It has been a bit of a frustrating week with a lot of time spent on trying to get my computer up to speed in preparation for the more challenging activites ahead.  Things are much improved but I still find the load time for the discussion board windows almost prohibitively slow.  The time it takes to open a window, read a post, open a reply, respond and post the response has meant I haven't been able to post as much as I would have liked.  I also find the transition from my own board format to this bulletin board format rather hard.  But I will reflect on that in another post.

Here I will summarise the things I have learnt from a week exploring the dark side (along with anything else I found interesting).

The choice of labelling personas let us to initially 'critique' people until we realised that we can't extrapolate an entire personality from the summary of one incident (which is probably more than we would get as tutors if we received a complaint).  If we have to make 'judgements' (or at least a judgement call) it is aways better to criticise the behaviour rather than the person.  

It is also good to bear in mind that behviour-based stereotypes are just as harmful as person-based ones.  So if a person is lurking it could mean they are lazy, or shy or it could be that they are reading posts thinking "yeah, that is exactly what I think, I can hardly repeat it though" or "damn that is exactly what I was going to say".  From my own experience with this activity if you don't want to look like an idler strike early, and strike hard!

Netiquette guidelines are essential, especially for people unused to an online learning environment, however you can't advise for every situation so the guidelines should serve to make people comfortable enough to survive the initial onslaught whereby they will gain enough familiarity to make their own choices on how to respond.

Overuse of jargon and acronyms is annoying and exclusive even if you know what they mean. 

The purpose of the online discussion is presumably to build community and so the social aspect is just as important as the academic. Therefore every VLE (virtual learning environment) should have a VCE (virtual chilling environment) just as every university campus has a bar.  People just need to be told (and reminded) what kind of chat is appropriate in each location.

There is nothing wrong with talking about cats.

Not all university campuses actually have bars.  Those in Saudi don't... which reminds me: remind your learners that online learning implies the possibility of richer cultural diversity.  Different cultures have different communicative norms and one man's perky challenge might be another's aggressive flame.

To feel loved and included you need to have your posts replied to promptly.  By your tutor if necessary, though this is a bit like getting a valentine's card from your mum - heartwarming but not really the point.   People should be encouraged to reply to each other just as much as they are encouraged to make thoughtful independant posts.

People are different, they post in different ways... some people are actually annoying - we should embrace that, especially if they have paid for the privilege of being annoying. They may still have something they can teach us.

It took me about a year of regular reading and sporadic posting to get really comfortable with discussing issues online.

Some tutors will naturally be more interventionist and others will be laissez faire.  Ideally there should be a balance.  If, as institutions, we can't afford to screen out students for the right virtual fit, we can't afford NOT to screen our staff.

We shouldn't behave differently online as we do f2f.  We can't afford to give up on humour just because it is hard to translate.  If someone is being cheeky, we can't let it slide just because we can't communicate our unease with body language. But we do have to make sure our emotions and subtle thoughtfulness is transcribed into text.  Learning how to do this takes time, and even when we know, we sometimes forget - especially if we are rushing.

Anyway, today one of my cats went missing.  We tore the house apart looking for her for an hour before my boyfriend found her nonchalently sucking spiders under the stairs.  She looked at us as if to say, what IS all the noise about? And was coaxed out by the offer of dog biscuits (which she prefers to the cat variety).  Cats eh?

It's Week 1 of the Learning Challenge (LC) and I have set aside 30 minutes to practice the art of knotcraft. The first website I went to was "Knots: How to Tie Knots"; I was not impressed with the rather short but pedestrian instructions with the naff looking illustrations - if I was having trouble understanding how to tie easy knots, what was it going to be like with the more complex ones?

The next website, "Ropers Knot Page", has slightly longer, but equally, pedestrian instructions with rather confusing looking illustrations that don't do anything to enlighten me as to what I am suppose to be doing. I am beginning to wonder if I have chosen an appropriate learning challenge - certainly the free resources I am using are not explaining themselves very well.

My next resource, "I Will Knot", is something of a revelation to me. It uses a mixture of short, sharp videos and short, but still, pedestrian instructions. But it is the videos that work for me. When it comes to something that involves a motor skill, I am someone who likes to be shown so that I can mimic and keep practicing that skill. In that sense I could be considered as a kinesthetic learner.

This also suggests to me that if you want someone to learn something online, the materials / resources you create will be dependent upon the task / skills / knowledge / information that you wish to convey to your students.

So, do you use drawings, photographs, videos, audio recordings or text to put across something that needs to be learnt? Should this resource be passive or interactive? Can the learner work in isolation or does this require a collaborative / community dimension?

Interesting questions indeed!

I thought I would post a little pensee that anticpates next week's discussion topic.  In the Northlands, the online community I run with my partner we are both administrators.  We have the same ideals and beliefs for the community - but we go about 'facilitating' those ideal differently.

I am interventionist.  If something is wrong or someone is behaving inappropriately I deal with it, often publically.  I have deleted posts, whole discussion threads - taken away people's posting rights, and even taken away moderation and admin powers.  These actions are usually accompanied by a private message to the involved parties, explain what I did and why. 

Dom on the other hand tried to nudge people in the right direction by posting with them publically.  He behaves like a 'regular' member of the board and tries to reason, in the context of the discussion or, as if often the case, argument.  He will at the request of another member delete offensive posts.  But it is always in response to complaints, and never because his own sense of (in)justice prompts him to take action.

At work I am the academic manager and my senior teacher is a guy called Manjit.  I manage people at work in a similar way to how I manage people at The Northlands.  I deal with them directly, getting to the core of the issues that are causing inappropriate behaviour.  I talk to teacher x about his anger, and teacher y about her depression.  I tell them my concerns about how I percieve it is affecting (or may affect) their performance.  In cases of extreme underperformance I give people the chance to change and if they don't I put them on a perfomance plan, take away a post of responsibility or in extreme cases ask them to leave.

Manjit is like Dom, much more subtle.  He manages underperformance when has resulted in a complaint from a student or some other concrete outcome (i.e. a covering teacher hasn't been able to plan a lesson because the main teacher hasn't completed their admin fully).  He will grumble and worry, but he will not hand the teacher the responsibility for changing their behaviour until he has external evidence which he can take to them and ask them to explain, justify and ultimately correct. 

It is easier to reflect on the actions of others than oneself but if I were to try and analyse these different management styles I would say I see myself as a guardian of the people whereas Dom and Manjit are guardians of the process. 

This is easy.  Money.  I can't really afford to do this as an overseas student, but I wanted to do the course so bad that accepting the overseas status only choice I had, so I take step one hoping I can pay for the second step when the time comes.

Nothing else really worries me.  I understand there might be worries, workload; interaction; pressure; learning new skills etc. But I can manage those.  The nature of online study doesn't phase me, it is who I am in a sense. Only the financial aspect is out of my control so only this worries me.

But it will work out. These things always do.  

Clara: "So what sort of things are you hoping to get out of the MSc?"

There is a social networking website called 43 Things where you make an account and list goals, read the goals of others and offer encouragement (which may or may not lead to marriage and children presumably).  It is pretty cool, for at least five minutes as many things on the interweb are.

A glimpse at the world's goals 24th Sept 2008 11.30 pm shows that, collectively, we want to: 

watch Stargate SG1 / make others proud / wear skirts more often / control my anxiety / create a programming language / go  to law school / find a job / Lose 15 more pounds / create a permaculture garden / build a excellent piece of furniture out of wood  /write and publish a novel / travel / forgive / be a spy / learn to love myself / create a newsletter / Read "The Magician's Nephew" (Chronicles of Narnia, book 1) / make all A's / Be a better friend / Build a bar in my basement / pay off my student loan / Skydive

Deep stuff!

Funnily enough on 21st March this year I created an account and told the world I wanted:

• to get my tongue pierced
• to do a Masters
• to learn about Moodle, and..
• to do yoga regularly

Well it was a good start, but something good must have come on the telly then (Stargate SG1 perhaps) and I never completed the other 39 things so I will try now.  Incidentally of the above 4 I am only holding Edinburgh Uni responsible for 2 & 3, I'm not expecting piercing services or asanas in a later module.

So Clara to answer your question my goals over the next three (or four) years are:

 My (MSc E-Learning) Life List

1. get my tongue pireced  

2. apply for a Masters  

3. learn about Moodle (and other VLE's)

4. do yoga regularly  

5. meet new people  (interestingly I share this goal with 3,786 other people)

6. inspire my teachers to be enthusiastic about technology  

7. blog regularly  

8. feel proud that I have done my best  

9. make a vodcast (thanks Kevin for the new word)  

10. find the money to pay for my very expensive masters  

11. make a podcast  

12. be more inspired  

13. make the most of the wealth of diverse experience that surrounds me  

14. share learning  

15. learn new skills that will make me employable in the US  

16. pass on my learning to my organisation  

17. learn about smoodle  

18. surprise myself  

19. fall in love with being an educator again  

20. get another tattoo  

21. be excited by discoveries  

22. share my strengths with my fellow adventurers  

23. innovate  

24. learn new skills that will make me employable in a broader context than EFL  

25. feel passionate about learning and teaching  

26. see the cybercultural bigger picture  

27. get comfortable with html  

28. get married  (me and 15,757 people, phew!)

29. learn from the strengths of others  

39. make wise decisions about which courses to choose  

31. ask for help when I need it  

32. get a new job  

33. network without fear or embarrassment  

34. have as little to do with assessment as possible 

35. find out how to use second life for more than sex and shopping  

36. explore motivation and buy in  

37. ponder personas and masks  

38. make skillful (and fun) use of my digital camcorder  

39. make a positive contribution  

40. understand how to make a difference to learners' experiences without being in the same room as them  

41. think of a stormin' thesis topic  

42. unite what I love and what I do once more  

43. succeed  

Concerns... tomorrow. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

In February of this year the British Council sent a rather frazzled Academic Manger to London on the Management Development Programme Level 2 (leveling up in the British Council isn’t half as fun as World of Warcraft , incidentally - but it does serve the same purpose: you get access to cool new skills, the chance to do battle with more fearsome monsters and it opens up new realms for you to explore.

Most of the content of the course is forgotten (accreditation, performance management, recruitment blah blah blah) but one day stands out as we visited international house and looked at* their moodle courses.

This was a turning point / epiphany / breakthrough for three reasons.

1)       I stayed awake AND paid attention for the whole session because the moodle platform is not dissimilar (at      least from the perspective of the admin control panel) from my IPB discussion board, so suddenly the world came into focus and made sense – I was hearing useful information.

2)       it made me wish I had applied for a job with IH instead of the BC and

3)       It gave me the desire to learn something new.

So (in a roundabout way which involved lots of course-googling and option-pondering) here I am.

I see the M.Sc in E-learning as a chance to combine what I love with what I do.  In my free time I am webprolfic: I engage in text based role play games, have my own online community (with a shiney new wiki), I blog and also appreciate the blogs of others and I spend far too much time on facebook.  I love it, it excites me.

What I do is teach English as Foreign language (actually I use this phrase as it is familiar however it is terribly unfashionable now – we prefer the term ESOL: English for Speakers of Other Languages).  Or more accurately I manage the teachers.  I currently manage a small (15 teachers) British Council outpost in Northern Thailand.  It is lovely and slow-paced and it is boring me to death.  Yet even here we have Interactive Whiteboards and a 10 computer self-access centre – the provincial Thai kids who learn with us are a thousand times more technologically savvy than the (predominantly) middle aged men who teach them.

I love my job but I sometimes feel it stagnate around me.  Not just being here but being part of a huge slow moving behemoth of an organization like the British Council.  By the time we commit to a change the change proposed has become an anachronism.  Yet it is our organizational commitment to be a world authority in teaching English.

I wonder how many organizations are like us? Aspiring to a world they don’t really understand, with a board of directors (in our case the British government) who believe that bringing their people into the 21^st century is simply a matter of teaching them a few new key-strokes.  When what is needed is a profound culture change. 

This is the crux of my concern – not only for the course but also for my (potentially) new career.  That there is too much to learn, our aims are too wild, we want too much and yet we don’t understand whether or not it will be good for us.  That we will fritter away resources on technological white elephants while there are still children (just down the road from me) who don’t have notebooks and pencils.

I want to get involved because I love the new technologies available to us, I believe in them, as agents of change socially as well as educationally – but I also want them to be used ethically and sensitively and with a deep understanding of the user behind the interface.

* When I say we went to international house and looked at their moodle courses I must confess that is all we did.  Their server was having an emotional event and so we couldn't access the course online.  So we looked at screenshots on a powerpoint.  This is an illustration of the gulf between our aspirations and our reality.  This gulf (which on a bad day is almost a dichotomy) could probably be a module in itself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

Update

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