The "information literate" are those who know when they need information and are able to identify, locate, evaluate, organise and effectively use the information to address and resolve problems

 The Australian Information Literacy Standards

An information literate individual has learned how to learn and is able to:-

1. recognise a need for information
2. determine the extent of the information needed
3. access the needed information efficiently
4. evaluate the information and its sources
5. incorporate selected information into their knowledge base
6. use information effectively to accomplish a purpose
7. understand the economic, legal, social and cultural issues around the use of information
8. access and use information ethically and legally
9. classify / store / maipulate the information generated
10. recognise information literacy as a pre-requisite for lifelong learning

I sorry but I found this paper rather dull although it did contain some little gems of information I could use.

Firstly, Barrett attests that most graduates did not have a clear sense of their research aims at the start of the process - they fumbled about and were guided by colleagues, tutors and supervisors. This is so good to hear as I am usually in the same boat. The important thing here is that this is probably when most of the searching of libraries and whatnot occurs - so that searching can at bet be unfocussed and at worst be blind fishing. Without good IL skills the period of fuzziness is probably an awful lot longer than it needs to be.

The second little gem was that most students lack personal collections and substantial subject expertise. Again, I thought I was alone but so many people I have spoken to lack a personal collection or just have haphazard piles of documents in cupboards or piled on desks. From this knowledge I feel I can make best use of the web-based personal catalogues offered by del.icio.us, Connotea, Furl It, Zimbio and the like. All the tools are there - we just don't use them. I shall catalogue all my piles of paper.

Hellfire!

What a paper to start us off on! It was like pulling teeth but I got there in the end I think. A good (content) opener for the course as it provided so much food for thought.

Intertextuality has to exist otherwise we would have to write everything de novo each time - scientific advances would be limited to the lifespan of any one scientist.

Newspapers of ten translate the "official" laguage of politicians and the like into the vocabulary of the the day-to-day spoken word (or rather the newspaper's interpretation of the spoken word). Why do they have to do this? Is it that "official" language is not digestable by the masses or are we losing the ability to understand "proper" vocabulary? I fear I do not know the answer to this!

From the paper:-

 Many non-commodity institutions are being drawn more and more into the commodity model and the matrix of consumerism - they are under pressure to "package" their "commodities" and "sell" them to "consumers".

 Presuppositions (based on prior texts of the text-producers or by other texts) can be manipulative as well as sincere - they are a good way of manipulating people as they are very difficult to challenge.

 A genre is not only a particular text type but a particular process of producing, distributing and consuming that text

 A discourse is a particular way of constructing a subject matter. E.g. Medicine is an area of knowledge constructed from a technological and scientific perspective unlike that of "alternative medicine"

Although this paper was a good read I do feel that it took an awfully long time to say not a lot.

Reading the paper did improve my understanding of sequential and cultural contexts in speech utterances and the importance of considering these when analysing dialogues.

Understanding the relationships between conversation participants helps understand the conversation through analysing the dialogue - are the participants on an equal footing or does one have some sort of superiority over another? This would change the giving and receiving of an utterance.

From the paper:-

 There is no point looking at a single utterance without considering their place in the local sequence of utterances and there is no point just looking at their sequential place if the contextual details are available. Contextual knowledge is a luxury though

 The analyst must know the cultural as well as the sequential rules for the use of certain utterances to correctly analyse the dialogue

I enjoyed this paper a lot more than I thought I would - although it got a bit techie in some areas I think I got a lot ot of it - mainly the highlighting that any discourse is a product of its participants. Those participants bring to that discourse their own expectations and histories, what had led them to have tose expectations, and external influences such as institutional / social policies and discourses.

Reading this paper has made me quite excited about doing some actual discourse analysis. I know I've got a lot more reading to do first but I think I'm starting to understand the complexity of the subject and intend to have a fisrt bash at things quite soon - I think I'll record one of my sessions at work next week and see what I can do about analysing it.

Good things I got from the paper - the actual process

Analysis of the teacher-pupil discourse

• Looked at how the teacher and all of the pupils interacted
• Was there any encouragement / discouragement? What forms did these take?
• How was discourse encouraged / discouraged? Did these change from pupil to pupil / over the time of the study?
• How much did each pupil talk and did this change over the course of the study?
• Was the students' talk "useful"? Did it use the vocabulary of the subject or help others in the class forward their understanding of the subject?

Analysing the teacher's intentions within the discourse

• Why did the teacher behave the way she did in the classroom?
• Where some pupils encouraged / discouraged more than others? If so then why?
• What were the teacher's expectations of the discourse and were these satisfied? Waht are the sources / aspects which have defined the teacher's expectations?
• How controlling was the teacher in the classroom? Did this have an effect on the discourse?
• What assuptions were made by the teacher in the classroom and did these have an effect on the overall discourse?
• Are there any sorts of pressures acting on the teacher which could have / did have an effect on her in the classroom/ If so, how did they manifest themselves?

Alignment of teacher's intentions with policy / institutional discourse

• Did the teacher's actions support the policies of the institution / society or not?
• How did policies and institutional discourses manifest themselves in the classroom and did they affect the classroom discourse in a beneficial / detrimental way?
• Did the teacher manage to achieve or advance the curriculum requirements or not? How? Why?

So much food for thought!

I ended up quite disappointed with this paper - it started out quite well and then just sort of fizzled out and I'm not sure that the so-called paradoxes were paradoxical enough to write a peper on them. I feel that they are more like "considerations" than bases.

The best part of this paper for me was the discussion about the over-romanticising of the idea that the provision of material will overcome the digital divide in some sort of magic way - it will, prpobably, actually increase the divide. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink! Also, so much of the world don't have the basic access so providing them with more things they can't access with help not one jot!

I did like the idea of not just throwing away the old traditional literacies though - use them as building blocks and as an access to the digital / information literacies required in a digital future.

From the paper:-

 Does the possession of multimedia literacy or the lack of it create a new divide between those who have it and those who don't? Will it make those who do not have the literacies into passive consumers of pre-packaged information?

 What is the relationship between traditional literacies and the new multimedia literacies? This question needs to be addressed if those with weaker IL skills are not to be left behind / out

 Competence in traditional literacies are often the gateway into new literacies.

 "We strive towards post-industrial forms of knowledge acquisition" - I hate this comment! It makes us sound as if we have been languishing in some sort of knowledge-poor Dark Age and the industrial age has been over for about 50 years or so - comments like this are way too late!

For my second module, I've chosen to undertake "Effective Course Design in e-Learning". As a full-time learning technologist, an apsect of my job is to ensure that our staff are using the VLE (Blackboard in our case) as appropriately, effectively and efficiently as possible. We are not talking about using a VLE to replace traditonal teaching and learning, we are talking about enhancing and supplementing the course programme - getting value for money and value for learning.

Having read Toohey's chapter on how course design is influenced by our own ideological beliefs and behaviours as well external "influences" from political, educational and economic agencies - this is going to be a most fascinating course.

References

Smith, M.K., (1996, 2000). Curriculum Theory and Practice. The Encyclopedia of Informal Education [online]. Available at: http://www.infed.org/biblio/b-curric.htm [Accessed 08 January 2008] 

Toohey, S., (1999). Designing Courses for Higher Education. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Wow, kudos to Jen Ross for getting my EduSpaces blog entries into the Holyrood Park / Elgg site so quickly and relatively painlessly. Perhaps I should start a "Give Jen a Pay Rise" community group on here?

Update

Jen informs me that she can't take all the credit for the smooth transition from EduSpaces. A lot of the behind-the-scenes work has been done by Stephen Vickers and others. A very big thank you to all involved.