It's been quite a busy afternoon, trying not to get overwhelmed by the multitude of tools that are being used in the IDEL10 course.

So far I  have:

• set up a profile at the holyrood park hub
• sent out friend requests there to all members of the IDEL10 course team
• logged in on WebCT and began reading
• went through the course guide
• and have now set up the weblog, added all the tutors as friends (waiting for approval by Clara O'Shea), created a group

I am not completely clear about whether only Clara should be in that group, or whether the other tutors should be in that group as well. So, Clara, once you've approved of my friend request on this blog, and you've read this, please let me know by writing a comment? TIA. But anyway, I can't add Clara to the group before she accepted my friend request here.

And just to help my own memory, this weblog is linked to my googlemail account, I did not want to run the risk to go through a change in e-mail address in about 6 weeks time, just to find out that it might not be possible and set up a new blog again.

Okay, back to WebCT now.

All right, looks like I am set to go. A quick review:

• Started using the (ugly) discussion board in WebCT. Of all the web apps in use for this course, WebCT strikes me as the most dull, unappealing, yet is seems to be the core system in use. I'll get over it .
• Completed the course pre questionnaire on Wednesday, WebCT warned that it would take an hour, when in fact it wasn't even two minutes.
• Put up a profile in the 'who we are, where we are' wiki page in WebCT. Looks like this module comes from Atlassian's enterprise wiki Confluence (http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/tour/?gclid=CMqOr_f). (Why doesn't the 'insert link' option in this blog software work? Ah, you need to select some text first? Nope, it opens up an insert box but not a field where I can insert, at least using Google Chrome.) Thank God I am a bit familiar with that product, it has a steep learning curve and I had to tinker quite a bit to get everything to look right.
• Put up a rather spectacular  video on the Wallwisher (http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/idel10-1) page, and found out that I couldn't upload video directly to that site so made a detour and created a YouTube account and linked to that. It sure added to the YAA (Yet another account) experience.
• I had set up a Twitter account earlier but don't like it very much. In order to avoid to go there as much as possible I added RSS feeds for the hash tags #mscel and #mscidel to my Google Reader.

We're now on the second day of the first week and have been discussing 'stories from the dark side of e-learning'. The real aim of the exercise seems to me to be discussing the use of discussion boards and to create some sense of community. As such, I think the first results are good.

Looking around the internet for some guidelines on the use of online discussion boards I came across one interesting site with the title Online Pedagogy and Engagement. With the following:

Best Practices in Asynchronous Communication

• Inform learners of your expectations for how these tools will be used as part of the course.
• Create a “Tell About Yourself” Discussion Area. Post information about yourself and the course initially. Ask students to do the same. Your use of the tool models an appropriate use of it and provides students with the initial prompt to begin a discussion. This exercise will also reveal if students are having difficulty understanding how to post or reply to a message.
• Focus the discussion by carefully preparing questions in advance.
• Provide discussion board participation guidelines to students, including instructor expectations and rules of conduct.
• Monitor the discussion or assign a student monitor to keep learners focused on the topic.
• Oversee the quality and regularity of the postings. If learners appear to post late (when you have already gone on to another posting), do not participate, or post non-substantive messages, communicate with that student privately.
• Consider asking students to facilitate discussions in specific content areas where they may have particular expertise or where expertise needs to be developed. Having a student lead the discussion can lead to the student preparing in advance with relevant issues and information.
• Provide a summary of the discussion before moving on to a new thread.

Online pedagogy and engagement, http://www.gadsdenstate.edu/academics/elearning/online_pedagogy.php (accessed September 20, 2010)

It looks like the IDEL team is following most of these guidelines.

Another, similar but much shorter set of guidelines comes from a reference by one of the participants (I should mention his / her name but finding stuff back in the many threads is too much of a hassle):

• Require students to participate
• Grade student efforts
• Involve learning teams
• Structure discussions
• Require a hand-in assignment (a deliverable)
• Pose questions and scenarios that require learners to use their own experience
• Relate the discussion to course objectives

Margie A. Martin (2005), Using Interaction in Online Discussion Boards, Educause Quarterly, nr. 4,
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/EQM05410.pdf (accessed September 21, 2010)

Again, the IDEL team is following best practices.

I find the experience in WebCT's discussion boards suboptimal since you have to jump from message to message and don't have a real feel for the flow of the discussion. A blog post with threaded comments would be better to get a feel for the flow. In the six cases there are already a total of 50 posts (today, 4:46 pm Bremen time).

The most interesting posts so far are those relaying experiences with similar tools. My own experience is very limited. Haven't been teaching for more that 20 years and been on the support side ever since. If I look at how most teachers use DLEs, it is mostly as a fileserver, for uploading the slides from their lectures.

Just so I don't forget, will get back later to the comments on Clara's latest comments. No, I think we're done for week 1. Anyway, two thoughts on 'a false sense of linearity'.

1. IIRC, Google Wave has the option of 'replaying' a wave, so you might be able to see how an asynchronous online discussion truly develops in time. Alas, Google will be discontinuing Wave by the end of the year, although the source code has been released. But I don't think Blackboard will incorporate any open source code in its very proprietary product.
2. In the end, if I'd like to check out the results of an online asynchronous discussion, am I really interested in how the discussion developed over time? Or am I much more interested in the 'harvest' of the discussion, the arguments pro and contra different ways of handling a case, and whether any conclusions were reached? Actually, one could see the summary ('harvest') of such a discussion as a (collaborative) learning result.

Oh well, the old process versus product discussion.

Although the plural of anecdote is not evidence, I'd like to share some personal observations on the whole net generation discussion. One important didactical principle is that you prepare the ground for learning new things in finding connections with what you already know.

A large part of this post is based on a column I wrote in January 2009 on http://www.surfspace.nl, SURF can be seen as the Dutch counterpart of JISC. The column had the title 'Net Generation bestaat niet' (The net generation doesn't exist - http://www.surfspace.nl/nl/Columns/Pages/NetGenerationbestaatniet.aspx).

Anecdote 1

One of the things I have been trying to do at Jacobs University is to use web 2.0 technology to bring the library experience closer to where the users are, rather than having our patrons come to the library homepage and sort it out from there. To that end we developed a catalog widget that you could put on any web page you like, or put on your desktop in an app dock. When we demonstrated a first iteration of this catalog widget to some of our students, they liked it. However, when we asked them whether they would also like this widget as a Facebook app (practically all of our students are on Facebook), their faces went blank. Drilling down, it turned out that none of them knew exactly what a Facebook app is. They might be playing Farmville, but the concept of an app was foreign to them. To them, Facebook basically is the wall, where you post messages and pictures. So much for their supposed (or assumed) technological avant gardism.

Anecdote 2

Jacobs University has a spamming tradition. There are numerous lists and staff, students and faculty really don't care to how many lists they send a message, even though it might be about selling a 10 euro railroad ticket. The worst list is jacobs-talk which can generate tens of thousands of mails, sometimes bringing our mailservers down. In order to relieve our burdened mail servers, we proposed to move some of the lists to Confluence, our enterprise wiki / blog solution. With most modern mail clients having RSS readers built in, we could only see advantages. Our students didn't even know what RSS was, and couldn't be convinced to move away from spamming.

Anecdote 3

Similar to anecdote 2. Jacobs hasn't much of a learning strategy, let alone an e-learning strategy, so should be very careful when it comes to investing in a LMS. We had outdated discussion boards supporting learning and teaching. We created an alternative in Confluence were we automagically created course workspaces based on data in our student / course management system. Students hate Confluence, faculty hardly use it, when they use it, it's for uploading Powerpoint files of their lecture slides.

Anyway, these experiences concurred with what I was reading at the time. One was a huge metastudy by Rolf Schulmeister, Germany's e-learning guru. who is also quoted in the Spiegel article that is on the reading list for this week IDEL. He, Schulmeister, looked at circa 46 studies to conclude that, yes there are new media, but if you look at media use by young people it's mainly for entertainment purposes and for keeping in touch with there friends. (Rolf Schulmeister (2008), Gibt es eine "Net Generation'? (Is there a net generation?), http://www.zhw.uni-hamburg.de/pdfs/Schulmeister_Netzgeneration.pdf (accessed September 28, 2010). Schulmeister also gives the important warning that rather than focus on a minority group of students, the differences in learning styles of students are probably much more important. To me, accommodating different learning styles could be one of the strong points of e-learning, because the technology, in principle, offers flexibility.

The other thing I was reading at the time was the 2008 ECAR study of undergraduate technology use (http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/EKF/ekf0808.pdf, accesses September 28, 2010). The ECAR studies are also frequently mentioned in the special issue on net generation of the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning that I went through last week. The same picture emerges, the majority of students prefer traditional teachers / teaching, only a minority is into web 2.0 as an active user.

The more important discussion is what the implications of such findings are for the e-learning debate. Of course it is fun to dismiss Tapscott, Prensky, and Oblinger, but their stories, apparantly not based on strong evidence. or rather no evidence at all, do have an important message. And that message is that we are teaching in a centuries old fashion to a world that has changed considerably. Just to use myself as an example, oops yet another anecdote, when I had obtained my economics degree in 1982, I vowed to myself that I would never pursue another degree. And yet, here I am enrolled in the MScEL program. What I meant in 1982: please no more boring lectures, workgroups with uninterested fellow students, based on core reading alone. I like learning, but the average university setting is an impediment to learning for people like me. E-learning, and that's the message I took from Oblinger and Tapscott (I have yet to read Prensky) can make learning more engaging and fun and, like, real world like.

 (Dear Clara: You probably did not see my first post in this week, because I had set it private instead of restricted, sorry, do read that one first though, please.)

 Having read all the articles for this week, not just the core two, I am simply amazed, and also amazed at the discussion in the discussion board. Nine years ago, Prensky coins a pair of terms: digital natives vs immigrants, and we have net generation and millennials (why do the British write millenial - only one n?) as well, and gosh the educational literature is still all over the guy. It was a metaphor to make a point, a simple rhetorical trick. Now, nine years later, time and again it has been proven that there is not much to the whole idea of digital natives, the data doesn't support the claims about the skills of digital natives. So please can we close the discussion and move on to a more interesting subject?

Below a short review of the articles. Apologies for not quoting correctly, I am in a hurry.

Jones, Ramanau, Cross, Healing / Net generation or Digital Natives

When reviewing the literature they already come to the conclusion that there is much evidence against the claims, still we get another survey. "Despite the growth of this evidence base the arguments about a new Net generation or Digital Natives persists (sic) in a popular discourse which is replicated in policy and practitioner literatures." (p. 724) In my own experience from reading the 'policy and practitioner literature', interest in the methaphor has waned in the past few years. A quick search im some selected databases would give a clue as to who is right. I don't have the time for that now. Interestingly enough, I find that there is a disconnect being introduced here between educational theorists and policy makers and practitioners. Not really smart when you set out to criticize a (perceived) disconnect between natives and immigrants.

Table 5 (p. 729) has a real whopper of a typo: "Contributed to a block". Wow, to me it seems the authors don't even know what a blog is.

Table 6 (p. 730) shows that self reported skills of under 25 are consistently higher than those of over 25. My statistics knowledge is to rusty to delve deeper into this.

Main takeaway: none, just another survey confirming what we already know.

Bayne,  Ross / 'Digital native' and 'digital immigrant' discourses: a critique

Second page: "Our view is that this is a discourse which - despite its clear limitations - is becoming internalised by many in higher education (...)". See my remark above regarding my experience that the the interest in the metaphor is waning.

Fourth page: "Any argument can be dismissed if it is spoken in the accent of an immigrant." I think this is stretching the metaphor a bit.

Sixth page: "The terms 'digital immigrant' and 'digital native' are now in such common usage that it is easy to forget they are metaphors (...)." I did a Google (.com, .uk may yield different results) search and found 20,100 hits on the first phrase and 80,100 on the second phrase. Somehow this indicates to me that the phrases are not all that common and that the emphasis is on the natives rather than the immigrants.

Sixth page: colonists and missionaries are introduced, again, the metaphor is stretched and almost becomes ridiculous. Where do these words all of a sudden come from, am I missing a reference?

Main takeaway: take care when using metaphors.

Sharon Stoerger / The digital melting pot

" (...) over time, [metaphors] become inaccurate and dangerous." (p.1 in the abstract). Couldn't she just have left it at that instead of introducing yet another metaphor. Reviews a lot of literature but I miss synthesis.

Main takeaway: none

Bennet, Maton, Kervin / The digital natives debate

Solid article, well written and structured. Mentions Larry Cuban's book 'Oversold and underused: computers in the classroom'. A book I enjoyed reading and from which I learned that you can learn more about e-learning by reading critical texts than by reading the evangelists.

Main takeaway: Prensky accidentally found a way to create a 'moral panic'. Question is: isn't the panic over by now?

Prensky / Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, part I and II (wasn't on the list)

Part I. Ah, page 2, that's where Bayne and Ross got the immigrant's accent. In that same paragraph, it is quite funny to see how outdated the examples are for recognizing immigrants (turning to the internet for information second, reading a manual).

It's a pamphlet, very well written.

Part II Mainly about neuroplasticity. Interesting read.

Main takeaway: you can also read Prensky's text (part I) as a case for game based learning.

Prensky  / ... Digital Wisdom

See? "(...) we need to imagine a new set of distinctions." (first page) The guy just loves oppositions, a strong rhetorical device indeed. Nothing much new here, yes technology can be a powerful ally to enhance our abilities.

Main takeaway: this metaphor hasn't catched on, I don't think it will.

Kennedy, Judd, Churchward, Gray, Krause / First year students' experiences with technology: Are the really digital natives?

No, they're not, but we knew that already, didn't we? Amused to see that they asked about PDAs (table 1), but hey, the survey is from 2006 (in digital terms the nineteenth century). Smartphones with mobile access to the web are rapidly on the rise now. Amazed that 38.5 percent had no games console (table 2), probably much lower now. 62.9 percent did not use a social networking site (table 4), just goes to show how quickly things change.

Main takeaway: none, it confirms what we knew from the ECAR studies.

Pew / Millennials will make online sharing in networks a lifelong habit.

I only read the overview. I think they are making a mistake when they interpret social networking as 'broadcasting'. it's really 'narrowcasting'.

Main takeaway: none.

Spiegel Online / The internet generation prefers the real world

I liked this one, even though it uncritically repeats stupid examples (multitasking, 'I found it on Google'). It confirms what I earlier said about Schulmeister's meta-analysis (up to 70 now), and the guy is even quoted. I am amazed that young people still watch over two hours television per day (I gave that medium up 5 years ago, signal noise ratio is near zero). What I really like is near the end the teacher who uses web 2.0 in his teaching. That's what the debate should focus on.

Main takeaway: "So instead of tech-savvy young netizens challenging the school, the school itself is painstakingly teaching them how to benefit from the online medium." (p.5, at least on my printout). Yes, and probably making school a lot more interesting at the same time.

And that also indicates what I think would be a much more interesting discussion.

Sorry, long post. See you tomorrow in the chat.

I'll be off next week for my vacation. Will download the literature for next week and read and think about it on the beach and come back with a blog post October 11 or 12, will review discussion board and TWitter archive after that and write a second blogpost about next week's subject. Okay?

A few comments on comments  by Clara:

>
It did get me wondering if it’s not jut about the tech preferences students might have but about the implications technology has for the roles of teachers and students.  E.g. moving from traditional transmissive model of learning to a more collaborative, coproduced one where students have to take more responsibility for their learning (which might seem like taking on the teacher role, losing the authority of a subject matter expert etc).
>

Exactly my line of thinking. In my view the technological options should be chosen carefully in order to make such a collaborative pedagogy possible. One example I came along a while ago was were Open Journal Systems (software to enable the publishing of electronic journals) was used in a class project. Students could take on several roles: write articles, review articles, (copy)edit articles, publishing articles. The product of the project were several issues of a journal being published (openly) on the web, adding yet another realistic twist.

>
I’m amazed you have done all the reading.  You know, you only need to do the core reading and one or two secondary readings.  :)
>

I like reading, the more you read on a subject, the more it makes sense to you.

>
So, having read so copiously, how would you draw the literature together?  What kind of overarching argument might you make about the nature of online students?
>

There is no overarching argument one can make about the nature of online students, so one should be careful with assumptions. ICTs are only enablers to achieve pedagogic goals. Good teachers work backwards from these goals to design challenging learning environments and choose technologies carefully.

No anecdotes to begin with, but one crossed my mind during reading, see below. Actually, this whole debate is new to me. Obviously did not make it into the 'practitioners' literature . 

Dreyfus, H.L. (2001), On the Internet, chapter 2, 'How Far is Distance Learning from Education'

(Unfortunately, the e-book version is crippled with DRM, can only be downloaded for one day and the pdf version wants to connect to the publisher's site, so not fit for downloading to my Sony wifi-less e-reader, and anyway, I seem to be without internet in this tiny fishermen's village on the east coast of beautiful Fuerteventura, Canary Islands.)

Some general thoughts after going over Dreyfus' text twice.

Dreyfus uses a trick generally in use with American writers to kick off his discussion: choose a few hilarious, maybe even ridiculous quotes to oppose against. This goes for the Perelman quote opening the chapter and the Reed Hundt quotes discussed during the opening pages. There is also an opening quote by Agre which could be seen as supportive to Dreyfus' argument. Yet, Twigg (Carol A. Twigg (2001), Innovations in online learning. Moving beyond no significant difference, Center for Academic Transformation, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, http://www.center.rpi.edu/pewsym/Mono4.pdf (link broken - October 12, 2010), and Carol A. Twigg (2003), Improving learning and reducing costs: lessons learned from round I of the Pew Grant Program in course redesign, Center for Academic Transformation, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, http://www.center.rpi.edu/PewGrant/Rd1intro.pdf (link broken - October 12, 2010)) has made the same observation and turns the point into favour of e-learning. Her argument is that when you add technology to an otherwise unchanged educational concept, the technology will only be 'added to'. Cuban makes a similar point (Larry Cuban (2001), Oversold and underused. Computers in the classoom, Harvard University Press), technology has not changed anything in schools (how could it, by itself?). Twigg argues for redesign of education in order to make technology work.

Dreyfus also uses another rhetorical trick: complete opposition of distance learning vs education, and so forces us into an either / or mode of thinking which is not very helpful when it comes to understanding the dynamics of both modes of learning, let alone how one mode could complement the other.

Throughout the text Dreyfus maintains the premise that distance learning can only 'pass on information'. Which is an extremely limited view.

The seven stage model seems an attractive way of viewing education as a process through which students evolve. Yet the model has a few shortcomings:

• It's way to generalized. Of course I would not undergo surgery from a student who comes fresh out of a distance learning course in surgery, but many skills can be learned that do not ask for going through expensive apprenticeship models. Dreyfus sort of admits this when he says that distance learning can get you to stage three, competence. The examples that he chooses in the advanced stages 5 and 6 -- he does not mention car driving in stage 6 any more, by the way -- suggest that these describe graduate and postgraduate levels, a stage that is simply not relevant for the majority of the world's workforce.
• Stage 7 does not seem to fit in the model of ever progressing, but might just as well be stage 0.
• Throughout the stages model, emotions are connected to embodiment. While I think that emotions are crucial in learning (learning should at the very least be fun, in my view), these emotions can also be experienced when learning alone: the joy of having read a good novel; the joy of solving a mathematical problem; the joy of solving a sudoku puzzle without ever having learned anything formally about the puzzle; the joy of developing scenarios for strategic development. One can add many examples.

Page by page remarks.

p. 30. 'What proposed change in the <<method of education>> generates all the excitement?' Exactly, see the remark about Twigg's work above.

p. 32. Ends with the question whether the stages model can be 'implemented and encouraged on the Web?' So the stages model is pertinent to the whole argument. Of course, one can question the limits of the model. For some reason the model also reminds me of the whole concept of levels that we find in so many computer games.

p. 37 'If we were disembodied beings, pure minds free of our messy emotions, our responses to our successes and failures would lack this seriousness and excitement.' Well, we are not disembodied beings, are we? Emotions might show easier in groups, relations, but we also have emotions when we are alone, don't we? How good can it feel to master another level in a computer game you're playing alone?

p. 38 introduces imitation as a way of learning. Usually imitation is seen as a very early stage of learning, here it is introduced in stage three, competence, curious.

p. 39 'at home in front of his or her terminal, there is no place for such risky involvement'. Yes, if learning would be simply passing on information. No, if there is real feedback from either a tutor or from fellow students. This line of thinking is repeated on the same page where Dreyfus talks about anonymous students without a 'class before which the student can shine and also risk making a fool of himself'. Yet a little but further he seems to remark that online environments can be 'much less intimidating'.

Also p. 39, Dreyfus finishes the stage 3 discussion with the remark that 'the absence of face to face learning - may well leave students stuck at competence'. For many students, and maybe for many professions this might be more than enough.

p. 40 'positive and negative emotional experiences will strengthen successful responses and inhibit unsuccessful ones', somehow this reminds me of Skinner.

The whole stage 4 discussion does not seem to discuss the classroom experience, which I find very odd. So, could we conclude that stage 4 can also be reached in absence of face to face?

p. 43 about learning by watching reminded me of John Seely Brown's et. al. latest book The Power of Pull. It tells the story of kids on Hawaii learning how to surf in the absence of teachers. They shoot videos of themselves while surfing and in the evening watch and discuss these videos together. These kids made it into the professional surfing circuits. And this reminded me again of TVI where a class of students watch a canned lecture and every now and then stop the tape to discuss the lecture. Very embodied, again, as in the surfers example, but the absence of a teacher in both examples seems to add, rather than subtract from the learning experience.

p. 44 about teaching assistants picking up their teacher's style: I question that.

p. 46 When it introduces practical wisdom it reminded me of Prensky's digital wisdom. And later in the discussion of that stage it occurred to me that online communities develop a culture of their own, however disembodied that culture might be.

p. 47 On the issue of disintermediating universities I need to check Brown and Duguid's The Social Life of Information where they discuss this issue in one of the final chapters. As to the question: 'can the bodily presence required for acquiring skills in various domains and for acquiring mastery of one's culture be delivered by means of the Internet?', my answer would be it depends when it comes to skills, not sure about the culture mastery part.

And in the end, it's all bodies behind terminals anyway. I do need to follow up on the Twigg reference. Her point is that convential, today's university education is essentially a standardized product, from the student's point of view, whereas e-learning could offer the option of more flexible offerings, accommodating different learning styles.

Yet another anecdote to round this Dfreyfus reading of. I once got into an argument on a Dutch usenet group devoted to power kites. Something I had written was completely misinterpreted and a flame war was about to ensue. I countered with the argument that on fields where kiters meet the atmosphere was much more friendly and helpful (culture on and offline compared). We, that's me, my wife, and the guy I got into an argument with, ended up writing a (web) manual for a power kite design program developed by a Canadian together, a short version of that manual was even published in a Dutch printed kite magazine, truly amazing. Even more amazing, we never met f2f. I am, sure I learned a lot about kite design in the process -- okay, maybe to the level of advanced beginner, but still. And I learned about how cultural norms can be set either on and offline.

Burbules, N. (2002) 'Like a version: playing with online identities', Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 387 - 393

Nice play on the Madonna song, the title, although the article really doesn't go all that deep into the identity thing as the title seems to make one to expect.

Obviously there is much more nuance to Dreyfus' book than was obvious from chapter 2 alone. Burbules has the same observations about the rhetorical style of Dreyfus that I had.

p. 388 'We need to raise the level of discussion by framing it in new terms.' Somehow I have the feeling Burbules does not achieve this goal. My own take is that this whole talk about embodiedness is just not very helpful to understand what's going, and what could be going on in online learning / e-learning, the same feeling I had about the whole net generation discussion in the week before. And hey:

p. 389 'Indeed, it's arguable that the Internet can foster and support modes of pedagogy that are more engaging, more intellectually stimulating, and foster more teacher-student interaction than the actual experience in many existing educational institutions.'

p. 390 echoes my earlier observation: 'for many students and subject matters, why is competence not adequate?' I'd like to add the observation that Burbules does not even question the whole validity of the seven stages model. On the same page, I like the following sentence: 'So now we arrive at the interesting questions: Where and how can these technologies be used to support particular educational purposes, and where can they not be?' Pretty much sums up my expectation for the MScEL program.

p. 391, the quote from Dreyfus about trust near the end of the page strikes me as completely weird. You have to remember that terms like 'trust' and also 'disintermediation' were used quite heavily ten years ago in debates about the merits of the internet / the web when compared to how things were done before the advent of those technologies.

p. 392 in the Dreyfus quote: 'If our body goes, so does relevance, skill, reality, and meaning.' It made me want to shout at Dreyfus: But the body does not go at all! I don't recognize this whole idea about disembodiedness. For the past five years the technology enabled me to stay in touch with my 400 kilometers away family, to do job interviews with people across the ocean, and I could give more examples. It just adds to the options we have of interacting with people. What does it add when it comes to education?

My take on the secondary readings for week 3.

Blake, N. (2002) 'Hubert Dreyfus on Distance Education: relays of educational embodiment', Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 34, No. 4

His description of how he sets up an online course on p. 381 makes all the more sense now that I have seen it in action at this IDEL course.

My main takeaway from this article is the following quote:

'Even insofar as the electronic message is literally disembodied, its content no less than its form must draw on the writer’s embodied experience of other embodied persons, at least in terms of generalisations and often with regard to specific occasions; and the success of the communication will partly depend on the quality of this experience and the skill with which the writer draws on it.' (p. 383)

This, for me, explains my whole uneasyness with the concept of (dis)embodiedness I had with the core readings. In online interactions I cannot think away my body or (even?) the body of the person(s) I am interacting with.

Dall'Alba, G. and Barnacle, R. (2005) Embodied knowing in online environments, Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol 37(5), pp.719-744

I found the first part of the article, up till page 727 hard to digest, I am still not sure what the authors exactly mean by the notion of 'embodied knowing'. It echoes things like tacit knowledge, learning-to-be, but that is as far as I get.

In the middle part of the article there are some great observations:

p. 727 "For example, Marion Coomey and John Stephenson (2001) reviewed 100 research reports and journal articles published between 1998 and 2000 on web-based online learning. They identified four features of online learning essential to good practice, as follows: incorporation of dialogue; active involvement of learners with learning materials or activities; provision of support; and enabling learners to take appropriate control over their learning. These conditions for promoting learning are similar to those identified in much recent literature on learning in environments that are not online (e.g. Brockbank & McGill, 1998; Brown & Glasner, 1999; Ramsden, 2003; Walker, 2001), as Coomey and Stephenson acknowledge.

p. 727 "For instance, Geraldine Torrisi-Steele (2002) argues that a desired approach to integrating ICTs ‘does not
focus primarily on technology but instead directs focus on learner needs, discipline requirements, learning outcomes and reflection on teaching practices’."

p. 728 "In a review of studies about online learning, Barry Jackson and Kyriaki Anagnostopoulou point out that ‘where effectiveness is demonstrated, it can often be attributed to a pedagogical improvement rather than to the use of the technology itself ’ (2001, p. 61)."

p. 729 "‘The potential for rich learning experiences online is mostly exploited by teachers whose conceptions of learning and teaching predispose them to consider deeply and continuously the needs of the learners in
any situation, regardless of technology’ (2001, p. 61)."

p. 729 "(Laurrilard) argues that ‘design has to be generated from the learning objectives and the aspirations of the course, rather than from the capabilities of the technology’ (2002a, p. 22)."

p. 730 "Alexander and Boud (2001) argue that the current higher education context and usage of ICTs do, indeed, primarily extend rather than transform conventional pedagogies." BTW, WebCT is a prime example of this.

All these remarks also correspond with some of the observations we made in discussing the net generation. The focus needs to be on engaging pedagogy and how ICTs can help there.

Than, in the final section the article goes real bad when they online the 'opportunities being offered through the use of ICTs' (p. 735). A lot of conjectures here.

I like the conclusion: "Instead, the issue is recognition and design: recognising the nature of humantechnology
relations in the design of learning activities and models." (p. 740)

Clark, A. (2003) Natural born cyborgs: minds, technologies and the future of human intelligence, Oxford: OUP chapter 1, 'Cyborgs unplugged', pp.13-34

A very refreshing read!

(p. 26) "In each case, the real problem-solving engine was the larger, biotechnological matrix compirising (in the case at hand) the brain, the stacked papers, the previous marginalia, the electronic files, the operations of search provided by the Mac software, and so on, and so on. What the human brain is best at is learning to be a team player in a problem-solving field populated by an incredible variety of nonbiological props, scaffoldings, instruments and resources."

And p. 27, "My goal is to dispel this illusion, and to show how a complex matrix of brain, body and technology can actuallt constitute the problem-solving machine that we should properly identify as ourselves." p. 31 humans as "natural-born cyborgs".

It is no longer about disembodiedness, rather it is about embodiedness-plus.

I was away on vacation and without internet, so read the discussion board and tried to read the twitter stream only today.

Discussion board mainly about the use of twitter. At times it felt like a discussion between converts and non-converts, in group and out group, worlds apart.

So, on to http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/mscidel. Unfortunately, I can only see the 10 latest, and an export I can't seem to manage either. It's probably my stupidity, but if a tool is not really obvious I give up real quickly.

So, on to http://search.twitter.com/search?q=mscidel as an alternative. What do we get?

• Frequent time outs trying to wade my way towards 7 days ago, I would have liked to make it to 8 days ago, but that was not possible, so already stuff is vanishing.
• Some people use twitter names that don''t relate to their real names, yes, I can look them up on the who we are where we are page, but that's a hassle. Talk about 'embodiedness' ;-)
• Okay, from 7 days ago, I started wading forward, just to give up after going through one day of tweets. Why?
• A lot of solo tweets, that is: not part of a conversation. People quoting some line from some article. 140 characters is just not enough to get some context here.
• Hey, some conversations are going on that can be expanded in Twitter search. Lots of them are short, lots of retweets, I don't get the feeling that there's much discussion really going on.

There might be some worthwhile information there, but to distill it afterwards is simply to time consuming. Maybe the experience is / gets better when you're in the middle of the flow.

It also reminds me of the discussion we had in week 1 about a false sense of linearity. Here I can't find an angle to make it work for me, to have it make much sense to me. Or it could make sense, but like I said, it would simply be too much hassle for me.

Up until now I find Twitter useful to relay information that might be interesting (have done a few times with the #mscel hashtag); when at a conference and people add information (other than retweeting the slides), or being used as a backchannel. I still don't like the tool very much.

>>Throughout the text Dreyfus maintains the premise that distance learning can only 'pass on information'. Which is an extremely limited view.<<
>I agree.  But why?<

I think my whole point here started with the observation that Dreyfus opposes f2f and distance learning, where as, from a more pragmatic point of view, the difference is only gradual. In a sense, f2f learning has always had a distance component, simply when it comes to doing your homework for a course. When I read a text, that text is not 'passed on as information', I am trying to make sense of that text, trying to connect it with things I already know, and finding new points of view. In other words, there is not only 'information passing on', there is also 'information processing' going on. In fact, the whole idea of information passing on could be seen as a deliberate disembodiment of a student, where the student is seen as a vessel into which information is being poured. Which is obviously wrong.

>For the 7 stages, I think one of the issues is how Dreyfus views skills (is that the only product of learning?) and how he assumes skills are learned in f2f education.<

I am not sure what your trying to get at with your question. I simply wondered why nobody questioned the 7 stage model itself.

>I’m curious as to why you think Stage 7 could also be stage 0.  (I have some idea why, but I’d just like you to tease it out a bit more.)<

All of a sudden there is no more 'progression' in the model. Even the examples about how culture is transmitted by how different cultures care for their babies shows this. In the end, I think it is more a stage in the argument that Dreyfus has been developing. Like: these are the things that you could never learn in a distance course. And of course he's right, but he only is drawing out a rabbit he put in his hat himself.

>Good point re emotions and embodiment.  I wonder if it might be useful to think of how emotions are tied to social practices to and what that might imply for the issues of embodiment and risk as Dreyfus sees it.  I think you are doing this in some of your notes on pages 37-39, for instance, and with your kite anecdote, but it might be worth drawing these together more.<

I'm really not sure what you're trying to say here. My simple point of view is that body / mind, ratio / emotion, social / individual distinctions are only helpful to a certain extent. In the end, you and I are all of those things at the same time.

>>p. 44 about teaching assistants picking up their teacher's style: I question that.<<

>Why?<

Based on my own experience teaching economics for 5 years. If you try to imitate a style, your students will pick that up as not authentic at once. You need to develop your own style with which you are comfortable and only then can you connect with your students. (Teaching bodies could be a whole subject of its own.)

>It might be useful to move from the notes-style to trying to write posts on particular themes or concepts, drawing together the readings. E.g. making your own argument about embodiment and risk, drawing on the readings to support or counter your claims.<

I am not there yet. I see myself as being in a dialog with the readings for the moment. That might change as soon as I get some more perspective on the course as a whole.

>> I am still not sure what the authors exactly mean by the notion of 'embodied knowing'. It echoes things like tacit knowledge, learning-to-be, but that is as far as I get.<<

>I think that it is partly that, but it’s also an epistemological stance.  It’s saying the only way we can construct knowledge is *through* the body, it is the way in which we experience, and thus have knowledge about, the world.<

I think I was hinting at that when I said that mind / body distinctions &c. are only helpful to a certain extent.

And finally regarding Twitter:

>>There might be some worthwhile information there, but to distill it afterwards is simply to time consuming. Maybe the experience is / gets better when you're in the middle of the flow.<<

>Interestingly, I’ve had folk both argue for and against the ‘retrospective twittorial’.  Some, like you found it especially hard to follow, others found it a worthwhile detective experience, a puzzle to piece together that gave them further impetus for learning.<

I can imagine that some people like detective work. But I am more of a pragmatist, technology should help us achieving our goals more efficiently, if it gets in your way, than don't use it. I think I made a point a while ago that I gave up looking television years ago because the signal noise ratio was near to zero. I have a similar feeling here.

Again, I can see some scenarios where Twitter could work in teaching and learning.

>>…false sense of linearity. Here I can't find an angle to make it work for me, to have it make much sense to me. Or it could make sense, but like I said, it would simply be too much hassle for me.<<

>I wonder if this is also because time is different for each member of the discussion.  For instance, in Skype we are all on simultaneously and know that’s basically how each other is experiencing it (albeit with a bit of lag).  On the db, we know people are unlikely to beon at the exact same time as us and that they may read things in different order.  On Twitter, we might be online at the same time as some, and because of the unthreaded nature, cannot guess at how others might enter the stream when they do come online.  So perhaps this makes for an even more temporally strange experience?<

I don't think the experience is 'temporally strange', it's just another medium, and a medium which I think works best when you're in the middle of it, reconstructing it afterwards is too much work - although I could imagine you could write a script to condense such a stream so as to make it more readable (f.i. drop all the retweets but count them and put the number in front of the original tweet, do some tag cloud like things.)

Finally: I had the impression you were interested in the Power of Pull. I have added a file with my notes on that book to this blog post, but cannot discover how I can link to it from within this post.

After reading Yee's (2008) The Unbearable Likeness of Being, a couple of thoughts occurred to me.

One is that I wonder whether this whole fuss about bodies might have to do with our conception of what virtual reality is (or could be). Yee's article starts with a quote from Barlow ('Suddenly I don't have a body anymore ...') If this was a virtual reality thing with like video helmet and data gloves (the movie Tron comes to mind, or, even more extreme, The Matrix trilogy), than, yes, I could follow that people feel disembodied in a virtual world. To describe Second Life as a virtual world in this sense is ridiculous, because you are very aware of yourself sitting behind a screen looking at the back of the head of your avatar, looking at other avatars. Hell, not even the experience is 3D, it's an utterly flat world and you really need to stretch your phantasy to imagine it as being 3D. Somehow this echoes with Yee's observation that in a textual multiuser online game his embodiment was 'salient in a way I'd never experienced in either physical reality or graphical worlds.'

Yee has two other observations that ring a bell with me.

The first one is that 'Games are all about slowing you down ...' This was the experience I had in the two Second Life sessions we had last week. The second session where we discussed, or rather should discuss, the literature made this awfully clear. The tutor was hardly around, spending her time picking up lost avatars probably. The discussion was a chat, much like the Skype chat we had two weeks earlier, with second Life functionng effectively as a wall paper to that chat. It, the chat, took well over an hour, if you reread it, it takes you about 5 minutes. What an inefficient way of achieving things.

What really hit me is Yee's following remark: 'If you were using a virtual world for work, why on earth would you want people to walk places, open virtual file drawers, be blocked by virtual walls, or have to figure out what to put on in the morning?' Exactly. Our thinking about how we have always done things offline influences pretty heavily the way we do things online, and as a consequence, we are many times disappointed in what technology has to offer.

I had already mentioned that I did not find the core readings for this week very helpful. The Warburton article too technical and only in passing mentioning some uses of SL for learning. The Boellstorff chapter not even mentioning the word learning (and not even learn, for that matter).

So, I was hoping for something better when I started reading the Dickey article. One thing that struck me was that the article is from 2003 and not about Second Life. But then again, the way Active Worlds is described shows very much similarity with SL.

The distinction being made between discourse tools, experiential tools and resource tools seems useful to me.

The analysis of the affordances and constraints of Active Worlds is something that for 90 percent also carries over to SL. It makes you wonder just how little progress there has been in this area in the last 10 or 11 years, Dickey somewhere (ah yeah, p. 109) mentions that her data are from 1998 / 1999.

So, where does this leave us all?

1. I am still not over the feeling of being lost. I know how to move around in SL, how to get to the meetings in time, how to chat there and, hey, even to save a chat in a notecard and drop it on Pancha. Where I am lost is that I don't see how this week fits into the overall idea of the IDEL course.

2. I had intended to do a search for some more recent literature on the educational uses of SL, but haven't found the time. It's hard enough already to catch up after the lost week and in the final weeks of my employment of Jacobs. I also would have liked to explore some SL educational sites. Frank had a reference somewhere in the discussion boards, but again, not found the time to get around that.

I'll be having a day off on Wednesday so I can do the week 5 reading, and be on track again.

Well, there's actually one thing that I am happy about regarding week 4 and 5 and that was to see librarians actively involved in the learning environment. Something I argued for already 9 years ago (Roes, Hans (2001), Digital libraries and education: trends and opportunities, D-Lib Magazine, July / August, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july01/roes/07roes.html).

On to the reasons why I am not happy.

1. I already commented on the Boellstorff chapter. Many stories in there about how people experience SL, but in how far is it relevant to the subject of the course? I asked for perspective, but did not get a real answer. In week 5 we get a very similar text from Taylor, this one from 2002 about a virtual world even crappier than SL. Again, stories about how people experience this world, again etnography.

My point is that you can learn something from these texts, but what you learn is how people experience these 'worlds' as a gaming annex social environment, in both texts there is absolutely nothing about how these 'worlds' would be experienced as learning environment. In both texts the word 'learning' is almost absent.

Also, both texts are ethnographies about people that immerse themselves deeply in such worlds. My question would be how deeply people - students, and teachers - would need to immerse themselves in such 'worlds' before they become adequate environments for teaching and learning? I am not sure, but see the next point.

2. In week 4 and 5 I attended 4 meetings in SL. Yes, I can see some progression in how the tool is being used in discussions. The discussion I attended last night was much more focussed than the one last week. On the other hand, we had only 5 participants last night, including the tutor (Pancha / Marshall, hey hey, a librarian!). Also unlike the discussion last week, Pancha was now present all the time and was actively steering the discussion. So I wonder what caused the progression, the fact that the students were more experienced, or the facts that the group was smaller and actively being led. I guess the latter factors are more important. And an important takeaway for me: I suspect 5 to 6 participants is about the max a group chat can have. (From my teaching days I remember research into the optimal / maximal sice of working groups, I'd suspect that there is research as well in this area.)

And of course, like I said last week, the meeting is still basically a group chat. Yesterday night I discovered that for the most time I just concentrated on the chat, and when I looked at the screen, I was mostly looking at the avs' names rather than at the avs themselves.

Okay, maybe it is just my lack of imagination. In this regard I'd also like to respond to a remark by Clara last week about whether or not I was experiencing 'flow'. A concept I always liked (although I wished that the guy who came up with it had an easier to spell name ;-), and also a concept I have tried to apply in my management positions: challenge people beyond their abilities, but not too much beyond. Incidentally, the Gee text also describes flow, second paragraph on p. 70, without any reference, but than there are no references in the Gee text at all. Back to 'flow' for me in SL. The simple fact is that I don't feel challenged by SL, let alone intimidated, as I have the impression some of my fellow students are. Again, it maybe my lack of imagination, but it's something I can't help.

Now, of course it is important for me to know how people might experience a 'world' like SL, and in a sense I can really follow all these stories in the Boellstorff and Taylor texts. But again, I am dearly missing the link to the relevance of all these stories for learning.

And, more importantly, I think Clara remarked a few weeks ago that technologies in a sense can also hinder learning. Now, I don't think SL is an obstacle there, but chat is a tool that at least for me is not really suited for a good discussion. It forces one to use short sentences, and slows my thinking down to the speed at which I can type. Maybe it's my background as an economist, but I can't help finding it a most inefficient way of communicating. The Yee text for me confirms this: games are all about slowing you down.

3. Learning then. Here we have three texts that at least have the words learning in their titles. Warburton, Dickey, and Gee. The first disappointment here is that Gee and Dickey are from 2002 and 2003 respectively. It made me want to shout at the librarians involved here: surely you could come up with more up to date texts here?

I will not repeat what I said about the Warburton and Dickey texts last week. I had another look at the Dickey text and although her analysis in terms of affordances and constraints is worthwhile, the example she uses - Intro to RWX Modeling - is in the end not a professional example. At the time she researched her article one would probably not find such a professional example, but that only reinforces my point that a more up to date text would have been very helpful.

4. Which brings me finally to the Gee text. Gee (that's a pun, yes), I thought, so now we have a linguistics professor that seems to be developing his own learning theory based on his individual experiences with a particular computer game. And gee, not a single reference in that text except for a short bibliographic note at the end that mentions some research into learning. Already on the second page (52) he puts me completely off with the remark 'your character - that is you'. No, you are playing your character, there's a fundamental difference there. And there is this strange second paragraph on p. 57: "One sort of limitation video games certainly bring up to real-world baby-boomers like me is that they do not reward - in fact they punish - some of my most cherished ways of learning and thinking (e.g. being too quick to want to get to a goal without engaging in sufficient prior nonlinear exploration)." Now, I recognize what Yee said about games slowing you down, and, being a baby boomer myself, I can see his point of too quickly wanting to reach a goal, but too quickly wanting to get to a goal is _not_ a way of learning, but hey, I am not a linguist, and English is not my first language, so who knows.

On p. 58 and 59 we find paragraphs beginning with "It is not uncommon ...", and "It has been argued ...". Citation needed, I thought, Wikipedia style.

On p. 61/62 we get to what seems to be the core of Gee's learning theory: entice to try, put in lots of effort, achieve meaningful success. Seems plausible to me, but my theoretical background in pedagogy is just not good enough to judge the validity of this. I really would like to have seen some discussion here (I might start one today, I am not that active on the discussion boards). Also, an interesting question would have been, assuming there is some validity to his learning theory, how Gee's principles might apply to the design of e-learning.

So there you have it, the reasons for my unhappiness. And yes, maybe I do want to get too quickly to my goals ;-).

 

Hi Hans

As promised, I want to give you some mid-way feedback on how I think the blog is shaping up in terms of the final assessment. Basically, things are going reasonably well for this stage of the process.  The criteria for assessment are:

* Reflection – you are posting thoughtfully, linking the course materials to your experience and professional practice where possible.  As we’ve discussed, I think there’s more opportunity for you to develop this as a sustained reflection, drawing together different readings and concepts as you move through the course. 

* Regularity – you are posting regularly and substantially.

* Knowledge and understanding - You’re demonstrating a sound understanding of the technologies and ideas introduced. Again, as we’ve discussed, I’d encourage you to keep developing towards a more synthesised, coherent framework.  You might find it useful to look over the way ‘knowledge and understanding’ aspects of the postgraduate common marking scheme criteria are described on pages 25-27 of the Programme Handbook.

* Communication style and multimodality – the weblog has a clear sense of ‘voice’.  The ideas discussed are often well argued, though there are times when I think you could tease out further what you mean (which I’ve generally flagged in my comments).  I’d encourage you to play a little bit with blog in terms of image, media and linkage.

So, in summary, I think things are going generally well with some opportunities to develop your blog further as a critical reflective piece.

Please let me know whether this is any use to you – I’m more than happy to chat through the blog process.  Also, I would like to develop my own practice further, so I’d appreciate your mid-blog feedback too!  Are my comments useful?  What could I do to be supporting your blogging more?

Cheers

C.

p.s. if you would like to paste this review into your blog as an artefact of some sort, you’re most welcome. 

One more anecdote before I make my point.

I have a sister who works as a teacher in primary education (4 - 12 yo). I have a daughter who works in secondary education (12 - 18 yo). I have spent the past 35 years of my life in universities, as a student, as a teacher, as a student counselor, as a librarian, and now as a student again. If there is one thing I've learned, it is how deeply conservative all these three teaching / learning environments are, and maybe for a good reason, but that's not the point I am / was trying to make here.

>I don’t think I would necessarily see SL as a ‘gaming world’ but more as an alternate, virtual world.  I wonder - are you making an assumption that gaming and learning worlds are different?  Are they?  If we are thinking about learning as collaborative, and thus relying on the social, aren’t there lessons from the one that could be applicable to the other?<

Maybe. Maybe. Yes.

But anyway, I was not making that assumption, I was wondering why the texts we got, notably Boellstorff and Taylor, only dealt with how people experience online worlds as a gaming / interaction platform, and not at all with what I would expect from an introductory course in e-learning, that is, what the relevance of these worlds for learning is in the conservative environments that I know. I also have the impression that SL is quite beyond its peak use, I hardly ever see it mentioned anymore in the past two years in the 50+ blogs that I follow, just to keep up with trends in 'net culture and higher education. As with the net generation theme, I wonder whether the IDEL course is running behind on what's happening on the 'net at large, and maybe not connecting enough to the world of practitioning teachers.

I also observed that much of the literature was quite old and, because the texts deal with internet phenomena, most probably outdated. It made me wonder when this part of the course was renewed for the last time. Please challenge that assumption ;-).

>As for immersion – is it worth contrasting this with the idea of authentic learning?  It might also be useful to think about how immersion in specific social practices might relate to learning as immersion in particularly communities (a la http://www.infed.org/biblio/communities_of_practice.htm ).<

You're missing the point I was trying to make. Before you can make SL work as a tool in the practical learning environments that I know, teachers and students would need to immerse themselves in SL as a tool for quite some hours before they can actually see how it could help them achieve their educational goals. Not to mention the support disaster with SL viewers not running on outdated hardware or for whatever stupid reason, I've seen enough of that, even with the tech savvy students in this course in the past two weeks (praise to Fiona who was, I think, responsible for handling that shit). I have no problem with the IDEL educational goal of getting students acquainted with the many possibilities, including SL.

I will dig deeper into this point in week 6, when it comes to the actual use that is being made in universities of LMSs or VLEs. Most is simple file upload of presentation slides. And now we see an enormous growth in canned video lectures being uploaded to these systems and to iTunesU (for marketing purposes, maybe?). Wow, really innovative.

Addendum, added October 27, 2010

Just came across this very interesting review study of educational uses of SL:

Hew, K.F. & Cheung, W.S. (2010). Use of three-dimensional (3-D) immersive virtual worldsin K-12 and higher education settings. A review of the research. British Journal of Educational Technology 41(1), 33–55

Worth a read. A literature search yielded 470 articles, only 15 of them where about empirical research into the use and effects of SL on teaching and learning. The single most prevalent research method was descriptive, only one study had an experimental setup using control groups. This final study failed to show a significant difference between three test groups in terms of test scores.

Other results mainly confirm the upsides and downsides already noted. Conclusion: we know next to nothing about the usefulness of SL for learning.

I started of reading the Bayne (2004) and Cousin (2006) texts. I am getting the feeling that Bayne's perspective is (at least for me) way too much dominated by her cultural studies background, at least in the two publications in the course I have read so far. Yes, I am putting myself at risk here in this online environment, I just transferred the (substantial) course fee (from my own account, no employer to pay for me) and I very well know that Bayne is the program director. I understand the importance of philosophy well enough to know its limits when it comes to guidance in the practices that I am familiar with.

One quote from the Bayne article I'd like to comment on: 'Yet it is rather hard to see where the virtual shanty-town might emerge among the regulated avenues of the 'e-learning system'.' (p. 314) They are here now, the shanty-towns, they're called social networks. Unfortunately, these social networks are just as much closed environments as many of the 'e-learning systems' like WebCT, or Second Life, all worlds of their own, and I have a hard time connecting them all. (I twittered this week with the mscel hashtag about plugjam, related to this, need to look at it closer.) Below I give a description of my PLE, as I see my attempt at connecting. A solution that works for me and is portable enough.

The Cousin reading read fine in the beginning, much there to recognize. I liked the McLuhan paraphrase on p.119: 'every kind of technology is an extension of our nervous system', echoing the readings of week 3 (Yee (why virtual drawers) and Clark's natural born cyborgs). Wonderful to see also how Tapscott is invoked (p. 120) to support the argument here although we discussed the whole net generation to death in week 2. And then the description of how VLEs enhance and thus confirm existing academic practice (p. 120). I went to Google Books to look up the Cuban quote: 'When teachers adopt technological innovations, these changes typically maintain rather than alter existing class room practices'. (Larry Cuban (2001), Oversold and Underused, p. 71), printed it out and stapled it to the back of p. 123. (Gosh, and I thought I had weened myself of paper over the past year ;-). (Yes, there's lots to tease out here, Clara.;-) I am starting to lose Cousin at the end of that same page. Yes, I think the technology is transformative (or disrupting as we like to say nowadays) but not a glimpse into which direction we would need to look. At the final 'rhizome' discussion I am lost completely.

Which is quite disappointing, since two texts I read earlier this year:

Jon Mott, David Wiley (2009), Open for Learning: The CMS and the Open Learning Network, in education 15(2), http://www.ineducation.ca/article/open-learning-cms-and-open-learning-network (accessed October 27, 2010)

Jonathan Mott (2010), Envisioning the Post-LMS Era: The Open Learning Network, EDUCAUSE Quarterly Magazine 33(1), http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVolum/EnvisioningthePostLMSEraTheOpe/199389 (accessed October 27, 2010)

where somewhat of an eyeopener to me when it comes to my growing dissatisfaction with VLEs (or CMSs as Mott calls them). They are used to 'maintain rather than alter existing class room practices', to quote Cuban again. I won't go into detail about these two (overlapping) texts here, but I would really like your view on the first one, since this one also connects - at least in my view - the technological affordances of web 2.0 with educational theory.

On to my PLE. (I'll send you a scan if you'd like on my drawing / scribbling, if you'd like, that shaped this text. Oh  no, did I manage to get it in? Yes, I did! My PLE Scan.pdf )

Before I start: I travel a lot and don't like to haul notebooks around, I have tried netbooks, but their keyboards don't work for me, and anyway in most places that I am there's always a notebook around for me to use. I am a Windows user, so if your favourite's a Mac you might want to bear with me through the beginning, it's short though.

My typical taskbar (open applications at the bottom of the screen) looks like this:

file manager|notepad|Internet Explorer|Google Chrome|Skype|MSN Messenger

Working outward in, the heavy stuff is in the center. Skype and Messenger are basically used as chat tools although I use Skype a lot for (video) calls and file exchange. Messenger is there because I don't want my 78 yo mother to deal with the daunting possibilities of Skype now that she learned only a few years ago to chat with me with Messenger. And I have a brother roaming the world - Malaysia last week, I believe - inspecting fertizilizer plants who prefers Messenger.

File manager gives me access to a folder called My Library. It has over 500 mostly pdf files of articles and books that I have read over the past five years, annotated and highlighted (using Adobe Professional, now switching to PDF Exchange Viewer as this is a free solution). Very poorly organized (flat folder, I try to use a system in file naming, but in the end I can search these files). My main worry here is syncing the shit between the notebook that I happen to be on, the notebook I use most to maintain this library, and the USB stick that I carry around as backup. A cloud solution is near, I believe, I hope.

Notepad is a very, very basic text editor (I am typing this blog post in Notepad). No distractions and it gets nicely rid of any disturbing mark-up.

The heavy stuff is in the middle, both browsers, both accessible anywhere.

Internet Explorer. Outlook Web Exchange on the first tab. Nice crisp interface (much like the Messenger mail or now called Live Mail that I use for private purposes). Nearly 1 GB of mail accessible to me anywhere in the world. But that's my work mail. Second tab: Confluence, my university's intranet / wiki. Boy, I will miss that one. Third tab: browsing. Right now it's on Holyrood Park Hub, and from there to the blogs, WebCT, SMS, Library without hardly an extra login, beautifully done. Fourth tab might be used for Facebook or LinkedIn, my favourite social networks, and of course there's the Google search bar used many times during the day. Whenever I come across an interesting link, it is saved to delicious (don't ask me where the dots go). Delicious is on the browser's toolbar as well.

Chrome is for Google Reader, keeping up with my 50+ blogs. The Gmail account that I'm switching to. Google Docs for more advanced editing tasks, sharing documents and even concurrent editing of documents (combined with a Skype call). Finally Google sites - but at the moment my wife and I are using it only to build a cookbook and get rid of all the loose stuff. Still, Google sites might be used by me during this course / program. Delicious on the toolbar here as well.

And of course I haven't mentioned all the other uses of my notebook (iTunes, watching DVDs, occasionnally TV since I don't have such an appliance, Dutch radio whenever I get nostalgical in Germany, banking etc. etc.).

There you have it, the first post of week 6. Hope to find some time to reflect upon all this craziness soon.

So one of the tasks is to create our own personal learning portal using iGoogle. I had played around with iGoogle some years ago, but never found a good use for it. Not sure what problem iGoogle could solve for me. Amazingly enough, iGoogle does not appear to have evolved in the past few years, so my impression is that Google does not love the product very much itself.

I already had described the way I see my own PLE, and how it works for me.

Naturally, I tried to replicate what I now have in iGoogle, that lead to quite some disappointment.

• Searching for gadgets to add to your iGoogle page made me wonder: is this Google?? Try a search for 'editor' (I wanted a replacement for Notepad). You'll get results that have really nothing to do with what you're looking for, very unlike Google.
• No gadget to connect to files. As an alternative I finally created a Dropbox account and added the Dropbox widget, or gadget. Works, but I guess that uploading my library would take about a day.
• I can't find a way to add links to the iGoogle page, I would have liked a link to, for instance, the Holyrood Park Hub. A workaround might have been a gadget for delicious, but searching for delicious only seem to give gadgets related to cooking.
• Amazingly enough, there are no gadgets for the Google products that I use frequently: Google reader, Google Docs.
• I found a way to add Google Mail, but that's only handy to check whether new e-mails are coming in, but then I'd need to look at iGoogle all day ;-).
• I was able to find a Webskype gadget, it does not work in Google Chrome, it appears broken in Internet Explorer.
• iGoogle has a chat option, but that is not tied to my Windows Live Messenger. I found a widget but that gave an error message in IE.
• Added a todo gadget to make a task list for IDEL week 6 and 7.

Even with the few widgets / gagdets on the page, the page is already overcrowded. See the two screendumps (igoogle1 and igoogle2 - nope, I managed before, but can't find how I did it, yet another frustration, please see the discussion board where I will repost and hopefully manage to attach the files) I made to get an overview.

So, mapping my PLE as it is right now is impossible.

Jen Ross suggested I'd read the Sanger (2010) article in the WebCT discussion board. Sanger's article is partially a response to an earlier article by Brown and Adler (2008) that I enjoyed very much.

Sanger opens with the question how the internet is changing education, an interesting question indeed and one that I find a bit missing in the IDEL readings (so far). Sanger discusses three 'strands of thinking about education and the internet'.

1. 'Instant availability of information online makes the memorization of facts unnecessary or less necessary.'

2. 'The virtues of collaborative learning as superior to outmoded individual learning.'

3. 'The insistence that lengthy, complex books (...) are inferior to knowledge co-constructed by members of a group.'

In fact, only the second issue responds to Brown and Adler. Issue # 1 is more against Tapscott, while issue # 3 is against Shirky. All three arguments by Sanger are really off in my view, although he has the best of intentions.

The basic error that Sanger makes in all three arguments is that he more or less accuses his self chosen opponents that they claim the internet is replacing something. I did not do a word count on replace and substitute and their variations, but you'll find that these words are used a lot. Sanger misses the point that the 'fancy new set of tools' (p. 19) that the internet offers are extensions, a point that is also being made in one of the readings for this week (Cousin, when she paraphrases McLuhan that 'every kind of technology is an extension of our nervous system'.)

Memorization. I totally agree with what Sanger has to say here, it's just that I don't think that anybody seriously claims that we don't have to learn facts because we can look them up so easily on the internet. You need to have at least a basic understanding of a subject to be able to judge the facts. But once you have that, the internet is a great help. (And the invention of writing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedrus_(dialogue) look for Thamus and Theuth) did not kill our memory, neither did the invention of the printing press.) And of course it is easy to come up with examples from education, especially from primary and secondary education where kids do an assignment by cutting and pasting from the internet. I am afraid that in most cases that was just the assignment they got. Kids usually do what you expect them to do. And of course, the internet is also great for debunking wrong facts or urban legends, like the one in the Barret / Carney for reading these weeks. Eskimos have many words for snow? Wrong (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow).

Social learning. If I remember correctly from the Brown / Adler article, they don't cite really hard evidence that group learning leads to better results than individual learning (is there?). Yet again, Sanger makes the same move and posits that his opponents say that group learning should replace individual learning. Again, extension is the better word to understand what is going here. Sanger should know that, since he cites Brown / Adler as talking about 'extending education' (p.20). He goes on to state that you can read the Decamerone online, 'but you must mentally process it yourself' (ibid.). Of course, but discussing the Decamerone in a group will lead to a better understanding, especially if you don't have much background in medieval Italian literature. Sanger calls writing an 'essentially solitary act' (ibid.). It is, but writing a blog, or post that is being read by my fellow students surely is different from writing an assignment that is merely being glimpsed at by my tutor (as in most primary and secondary education). I am writing for an audience, so I need to choose my words carefully, and I might get feedback. On the same page, Sanger goes on to criticize online group discussion: 'My notion of a good scholar  - perhaps standards are changing - is someone who is capable of thinking independently'. I think it works the other way around: by engaging in critical discussion with others I learn how to discuss with myself.

Books. Again the word replacement. 'Is participating in online communities via social media a replacement for reading boring old books'. (p. 22) Social media extend my reading experience. I write small book reviews an publish them for my friends (most of whom are more professional acquaintances) on Facebook. I pick up ideas for reading from there. Another quote: 'Blog and Twitter posts, Wikipedia and YouTube contributions, which arguably weaken our attentional capabilities (...).' Uh no. My 50+ RSS feeds act as an important filter. Wikipedia came up as I tried to remember where it was that I heard that the Eskimo many words for snow story is bull. Sometimes I use YouTube as jukebox when discussing songs with my friends. And of course books are not being replaced, book sales go up and up every year. E-readers are taking off real fast now.

I have said it before, I see the technologies that are so rapidly developing among us as opportunities for enhancing learning experiences. But we need to learn how to put them to good use.

Sanger, Larry (2010), Individual Knowledge in the Internet, EDUCAUSE Review, March / April, http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM1020.pdf (Accessed November 2, 2010)

Brown, John Seely and Adler, Richard P. (2008), Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 EDUCAUSE Review, January / February, http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0811.pdf (Accessed November 2, 2010)

In another post, I have described the way I see my personal learning environment. It is personal, since I have set it up myself. So naturally the biggest issue with the Wilson et.al (2006) core reading I have is: why would anybody think that they can design a PLE for me? It would immediately loose all personality.

In a sense, I was also offended by the article since many ideas presented there are echoing the seminal paper by Tim O'Reilly, What is Web 2.0 (O'Reilly, 2005), yet we find no reference at all to that paper.

Back to my PLE. It was the easiest thing in the world for me to plug in all the Edinburgh e-learning stuff. Simply add the URL of the Holyrood Park to my bookmarks, and from there, most of the time without an extra login I have access to all the other systems in use, including the VLE.

The Wilson reading sees VLEs in general as an example of 'dominant design', in my view, you can't really call VLEs a dominant design since there are many differences between VLEs, although you can see a convergence as they all have incorporated web 2.0 technologies in the past few years. Even WebCT has a wiki, although the way that is integrated (or rather bolted on) is rather crude. Some VLEs, like Moodle distinguish themselves from other products by explicitly stating that they support a specific pedagogy, constructivism in the case of Moodle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodle). VLEs in for profit institutions are usually much stronger on statistics and management information (Kolowich 2010). One might say though that VLEs tend to have a sort of dominant architecture in that they were all designed to support a more or less traditional educational concept. They are added to a traditional mix of lectures and core readings. And most teachers use them for very basic tasks like uploading lecture slides. Sure, they have added all these features in response to the market, but what you get is over-featured applications that try to do too many things and, as usual, do nothing really quite good.

This is also recognizable in the IDEL setup. The VLE is basically used for two things: content pushing and online discussion. For the rest, other applications are preferred. I am starting to feel more comfortable using the discussion board, but more substantial posts go to my blog as well, where I have more of a sense of ownership (yes, there is a connection here with the portfolio discussion) since I know for sure that at the end of the course everything in the discussion boards will disappear, or at least become inaccessible to me.

To end my discussion of the Wilson reading: I checked two of the projects they mention in their article, Plex (http://www.bolton.ac.uk/IEC/EducationalSoftware/PLEX.aspx) and TenCompetence (http://www.tencompetence.org/web/guest). Both projects seem dead to me.

So again not a very good reading, sorry to mention it. The Downes article cited in Wilson (footnote 24) might have been a better choice, but then Downes is somewhat controversial. What struck me most about the article is the near absence of any pedagogy, the references to lifelong and lifewide (a new term for me, I know it as 'real world learning') felt almost obligatory.

Then it struck me that I had read two articles (Mott and Wiley, 2009 and Mott, 2010 earlier this year, one of which explicitly departs from a pedagogical point of view (Mot and Wiley, 2009), Bloom's 2 sigma problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_2_Sigma_Problem).

Mott and Wiley (2009) go on to show that the VLE is mainly used by teachers to 'increase the efficiency of the administrative tasks of instruction'. They see it as a missed opportunity that the VLE has not been used to innovate teaching methods. VLEs have three major shortcomings: (1) it imposes a student-throughput model, (2) the VLE does not afford learners the opportunity to contribute to the learning process, (3) the VLE is a walled garden, disconnected from the larger world. (2 and 3 can be recognized in the Wilson core reading.)

Mott and Wiley propose an alternative, which they call open learning network, which they see as a 'hybrid between the CMS (VLE) and the PLE. This is however only very sketchy worked out.

Finally, Mott and Wiley state that 'our assertions about the weaknesses of the CMS paradigm should also be taken as critiques of the predominant pedagogical model in higher education'.

One might also say that VLEs are used mostly for substituting administrative tasks, rather than as extensions, offering new opportunities.

Jen responded to this article:

>many thanks for these references, Johannes. I am intrigued by the author's claims that an open learning network represents something radically different from a learning management system - its imperatives would seem to be exactly the same (to manage and institutionalise - to striate in Bayne's terms? - student work). On the other hand, the notion that content, environments and discussions should be persistent (in the cloud) rather than trapped inside modules, does seem quite radical (in the context of an LMS/VLE).<

It's not radically different since it wants to marry both PLEs and VLEs. My point of view is that the PLE is mine and mine alone, something that I manage myself. And yes the persistence notion is rather radical and something I don't trust the university to take care of. Although I have raised the idea in 2001 that libraries could create repositories for (parts of) portfolios (Roes, 2001). To shamelessly quote myself:

"By taking a knowledge management approach to digital portfolios, these results can be shared over the Internet or, more likely, the intranet. This implies a new task for the library in the management and indexing of these student portfolios in such a way that they too can be integrated with other information resources offered by the library. In this sense, digital portfolios are an extension of the first domain identified -- digital libraries and digital learning environments -- but now include the intranet. The emphasis here is on the institution as a knowledge organization, and the integration of that knowledge with other information resources."

Oh yeah, I have also a PP, a personal portfolio: http://www.hroes.de/artindex.html

Steve Kolowich (2010), The For-Profit LMS Market, Inside Higher Ed, November 1, 2010, The For-Profit LMS Market, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/11/01/lms (Accessed November 3, 2010)

Jon Mott, David Wiley (2009), Open for Learning: The CMS and the Open Learning Network, in education 15(2), http://www.ineducation.ca/article/open-learning-cms-and-open-learning-network (accessed October 27, 2010)

Jonathan Mott (2010), Envisioning the Post-LMS Era: The Open Learning Network, EDUCAUSE Quarterly Magazine 33(1), http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVolum/EnvisioningthePostLMSEraTheOpe/199389 (accessed October 27, 2010)

Tim O'Reilly (2005), What Is Web 2.0. Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software, http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html (Accessed November 3, 2010)

Hans Roes (2001), Digital libraries and education: trends and opportunities, D-Lib Magazine, July / August 2001, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july01/roes/07roes.html (Accessed November 3, 2010)

Wilson, S., Liber, O., Johnson, M., Beauvoir, P. Sharples, P. & Milligan, C. (2006). Personal Learning Environments: Challenging the dominant design of educational systems. TENC Project: Publications and Preprints. http://dspace.ou.nl/bitstream/1820/727/1/sw_ectel.pdf (Accessed October 25, 2010)

(I just posted this in a thread / conversation with Rory on the WebCT discussion board, but I think it's worth keeping it here in the blog as well.)

Thanks for the reply, Rory.

I think part of my problem is that I reserve the word presence for something physical. I think I would be more comfortable with the phrase 'virtual presence', but even that is problematic. When you use the adjective virtual, you're still trapping yourself in an analogous way of thinking. For instance, the phrase 'virtual space' seems to refer to a space, again a very physical thing, to me. To me, SL is not a space at all, it exists as bits on servers and my notebook that are connected through a network and becomes 'visible' (cartoon style) through my monitor, and audible through my speakers. I can type in a chatbox, or use my computer's mike to talk, but in the end its all just bits. So, 'I' can never be in SL.

Similar with this thread. I type this in a word processor and will later cust and paste this text to the WebCT discussion board. I don't think of myself as being 'in WebCT'. WebCT is also just bits. When I have posted my text there, than you might say that text is present there, but not me.

Your explanation of cognitive presence was helpful, thanks for that.

Now on to the implications for e-learning. I think that as long as we keep talking about virtual classrooms, learning systems as Blackboard &c., we're thinking in terms of analogy. We're thinking in terms of how something 'e' can replace some activity in a traditional learning / teaching setting. To me, the interesting possibilities of technology appear at the edges, when we try to think of things 'e' as extensions. What does 'e' allow us to do that we could never do in a traditional classroom setting?

One example might be the MScEL program. I think this exists only because you can do this whole program online. It might be hard to find enough students in Scotland to make this program economically feasible. Since it is now possible to recruit students internationally, world wide, the equation has changed considerably. Yes, of course you could also do it as a traditional long distance learning package, but the structure and communication that you can add in an e-learning setting helps students to stay focussed and schedule time on task.

Another example would be collaborative research, with a group of graduate students one would be able to digest a large amount of literature and build a knowledge base, for instance in a wiki, very fast. This would be different from the situation in which all your students read the same textbook, or same articles. Even more interesting: the wiki might stay on for students in coming years, for them to expand and to build upon.

I'd like to offer three things as final thoughts regarding the IDEL10 course.

• First is a word cloud IDEL10 Wordle BW.pdf (you might want to save this and open in a pdf viewer that has the ability to rotate the view). It was created based on the over 20,000 words I wrote in 26 posts in this blog over the past three months. The cloud was generated by http://www.wordle.net. Students, Discussion and Learning seem to be the most frequently used words. Yep, students sure discussed learning. 
• Second is a mindmap elearning mindmap.pdf centering on e-learning created in Google Docs. It's different from what I would have drawn three months ago. The technologies mentioned are the ones we encountered, although I can see now that I have omitted Twitter, even though I tweeted on a regular basis with the hashtag #mscel. And of course there are many other technologies out there.
• Third, I looked at the course learning outcomes as described in the IDEL10 Course Guide, page 5.

1. "Critically evaluate a range of technologies in terms of their impact on teaching and learning." Although the use of most technologies throughout the IDEL10 course was on a rather basic level, there are lots of critical remarks regarding technologies and technology use in my blog.
2. "Begin to design your own online learning resources." Although the word design is frequently used in my blog (look at the word cloud, it's wedged in the second N of learning) there were not many activities regarding design in the course itself. I think I learned most about design by critically looking at the setup of the IDEL10 course, and the way this design was employed by the different team members.
3. "Contextualise your own practice in terms of the key issues emerging from current research in e-learning." Wherever possible, I brought in anecdotes from my own experience, although want might say that these anecdotes were used as much to contextualise the readings, as the other way around.

Finally. I know I have been a "difficult and demanding student" like I wrote in my last blog post. I do hope though that some of my criticism of the IDEL10 course will make it into the team's evaluation. Should this lead to more specific questions you'd like to ask me, please contact me.

Thanks to all of you, and in particular to Clara (you're in the word cloud as well, upper left corner, right above the word 'also', that can't be a coincidence ;-) for bearing with me.

I made some minor changes to the mind map. Assessment is now fully two-way, it wasn't before. And I have added Twitter and PBwiki to the technologies list.

Some short remarks:

• Like I said, I think I could not have drawn the map this way at the beginning of the course. No idea, what kind of map I would have drawn then.
• The bottom part of the map is heavily influenced by the community of inquiry model.
• I could have added more relations, but tried to concentrate on the most important ones.
• Technologies are relatively isolated, they are really the least interesting part, I think.
• The way library / resources are integrated is consistent with my thinking since about 10 years.
• I have added two web 2.0 principles, re-use of data, and co-design. Co-design is also responsible for the only crossing line in the map, but students cross a teachers' line, which is in its own way rather funny.
• Design and activities stand heavily out as important nodes. These will be interesting candidates for mind maps of their own.
• O yeah, students are the most busy node in the map, also kind of interesting.