Even when plunging into the ‘black hole’ of the online, the basic rule of thumb to follow is the same as offline,  to remember the human (from an article on netiquette). Despite the tech element, it is still all about interaction and building relationships. Transferred into the educational context, the classroom might be swapped for a VLE, accessible at any time and place, but technology should not supersede pedagogy. And the learning theories that I have in mind here are blend of humanistic approaches and social constructivism, a balance of individualism and collaboration.

For that to work, the students need to be instructed what they are using the technology for and what is expected of them in terms of input (content plus assessment criteria) if they are to treat the online component seriously and not as a fancy (and probably clumsy) add-on. The purpose of different tools and choice of online activities should also be made clear so that students do not develop wrong expectation. This would refer especially to self-study courses where the student is left altogether to their own devices. To illustrate what I mean, I will refer to the first story ‘The black hole’. There is perhaps a natural tendency for people to moan and groan or exchange views on topics unrelated to the course but that can be done on a separate, non-learning, forum, e.g. ‘virtual cafe’ and the purpose of such a forum should be clearly spelt out and differentiated from that of learning forums and this is what happened in the story about ‘the black hole’. The message got ignored, sucked into a vacuum, leaving the student distressed and disappointed. It’s possible, however, that it was the course design that was to blame rather than the self-absorbed cat-loving fellow students. Namely, the design could be summarized as ‘laissez faire’, the students were let to get on and in doing so the cat group opted not to respond to the other student’s call for help. For obvious reasons (age, different outlook and priorities) she hadn’t engaged in interaction with them and so she might have been perceived as an outsider and intruder, somebody they did not care about.

To develop a sense of community and add dynamics to the course, many online courses introduce groupwork. Things might go wrong though, especially when individuals present different views on how to go about the task. In order to facilitate smooth collaboration and get students more involved and perhaps become watchdogs themselves, a working agreement could be devised at first which could describe in detail how they are going to collaborate and behave towards each other. The students could regularly reflect on the effectiveness of the agreement, refining it if need be. 

Creating rubrics specific to groupwork could perhaps encourage more active participation from quieter or idler students. It is true that, similarly to a traditional classroom, there will be an array of learning styles on an online course, with some students sharing their ideas publicly more readily while the more reflective types might lurk in the shadows of online back channels but certain mechanisms need to be put in place which will squeeze the minimum from the latter, especially in the case of groupwork. Assigning a leading role to a quieter student, putting them in a position of responsibility might spur more activity on their part too. Collaboration could also be subject to anonymous peer assessment, something one presenter in the workshop I recently went to  had introduced on their course. What is more, the peer assessment could influence the final mark, which kept all the potential idlers on their toes!

Since the online overly relies on the written word, there is much more permanency. Once you write something on an online forum, it's frozen there and irremovable (unless there is a good reason to take it off, e.g. abuse, indecency, etc.). So, greater care needs to be taken when posting messages but, on the other hand, there needs to be more forgiving  of other people's mistakes, being it spelling, grammar, a silly question or a daft contribution. Sometimes, the computer screen creates a buffer or a distance; you cannot see the recipient, their face or gestures, you deal with lone words, making the one who typed them become somehow disembodied and dehumanised. This might induce more assertiveness in you, make you feel more vociferous and bold in your opinions, putting forward criticisms. I think it's always worth asking yourself a simple question ‘Would I say something like this to the person face-to-face?’ (the flamer story).

The online might exert an interesting influence on how people present themselves and how much of personal info they decide to disclose, and how much of it they tamper with, embellish, distort and how fast they allow the truths to trickle into the open. This is particularly interesting in the case of people who are perceived as 'different' by the society at large, for example due to their disability or people who have experienced some misfortune in their life. In order to receive equal treatment, some of them will choose to hide the fact of their otherness. This way the online might promote inclusion more effectively than face-to-face.

According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow, the process through which we are going while trying to achieve our goals is more enriching than the success of attaining them at the end. This can be explained by the sense of enjoyment one derives from overcoming obstacles on the way, often through trial and error, momentarily groping in the dark in order to be enlightened in the most unexpected moment, forming hypotheses, scrutinising them to either refine them or refute them. It is these little successes (and likewise failures) that provide a sense of fulfillment, progress and flow.

I am now embarking on a new journey and although the final destination seems to be clear – completion of the introductory module of the post-grad course in e-learning, the adventures on the way seem equally, if not even more, enticing. As a true traveller, I cannot NOT keep a log of events – let it be ICTraveBlogue (50% after all).

LOOKING BACK & AHEAD

In order to explain how the idea of the flow applies to blogging, let me go to the roots. I’ve had a go at blogging before. While doing an online course in autumn 2008 (ICT in the Classroom), one of the tasks was to set up a blog. Mine was very impressionistic and featured a handful of stories from distant places, embellished with pictures and music. It’s still floating somewhere in the blogosphere but I’ve given up on it as I didn’t have a clear idea of what to fill it up with.

At the same time, I discovered a few blogs kept by language educators, some of them exemplary, some of them not. I also tried blogging with my learners but again due to insufficient planning, the blogs soon fell into oblivion. There’s been and still is a desire in me to blog but seeing how many people reach for this tool to share their personal or professional musings, I feel overwhelmed and somewhat reluctant to throw in my two pennyworth. Sometimes, I feel like there are too many words already produced and the blogosphere becomes a massive dump of verbal waste, creating a sort of e-pollution. Cautious and maybe overprotective of my digital identity and image, I’m slightly sceptical about blogging.

Blogging means getting enmeshed in the Web, Web 2.0 to be exact. By establishing your online presence in the blogosphere and contact with your audience you build social relationships. As in real life you look after your reputation, maintaining your online self requires careful planning and management. This is your online footprint, coded in pixels and bytes, easily replicated and reproduced elsewhere by means of pings, tweets, mentions, linkbacks. Therefore, to prevent the blog from becoming a double-edged sword, some quality-assurance formula is essential. This means determination,  an awareness of the audience, sharing interesting, thought-provoking ideas and posing good questions for the audience to ponder and finally being willing to involve in the dialogue. I am an educator in the first place, a technologist in the second so pedagogy will always come first and thus the basic questions to ask yourself before venturing into the blogosphere are 'why am I doing this and what do I want to achieve?' and 'how do I want my audience to benefit from it?', questions I keep asking myself before each face-to-face or online class.

Ideally the ideas shared with the reader should be new but these are sometimes hard to come by and perhaps require a spark of genius ;-) I much rather prefer the other route of the so-called ‘creative recombination’ which might involve the following steps (aptly described in the course on Personal Learning Environments):

·         Aggregate

·         Remix

·         Repurpose

·         Feed further

In case of this blog, the aggregation has been partly managed by my course tutors – it’s the module list of core and secondary texts. It’s also the input from fellow students in form of the discussion forums. Lastly it’s the blogs and sites on e-learning I have been following for a while, Steve Wheeler’s or George Siemens’ to name a coupls. Combined with my personal experience of being an online student and tutor, this should provide enough food for thought for this blog. By engaging with concepts pertinent to e-learning, I am hoping to increase my expertise in the field. But an additional goal is to harness the idea of blogging, dispel any sceptisism about its feasibility and instill a healthy habit of reflecting on the web reality/e-learning. This is the journey or the process I am going to take part in and hope to derive a sense of flow. This should be easier as the blog at the moment is to grow in a closed environment, a little greenhouse visited only by my tutors – less worry about my digital footprint. Another ‘bonus’ is the fact it’s subject to assessment – otherwise my procrastinating self could easily forget about the required frequency and quality of postings.

In order to do so I need a plan too. I thought I could start with setting up some basic rules by filling in this simple but imaginative worksheet from Blog of Proximal Development:

Week one of 'Introduction to digital environments for learning' is drawing to a close.  An interesting activity, and in many ways challenging as the different student types discussed had a lot in common, so it wasn't always easy to come up with something new.

Having found time to finish reading 'e-tivities' by Gilly Salmon this morning, I find that the last few pages of the book to be relevant to this exercise.  The book is divided in to two similar length parts, starting with an introduction to e-tivites and makes use of Gillys five-stage framework.  Part two concentrates on resources for practitioners and is divided down in to a number of digestable sections, each a couple of pages in length.  Many of the sections  look at issues raised in the course discussions such as: 'Promoting collaborative groups', 'on line emotions' and 'Patterns of participation'. The patterns of participation section is particularly relevant as it discusses the characteristics of most (if not all) of those partisipants studied, alongside a number of others that give a fuller picture of the social mechanics of discussion boards.

I found the book a challenging read so it has taken some time for me to complete it.  However the resources section makes this a worthwhile read for anyone looking at online learning from any perspective.

Salmon, G. (2002) e-tivities (the key to online learning). Abingdon: RoutledgeFalmer.

Having looked over all the case studies for week one, I find they appear to have more in common than not.  There is a general consensus that preparing the students in advance is key, to this I add that the staff need to be prepared well too.

It can be difficult to find somthing original to say once the threads have got underway, I guess this leads to some original thinking at times.

The big day has arrived, so I have had a go at the week one activities.  There are only a few contributions so far, so I have dived in in the hope that I am on the right track and that it will encourage others to dive in too.  The pace of contribution will probably quicken towards the end of the week as everyone consciously tries not to be identified with any of the characters in the case study!

I tried to buy an ebook reader today but Waterstones were out of stock of the model I chose, the assistant told me they had two on the stock system but they were both faulty customer returns...  I hope such a device will make referring to articles easier as I won't have to flick from session to session on the computer.

Well, I guess this is where it all begins.  I am looking forward to being on the receiving end of education for a change. 

Not a totally good day of e-teaching, a faulty projector and downloaded youtube videos that decided not to play.

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

Some short remarks:

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

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

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

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

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

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

I try to visit the Online Educa Berlin every couple of years because it is really the largest conference on e-learning. This year there was almost 2.200 participants from 108 countries. The largest delegation was naturally from the Germany but on the second place were the Danish then the Finnish and on the forth place  the British participants. I like Educa because there are lots of ways there to meet people and talk to them. Apart from exhibition booths, there are discussion session, topic lunches and informal gatherings. There are always good keynote speakers and sessions cover almost all possible topics.

This year keynote speaker was Talal Abu-Ghazaleh who talked about "Learning for All in the Digital Age". He said that changes and repairing isn’t enough, that we have to be creative and re/invent new things in education. Routine thinking isn’t enough and we should give more time to creative thinking.

Second keynote was Adrian Sannier with “The third way”. His presentation was quite a performance. He is skilled orator. He was also saying that we should reinvent the culture of traditional institutions otherwise emerging institutions will blow them away.  The only way to survive is to make cultural change in the institution. He pointed out three issues:

• Team Sport- no more individual teachers working for themselves and the only owners of specific information
• Keep score- if we prepare and design content, lectures, courses we should measure how they behave
• Fix what’s broken

 Last speaker was Charles Leadbeaterwho talked about learning strategies for changes in our approaches towards knowledge society. He shared his experience about education he gathered travelling arounf the world. In many places in the world (Africa, India, South America) education is very important as it brings, along with technology, a hope for better tomorrow for this people and they consider education almost as religion. Education provides them with choice in their lives. It made me think on Croatian education system. Have we forgot about  the importance of education? It seems that we care less about it then before. Another important issue he was talking about was that in education we should try to pull people into by motivating them and not pushing.

Afterwards I have listened presentations on the future of academic conferencing where presenters shared their experience and ideas in organizing online conferences. Especially Interested to me was conference to be held next year "Follow the Sun" as it will be fully online conferences using Adobe Connect, Second Life and Moodle.

It was interesting, are we going to abandon 2f conferences? Certainly existing model of f2f conferences (sessions with presentations) doesn't meet expectations of participants any more and there has to be more additional program and interactivity around it. Is the Online Educa going to be only online next year? 

Afterwards I moved to session on e-portfolio. I hoped there will be some talk about  using e-portoflio as the assessment tool but the main emphasis was on e-portfolio as a tool for self presentation to the future emplyers. There were statements that use of the e-portfolio increased tutors’ knowledge of learning in the other areas of course, about raising potentials of e-portfolio and so on. Presenters were mostly new in that field and that were their first experiences. I was interested especially in presentation “Mahara E-portfolio networking Platform as a Tool in RPL”

Well, you might ask what is RPL? It states for Recognizing Prior Learning. Presentation was from Helsinki University of Applied Sciences. They have started to use Maharain autumn this year and presentation was about Mahara as a very short course how to use it. They were talking about possibility to connect Moodle and Mahara and that in new Moodle 2.0 there is a possibility to export data from Moodle to Mahara. I know that the Finnish people are very advanced in the development and use of technology but in this case we (the University of Zagreb) are better. We have integrated Moodle and Mahara almost two years ago and we have single sign on. We offered this tool to the academic community and are trying to pull them into it. We have users who use it for self presentation but our focus is now to show them how it can be used in teaching and learning as an assessment tool. Well, when I shared my experience with the audience lots of them were surprised that we have been using Mahara for so long already. E-portfolio is not quite a new tool but it seems as it still has to be discovered. Discussion moved to topic of how to use it as a tool for self presentation to the employers and how to connect schools, labour market and employers.

On Friday plenaries were divided on the Academic and the Corporate sector. There was strong emphasis on the corporate sector this year and there were even sessions  called "Business Educa".

I followed the Academic plenary. I would excerpt presentation from Josie Fraser. She was talking about digital literacy's and learning communities. Did you know that number of users on the Facebook has increased from February to July this year for a 100 millions and that there were 500 million users in July ? Number is increasing rapidly. That is 19% of entire European population.

She also stated three models of literacy:

• Functional
• Socio-cultural
• Transformational

She has defined digital literacy as digital tool knowledge+critical thinking+social engagement. Digital literacy is a life long practice with skills in the context of continual development of technologies and practices.

There are always a lots of exhibitors. I would say that news are exhibitors from Africa and I was positively surprised with number of Polish exhibitors and their ICT solutions.  They have developed the tool for plagiarism which can be integrated in Moodle.

I went to the Business Educa session to see how different are these session from others. I have chosen session called "Learning in three dimensions, maybe four" . Besides f2f speakers there were announced two virtual speakers. I said announced because technology misbehaved :)) We waited and waited  as they tested and tried to connect but at the end we could hear one speaker briefly through someones' notebook and that was that. They have tried to connect them through the Skye but it didn't work. Well, when we finally focused on the f2f speakers we have lost concentration. There was a presentation about games, should we be doing them at work ? Speakers says YES as they help to learn new and unlearn the old context. So everyone, get the Call of Duty and learn :))

To me, new "discovery"  is Bert de Coutere from IBM, Belgium. He has written the book on "Homo Competens" which I'm reading at the moment. He said that with virtual worlds geography is history and we have "death of distance". Well, he has certainly read Virilio. We are moving into immersive world. Also they have made training courses for their managers in SL. They have created rooms there people are sitting at the table as to make them feel as the part of the group. I especially liked the world map which they have put on the floor and participants standed on the map at the place where are coming from.