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?