This is now Week 4 of the Learning Challenge (LC) and I've been a little naughty in that I have allowed the "Learner Analysis" assignment to interfere with the LC. The "Learner Analysis" assignment is due to be submitted on Sunday 26th October and I have probably spent more than is actually necessary on it.

I am back on the "I Will Knot" website to refamiliarise myself with the knots that I was practicing before the assignment got in the way. It's amazing how much you quickly forget because you haven't been practicing to the point where it "sticks" or "clicks" into place. At the moment, I am practicing once with the knot with the aid of the step-by-step video and then a further three times without the aid of the video - the trick is to try and repeat this tomorrow without the aid of the video at all!

On the subject of the "I Will Knot" website, I mentioned to a colleague of mine who teaches Chemistry at my University and has just been appointed a Learning and Teaching Co-ordinator for my Faculty that I was doing this learning challenge as part of my MSc and showed her the website I was using. She was most impressed by it - NOT because it showed you how to tie knots in easy step-by-step videos BUT how the idea behind the easy step-by-step videos could be used to show a particular Science experiment / practical to a group of students.

This visual aspect to learning is indeed a powerful motivator, and if done properly it could instruct students better than just reading it out of a textbook.

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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.

So here we are, the final leg of a 12 week journey that is "Digital Environments". This is the first time that I have done an online course taught at a distance. I already had some experience with a correspondance course; which I did, in part, to test the waters to see if I had the stamina to take on a higher degree that was being taught from a distance. Oh boy! it couldn't have been more different.

"Block A - Orientations" gets the ball rolling very quickly by using discussions boards to introduce yourself to the group and to discuss a number of presented scenarios - immediately I can see that the communication element is far superior here than the correspondance course which relied mostly on sending material via Her Majesty's Royal Mail, possibly e-mail which was read on certain days or a telephone call which may be picked up during a two hour window on Sunday's only. Oh and no fellow students to talk to about the course or the assignments.

The communication dimension of the course aside, the really big thing that impressed me the most was how fantastic the course Blackboard/WebCT was laid out (see "First Week Impressions"). For example, all the reading lists were located under the relevant week's topic folder (not in a completely separate reading list folder that my academics tend to do - but then we don't do course design as part of the basic Blackboard training that we offer academics if they want to be Blackboard Instructors).

Despite not having met (yet!) Sian Bayne and Rory Ewins, their digital presence has been strongly "felt" (sorry Dreyfus! Wasn't he Inspector Clouseau's boss?). This has also been true of the more prolific students (Tony McNeill, Henry Keil, Nicki Brain, Andy Miller and Bill Babouris). The feedback from blog and discussion board posts from Sian and Rory have been pretty much immediate - so much better than a correspondance course (or even a classroom-based course come to that!). On the subject of discussion board posts (I've made 44 posts in total), I did find myself not participating on some of the more popular topics. This, in part, has a lot to do with me coming to the discussion boards after 7.00pm when everyone has gone on a discourse feeding frenzy like a plague of locusts - much discussion and research has been done about this.

"Block B - Environments" allowed us to explore "structured spaces" like e-portfolios and virtual learning environments (VLE); "volatile spaces" like Web 2.0 and Hypertext; and "new spaces" such as Second Life. One of the reasons for doing the MSc in e-Learning at Edinburgh was the richness and diversity that the course offered (see "And so it begins...") and it is here that it is at it's most apparent.

For me, the discourse and the theoretical underpinnings of the e-portfolio was a lot more exciting and interesting than trying to "knock up" an e-portfolio on Blackboard/WebCT (see "Betwixted, bothered and bewildered"). The Web 2.0 section of the course made use of a number of activities such as adding a bookmark to Delicious (whilst I appreciated what was going on here, the activity could have benefitted from adding a bit of extra meat to it) and placing an entry onto the Group Wiki (interesting that no-one wanted to mess around with other people's entries). We also discovered that the volatile nature of the Web 2.0 application / service is fraught with opportunities and dangers (see "Web 2.0: A Game of Snakes and Ladders").

One of the big delights for me on this course was the opportunity to use Second Life in an educational context and to interact and engage with my tutors and peers in a very relaxed and friendly environment. The nature of digital identity, personalities, group dynamics and digital discrimination and prejudice was explored and discussed; along with that of "presence" - by now this had become the course arc word (see "Return to the Rabbit Hole").

"Block C - Contexts" introduced us to the more philosophical (and highly explosive) discussions of "learning bodies" (or the importance of human embodiment to teaching and learning) and "digital natives" (the controversial metaphor, the generational rift that it appears to have opened up and the implications to 21st Century teaching and learning practices). Indeed, the course material should have been rubber-stamped with an "highly inflammable" symbol. On the subject of course material, I should say that the quality of the reading materials and the scanning have been first rate and easy to read.

Whilst I can see that the "digital native" / "digital immigrant" dichotomy would have offered a useful conversational starter on the perceived changes in student behaviour and learning that Higher Education (and in education as a whole) would have to address - it has now been insidiously absorbed into something far greater and more menacing than anyone would have imagined (see "Digital Imperialism: The Tyranny of Technology").

So for now, I bid Rory, Sian and the inspirational "Digital Environments" course a fond and affectionate adieu.

Thanks for the digital memories.

Came across a rather interesting blog article from EduSpaces user AWyatt called "Academic Facebook: Lessons learned so far". AWyatt has been using Facebook to talk to students outside of the class and offers some interesting insights upon it's use:

"Things I have done that I thought were positive:

• Have messaged conversations about issues that matter, but that were too personal for a class discussion
• Send messages of encouragement
• Send application presents (jack o lanterns, gingerbread men, christmas tree presents) just for fun 
• Check status changes.  Sometimes I can follow up on a student's well being the next time I see them, on the sidewalk, in my office, or before class starts.
• Use the messaging feature for my class groups to announce things like changed due dates (which are also announced through the usual channels)
• Participate in student run groups as a contributing member
• Find out things about who my students are and what they are concerned with that make me see them so much differently.  I have always been bemused by students who, even at the end of the semester, did not know my name (and I generally teach small classes with a lot of interaction!).  I can see how professors would really not know much more about a student than what they look like, how they write, and where they sit!  I was never satisfied with that, because it meant that I had never made a real connection with the person AS a person.  Facebook gives me many more cognitive "hooks" to use in making our relationship better and to help me tailor my teaching methods."

and misuse:

"I decided that,  if my students were gracious enough to be friends with me, I probably should not:

• leave a message on their wall asking why they were not in class or where an assignment was
• send them any apps without checking them first (sometimes the adverts at the end turn out to be something I would not like to endorse personally)
• be judgmental about any activities, even if I initially find some of the posts/photos to be surprising"

I came across Lynetter's Flickr account whilst looking for a picture on "digital natives" / "digital immigrants". She has an area called "Interesting Snippets" which used to be called "Online Developments".

"This is my personal dumping ground for various cool quotes, the odd stat, as slides to talk around when describing how things are changing online and in media & communications generally."

These are really fantastic pictures and images coupled with quotes and sound bites that have been taken from various media, communications and technology sources.

The photo set comes with an RSS feed if you want to keep tabs on any new photo-quotes.