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! [You do not have permission to access this file])

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.