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November 29, 2010

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Hans Roes

Presences and Communities of Inquiry

Never have I seen so many different definitions of presence as in IDEL week 10. 

The Lombard and Ditton (1997) article goes very in depth with the concept of presence, in the end however, their concept is a rather technical one: "the perceptual illusion of nonmediation" when it comes to users interacting which either other through media or users interacting with media. Learning is only mentioned very briefly twice. The first one is virtual reality systems for skills training, the second mentioning is about the memory effects of media use, where the effects are inconclusive, it can either enhance or reduce memory. I wish anybody could tell me the relevance of this core reading for the IDEL course. What was it that I was supposed to learn from this article? What did I miss?

The Garrison and Anderson reading is a useful follow up to my blog post in week 6 and 7 where I discussed Sanger versus Adler and Brown, since it looks at learners as both individual "independent thinkers" and "interdependent, collaborative learners". I also like the following quote: "It is a serious mistake to categorize teaching and learning in terms of extreme positions."   (p. 23) which echoes the week 8 and 9 discussion we had about a flatter hierarchy between teachers and students. This is carried on in the description of a community of inquiry as "teacher guided, non-authoritarian community" (p. 27). At first, I found the concepts of social, cognitive and teaching presence confusing, in that I found the use of the word presence here confusing - and, completely different from the way in which Lombard and Ditton use the term. This confusion can only be reduced by thinking of the highly abstract model of a community of inquiry, presented by Garrison and Anderson, as a group of students and teachers that interact which each other. Table 3.1 describing the community of inquiry in terms of presences, categories and indicators seems to me an example of an overall learning / teaching framework that I have been looking for since I started this course. It might be useful as an overall high level blueprint when designing learning environments. At the same time, I wonder whether this framework is not highly influenced by an idealized class room metaphor.

Garrison and Anderson's abstract model comes to life in the Stodel et al. (2006) article. One can also read this article as giving practical recommendations when setting up e-learning environments. However, the extremely low number of students participating in this qualitative research (10) and the heavy gender bias (9 females, one male) should make one cautious in generalizing any results from this research. 

These shortcomings are not present in the Shea, Li, and Pickett (2006) article that report quantitative research on a much larger sample (and, in passing, the whole idea of a net generation is effectively refuted once again). Shea et al. also ground their research very broadly by referring to work by Bransford (new to me), Chickering and Gamson (mentioned quite frequently at the Educause 2001 conference in Indianapolis that I attended, IIRC, they also wrote an article about how these principles could guide setting up e-learning environments), and, again, Garrison and Anderson. Again the community of inquiry framework is brought to life in that they develop a Teaching Presence Scale to measure the different aspects of this concept. The overall conclusion that "a strong and active presence on the part of the instructor, one in which he or she actively guides and orchestrates the discourse, is related both to students' sense of connectedness and learning." (p. 185) is an important one. Although it is not a completely unexpected result, it has some interesting implications. One is that it emphasizes the importance of the teacher in the learning experience. Such a result could be useful to counter arguments that the role of the teacher will diminish in e-learning environments. Another implication has to do with scalability - if students in an online environment require the same amount of attention, and thus time, by their tutors as in an offline environment one wonders whether there might be some economic advantages to e-learning. On the other hand, reading the Stodel et al. articles and the comments of the students in there, one might also wonder whether this is such a surprise: students seem to basically ask their teachers to replicate the class room experience in an online environment. Our ideas of what teaching and learning are, or ought to be, are obviously deeply rooted. 

It's the same experience I had in developing digital libraries over the past 20 years, libraries are deeply associated with physical books in peoples' minds. And trying to replicate these physical environments in e-environments  leads to weird results - the way the Garrison and Anderson book was available through the MyILibrary interface was a prime example of this. True innovation can only happen when we go past our deeply rooted ideas of what a thing, an activity should be.

Garrison, D. and Anderson, T. (2003), Community of inquiry, chapter 3 of E-learning in the 21st century (London: RoutledgeFalmer) pp.22-31

Lombard, M. and Ditton, T. (1997), At the Heart of It All: The Concept of Presence. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 3 (2)

Shea, P., Li, C. S. and Pickett, A. (2006), A study of teaching presence and student sense of learning community in fully online and web-enhanced college courses. The Internet and Higher Education , 9(3)

Stodel, E. et al. (2006). Learners' Perspectives on What is Missing from Online Learning: Interpretations through the Community of Inquiry Framework. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 7 (3)

Keywords: IDEL10

Posted by Hans Roes | 1 comment(s)

November 26, 2010

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Hans Roes

My trouble with the word presence

(I just posted this in a thread / conversation with Rory on the WebCT discussion board, but I think it's worth keeping it here in the blog as well.)

Thanks for the reply, Rory.

I think part of my problem is that I reserve the word presence for something physical. I think I would be more comfortable with the phrase 'virtual presence', but even that is problematic. When you use the adjective virtual, you're still trapping yourself in an analogous way of thinking. For instance, the phrase 'virtual space' seems to refer to a space, again a very physical thing, to me. To me, SL is not a space at all, it exists as bits on servers and my notebook that are connected through a network and becomes 'visible' (cartoon style) through my monitor, and audible through my speakers. I can type in a chatbox, or use my computer's mike to talk, but in the end its all just bits. So, 'I' can never be in SL.

Similar with this thread. I type this in a word processor and will later cust and paste this text to the WebCT discussion board. I don't think of myself as being 'in WebCT'. WebCT is also just bits. When I have posted my text there, than you might say that text is present there, but not me.

Your explanation of cognitive presence was helpful, thanks for that.

Now on to the implications for e-learning. I think that as long as we keep talking about virtual classrooms, learning systems as Blackboard &c., we're thinking in terms of analogy. We're thinking in terms of how something 'e' can replace some activity in a traditional learning / teaching setting. To me, the interesting possibilities of technology appear at the edges, when we try to think of things 'e' as extensions. What does 'e' allow us to do that we could never do in a traditional classroom setting?

One example might be the MScEL program. I think this exists only because you can do this whole program online. It might be hard to find enough students in Scotland to make this program economically feasible. Since it is now possible to recruit students internationally, world wide, the equation has changed considerably. Yes, of course you could also do it as a traditional long distance learning package, but the structure and communication that you can add in an e-learning setting helps students to stay focussed and schedule time on task.

Another example would be collaborative research, with a group of graduate students one would be able to digest a large amount of literature and build a knowledge base, for instance in a wiki, very fast. This would be different from the situation in which all your students read the same textbook, or same articles. Even more interesting: the wiki might stay on for students in coming years, for them to expand and to build upon.

 

Keywords: IDEL10

Posted by Hans Roes | 1 comment(s)

November 25, 2010

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Dakun Yang

The Business Field needs Distance Education and the stakeholders

Business leaders continue to look to the talend pool in higher education, we are facing growing competition. Business no longer has the time nor the resources for extensive retraining....we need the education system to develop these thinking....business interest in using online higher education continues to grow.. (V. Withers, 1992).

 The business environment truely needs the distance education, the organisations could go through the online management courses to retrain their senior managers and HR managers in stead of organising the courses by themselves, it could save time and also bring new and  fresh blood to the organisation. Normally, the stakeholders are from Universities or academic and instituational organisation, these organisations have a faculty and administravtive staff whos duties are different from the universities, school system or training department, and these stakeholders may supply the most academic, authority, latest information and management theories or structures to the companies who needs the new blood to improve their organisational capabilities.

Posted by Dakun Yang | 0 comment(s)

November 18, 2010

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Hans Roes

IDEL week 9: Web 2.0, misconceptions, and possible implications for learning

(Warning, this is a long post, over 2,500 words. Than again, this should compensate for several smaller posts, and I needed the space to draw my thoughts together.)

Web 2.0 is probably one of the most abused terms in the past five years. And because of all this abuse, probably also one of the least understood. Any discussion about web 2.0 should therefore start with going back to the origin. Web 2.0 was introduced in 2004 by Tim O'Reilly (2005)  in order to describe a paradigm shift that was going on in the world wide web. In his article O'Reilly describes seven 'design principles' in order to make the shift clear. 

These design principles, and some keywords to describe them, are:

1. The web as platform: services, participation, network effects (a service gets better the more people use it), users add value.

2. Harnessing collective intelligence: connections, links, user engagement, collect data and compute on them in order to improve services further, wikipedia - a radical experiment in trust, tags and folksonomies, RSS, permalinks, blogs as conversations.

3. Data is the next Intel inside: user generated data (Amazon recommendations), mash-ups.

4. End of the software release cycle: release early / release often, perpetual beta, user feedback, users treated as co-developers.

5. Lightweight programming models: loosely coupled systems, re-use of data, APIs, hackable, remixable.

6. Software above the level of a single device: iTunes as store, as music management program, as feeder of iPods.

7. Rich user experiences: the rise of web applications as good or better than stand alone software (GMail)

Four years later O'Reilly and Batelle (2009) published a follow-up paper: Web Squared, where the 2 from 2.0 has now been promoted to an exponent. This meme has not (yet) caught on. More importantly, the follow-up paper shows how the principles described in 2005 are still at work an at an accelerating pace. More and more people are creating more and more data, by participating in social networks, by location data from their smartphones &c., and businesses that can structure and compute on these data, and put them to good use thrive. 

The reason I start out with these two readings is that there is much more to the term web 2.0 than social media alone. And there is more to social media than meets the eye. Take a blog, for example. On the face of it, it enables a user to easily create web content, without having to know any HTML. The blog becomes more interesting when it uses permalinks to refer to other blogs and becomes now part of a conversation. Below the hood, something even more intriguing is going on: through the RSS feed of the blog, search engines can almost real-time index this ongoing discussion, computation on those indexes can detect trends. 

Also, I think it is important to note that in the principles mentioned above there is nothing that relates directly to learning (although the Websquared paper uses the metaphor of the web itself as a learning entity, we, the users, are teaching it by feeding it ever more data). The design principles are at its most powerful at web scale. Most learning takes place at a very small scale. Compare for instance the IDEL course where blogs are mainly used for sustaining a dialog between tutor(s) and student.

Against that background, I started reading the 2009 JISC Report, Higher Education in a Web 2.0 world. The report suffers from a number of misconceptions. The first is that it assumes that there is something to the whole net generation discussion, whereas we have seen that this is over generalizing. The second misconception is that it equates web 2.0 and the social web. The third misconception is even hilarious: "Decisions on whether or not to implement Web 2.0 technologies are, however, the responsibility of each institution individually having regard to its particular ethos and circumstances." (p. 31) Sorry, but that is not how it works. Those technologies are out there, our students are using them, and even 11-16 year old students know how to circumvent use restrictions by schools (Clark et al., 2009).

Another annoying thing in the JISC report is the frequent mentioning of something called e-pedagogy, defined as "learning with and / or through technology". Is that all there is? Okay, they sense that the affordances of new technologies call for thinking about new educational approaches. And there is a hint to constructivism on p. 36. 

And to end positively, there is at least one web 2.0 characteristic that found its way in the report, we find it on p. 38: "The involvement of students in the development of tools for learning and teaching cannot be achieved by fiat and immediately; rather it is a position to be developed over time. However, we believe that the resulting outcomes for tutors, students and HE overall stand to be highly positive and rewarding." This echoes O'Reilly's idea of users as co-developers.

The interesting question is of course whether students and teachers would be comfortable with a more flat hierarchy.  We discussed the ECAR studies during the net generation week that show that most students are asking for good old f2f teaching. But who knows, maybe British students are different. So what a joy to find a report by the National Union of Students (NUS) on their perspective on technology, just published last month (HEFCE 2010).

At least style-wise, the NUS report echoes the JISC (2009) report with its numbered paragraphs. The approach has been a bit different though, in that they explicitly used Facebook and Twitter in their methodology. Of course there is the expected rant that teachers are lacking technology skills. On the other hand, the students themselves also ask for skills training, for instance in searching, although a survey they undertook showed that 88.6 percent regarded themselves a 'effective online searchers'. (p. 4) The biggest surprise we see in paragraph 102: "Yet students with a working understanding of ICT may have a transformative effect on teaching practices, no longer being passive, but actively involved, and educating lecturers en route." (p. 28) Even students can see themselves in a role as co-developers. 

Of course, the space I devoted to these two 50+ pages reports is too limited to do them justice.  To me, they both show that there is a huge uncertainty - among students, teachers, and administrators - when it comes to web 2.0, or even more limited, the social web, and its possible implications for (e-) learning. 

Then again, this whole idea of students as co-developers is already happening, for instance in the Open Wetware (http://openwetware.org/wiki/Courses) project, a community of bio-engineers:

"As more and more people got on, it became apparent that the collaboration could benefit other endeavors, such as classes. Instead of making do with a static Web page posted by a professor, students began to create dynamically evolving class sites where they could post lab results, ask questions, discuss the answers and even write collaborative essays. "And it all stayed on the site, where it made the class better for next year," says Shetty, who has built an OpenWetWare template for creating such class sites." (Waldrop, 2008)

Or, to quote William Gibson: "The future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed." (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson) 

It should also be noted that there is another web 2.0 principle at work here: re-use of data.

On to the other readings. Ravenscroft (2009) starts out with the now familiar misconception that web 2.0 equals social software, but asks the right question:"What are the implications for learning?" (p.1) Skipping the article summaries there seem to be some interesting references to earlier work of Ravenscroft hinting at learning design that I will want to follow up on. Ravenscroft's comments on the tension between 'highly structured' learning / teaching and the 'more collaborative, volatile and anarchic nature of the social web' (p. 5) echo the smooth / striated distinction from Bayne in earlier weeks. Since that tension interests me, I chose two articles in the special issue to delve more into that.

Clark et al. (2009) show how young (11 - 16 yo) learners and their teachers are struggling with the invasion of new technologies and how these new technologies are blurring distinctions / crossing lines between the young people's social environments and the school environment. With the growth of the mobile web, these tensions will only become stronger. The sloppy use of data in the article (table 2, p. 61, where the total percentages cannot adequately be traced back to the constituent samples) did not invite me to go much deeper into this article. I have reported my issues with table 2 to the lead author, Wilma Clark.

The Trentin (2009) article is a prime example of striating an originally smooth tool, the wiki. The good thing about the article is that it also introduces some 'rules for distributed writing' (p. 45), although introducing these rules in itself already implies a structuring of an environment that is intrinsically anarchic. On the other hand, even Wikipedia has developed guidelines for its contributors (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents/Policies_and_guideli). 

This is also in sharp contrast to the activity for this week where Bayne has chosen for an almost completely smooth approach in hardly offering any guidance or feedback in wikifying David Silver's article. I added some text, I added some links, I created a page for suggested readings, I embedded a video, and I added a comment in order to see whether we can have some 'meta' discussion on where the group wants the wiki to go. But as of November 18, there is not much progress in this area.

Back to Trentin. The methodology he describes for arriving at grades seems to me quite a burden for teachers, although one could choose to offload some of the work to students. Interestingly enough, peer assessment seems to correlate well with more objective measurements of activity (p. 48) which would have been an interesting thing for follow-up research. Instead, Trentin wants to build a wiki that collects the data he needs for his grading methodology. Well, good luck to him with that striated approach.

From wiki's to hypertext is but a short distance, so on to the final reading for these weeks, Landow (2006), Hypertext 3.0, where the 3.0 refers to the third edition of the book. Some observations:

  • The book obviously evolved as hypertext, unfortunately, we have to do with the linear printed text (and a scanned image at that).
  • I searched the Victorian Web (http://www.victorianweb.org/) for the hypertext version, but no. Obviously the author is not very much into Open Access yet, and boy, did that website look Web 1.0ish. Converting the thing to a wiki might make more sense.
  • Deja vu. In week 4 and 5 we had Gee (2003) the linguist that seemed to be developing his own learning theory based on his experiences with a particular computer game. Now we have a literature professor sharing his pedagogical insights gained from working with his students on hypertext. As with Gee, it is not clear how these experiences / insights might be generalized, how they might fit in an overarching pedagogical framework.
  • There's Landow's remark on p. 279 about hypertext 'providing the means of integrating subject materials of a single course with other courses.' I noticed that the Holyrood PBWiki is two parts, for two different courses. Alas, I did not have access to the wiki of the other course (Digital Futures), but I guess that was a deliberate design decision. 
  • On p. 281 we find the beautiful word 'extended' again. Yes!

Landow's discussion also echoes what we see in the Open Wetware project mentioned earlier (Waldrop, 2008). Material is created by students and becomes available as a resource for future students (p. 285). I also love the way how Landow describes how he redesigned his assignments in order to show students the advantages of hypertext (p. 286). Many more good points in this text, I truly enjoyed it.

Words that keep on recurring are extension and design. From our web 2.0 discussion we might add re-use and students as co-creators. I've also mentioned the smooth / striated distinction a few times.

With regard to that last distinction there's another interesting experience that I mentioned on the WebCT discussion board for these weeks:

"Comparing week 6/7 with week 8/9 (so far), I think what we see is what I hereby would like to dub as the WYGIWYE design principle: what you get is what you expect.

Week 6/7 might be said to be 'over designed', where week 8/9 looks rather 'under designed'. Lots and lots of activities and literature in week 6/7 plus a tutor actively steering the discussion board. Result 218 messages on the db for those weeks. So far we have 21 messages on the db for week 8/9.

So one learning outcome for me is that a design needs to find a balance, especially when it comes to what you expect your students to do."
(IDEL WebCT Discussion Board, November 12, 2010)

The observation led mostly to students expressing their relieve about the 'breather' they got. There's was also the remark by Bo Causer that it must be frustrating for the IDEL team to 'teach teachers'. To which Nigel Mehdi replied that it is the recursive element here that fascinates him. Exactly, I am learning as much from using the many digital environments set up for us by the IDEL team, and the way they where set up by them, and the way they are being 'led' by the tutors, as from the literature.

The experience also sheds yet another light on the smooth / striated distinction. However smooth you set up / design a learning experience, your students will expect some structure, some leadership, some expectations (expect expectations? can you say that? well I hope it is clear what I am hinting at), or ... some striation. Again it is not either / or, it's all about balancing a design.


Clark, W. et al. (2009), Beyond Web 2.0: mapping the technology landscapes of young learners, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 25, 56-69 

Gee, J. P. (2003). Learning and Identity: What does it mean to be half-elf? In What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy (pp. 51-71). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

HEFCE (2010), Student Perspectives on Technology - demand, perceptions and training needs, Report to HEFCE by NUS, http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rdreports/2010/rd18_10/rd18_10.pdf (Accessed November 9, 2010)

JISC (2009), Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/heweb20rpt (Accessed November 5, 2010)

Landow, G (2006) Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in a Global Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), extracts: 278-291 and 302-309 

O'Reilly, Tim (2005), What is Web 2.0. Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html (Accessed November 9, 2010)

O'Reilly, Tim and Batelle, John (2009), Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On, http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/28/web2009_websquared-whitepape (Accessed November 14, 2010)

Ravenscroft, A. (2009), Social software,Web 2.0 and learning: status and
implications of an evolving paradigm, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 25, 1-5

Trentin, G. (2009), Using a wiki to evaluate individual contribution to a collaborative learning project, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 25, 43-55

Waldrop, M. Mitchell (2008), Science 2.0 – Is Open Access Science the Future?, Scientific American Magazine, April 2008,http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=science-2-point-0 (Accessed November 15, 2010)





Keywords: IDEL10

Posted by Hans Roes | 1 comment(s)

November 15, 2010

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Dakun Yang

Earlier Thinking on the Internet Shaping Society

"The main tendeny in the literature has been to analyze how the internet changes society, most analysts ientify fundamental societal changes" (Wrote by Jan, N)

The internet is truely influencing our society, the range is widely, which includs education, business and so on. Nowadays, people could buy clothes online instead of go shopping, our life style has been changed by internet, and also the business environment has totally changed approaching the IT technology. Everytime when the IT companies innocated new software or created successful website, many stakeholders will rapidly find the market information and fast reflect the potential market, targeting their customers in order to earn profts by internet. My own experience is that in Nov, 2008, China's offical department announced that San Lu milk powder contains unhealthy elements, suddenly parents scare to buy domestic milk powders products and most of them are trying to buy powder on Taobao website, the website is like Ebay or Gumtree, because they trust some oversea brands which like New Zeland brand" Fonterra". At that moment, I was in New Zeland, and most of NZ people were trying to sell NZ powder in Chinese Taobao, and they received the oder and then post the products to the customers. So we can see that how the technology and internet influence our life and society, its not only influence on a single society, but also in globalization. 

 "The lack of regulation can also by explained in terms of the internet being such a quickly developing and changing technology" (Wrote by Jan, N)

Also discuss the same topic as the above, after a few months, Chinese government seted regulation about selling and delivering the milk powder to China, and then limited the milk powder's quota, because there are many different kinds of brands were selling on the Tao Bao website, some of their products are not safety, consumers can not recognize the real and good brand on these oversea milk powder brands. Indeed, internet develop and change too fast and the governments should keep monitoring and build up regulation on the internet in order to protect the customer's benefits. 

Posted by Dakun Yang | 0 comment(s)

November 11, 2010

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E-learning, Politics and Society 2010 - Dakun Yang

The Darker Side of the Internet: "Oracles"

Based on the topic of Cyberspace and the Concept of Democracy (Wrote by Fred Evans), An considerable paragraph shows at below:

"Many commentators acknowledge that cyberspace and the internet have a "dark side" ...... the technocrat control, panoticism or pervasive surveillance by the government or by corporations and escapism"

The above statement obviously described the China's internet circumstance. The example is that most of famous online companies have banned in China, such as  Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Youtube. So people can not use these website in China, because of these websites includes some speeches or imformations which include positive influences to Chinese government. The government is the unique party in the China, so the party does not want to listen any bad words about it and the party chose escapism, which avioid to listen a positive information or new vioices make by people dont like them, but these people are still exist. In this year's July, the world's biggest research engine company Google, left the Chinese market, because Chinese government try to "technocrat control" in Google's company, so Google believe that they need to be democracy, because their service aim is to give people speech of freedom and voices and identity, as Fred Evans wrote in his topic "our voice is our identity", so Goole insisted to service "voices" to the Chinese people, finally, they have to leave the Chinese market by the government's power.

However, I believe that China's democracy of internet could be change in the future, because the country is still a developing country, the mainly things of the country is to increase the economic, maybe after few years, when China become to the developed country, the democracy of people and internet could be released naturally. 

 

Keywords: "Dark side", Democracy, escapism, Google, technocrat control, Voice and Identiy.

Posted by E-learning, Politics and Society 2010 - Dakun Yang | 5 comment(s)

November 04, 2010

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Hans Roes

Some thoughts on portfolios

I read a Dutch book on portfolios years ago (can't find it at the moment). As I remember it, portfolios were discussed in that book as a way to support competence based learning, and the portfolio was presented as a tool for students to 

1. collect and present evidence of their learning / acquired skills
2. reflect on what they had learned and to identify gaps in their knowledge and skills
3. to plan future learning activity

With that in mind, I had a look at Pebblepad, and it seems to me that all these things can be done there. Would it be something I use? No, I already have a solution for that in my PLE. If the course would require me to use Pebblepad, I would use it, you might use it as an alternative for the course blog, for instance. Another reason though I would rather not use it is that I could not find an easy way to export stuff from Pebblepad, so I'd fear a potential lock-in.

On to the readings. Ayala's article reads as a pamphlet and raises questions. Second paragraph for instance: portfolios as an attempt to solve curricular issues. What issues? Seventh paragraph: no discussions mentioning student-centered pedagogy (...) have infiltrated the discussion on e-portfolio (...). That's not my recollection of the Dutch book that I read (I really need to find that back). Eleventh paragraph: democratize, all for it. But what about: should be build on a constructivist knowledge paradigm, a little elaboration would have been nice here. Twelfth paragraph: discussion about why portfolios are valuable have not appeared in the literature, I don't think so.

The Barrett / Carney reading. I have written elsewhere that the eskimo snow words story is an urban legend. But there is something basically wrong in this article. First they make a big fuss about incompatibility of accountability, learning and marketing purposes. No, they are all related. And even a quick glance of Pebblepad shows you that you can manage your assets there for all three purposes. And indeed, Barrett / Carney even see this on the eight page: "Students can draw from the same collection of evidence as they respond to and create multiple portfolios."

Third page, a survey of six people?! Really? Can you get this through peer review?

Okay Clara, this concludes my work for the last two weeks, I'll be hitting the road again tomorrow and won't have much time until Monday.

Looking at the activities list, I see that I have not played around with WebCT. I had the plan to create an alternative - smooth, in Bayne's words - 'learning environment' in the WebCT wiki, just to show that a more level playing field between teachers and students is possible, even in WebCT. Alas, haven't gotten around doing that.

Keywords: IDEL10

Posted by Hans Roes | 1 comment(s)

November 03, 2010

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Hans Roes

VLEs and PLEs (and PPs)

In another post, I have described the way I see my personal learning environment. It is personal, since I have set it up myself. So naturally the biggest issue with the Wilson et.al (2006) core reading I have is: why would anybody think that they can design a PLE for me? It would immediately loose all personality.

In a sense, I was also offended by the article since many ideas presented there are echoing the seminal paper by Tim O'Reilly, What is Web 2.0 (O'Reilly, 2005), yet we find no reference at all to that paper.

Back to my PLE. It was the easiest thing in the world for me to plug in all the Edinburgh e-learning stuff. Simply add the URL of the Holyrood Park to my bookmarks, and from there, most of the time without an extra login I have access to all the other systems in use, including the VLE.

The Wilson reading sees VLEs in general as an example of 'dominant design', in my view, you can't really call VLEs a dominant design since there are many differences between VLEs, although you can see a convergence as they all have incorporated web 2.0 technologies in the past few years. Even WebCT has a wiki, although the way that is integrated (or rather bolted on) is rather crude. Some VLEs, like Moodle distinguish themselves from other products by explicitly stating that they support a specific pedagogy, constructivism in the case of Moodle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodle). VLEs in for profit institutions are usually much stronger on statistics and management information (Kolowich 2010). One might say though that VLEs tend to have a sort of dominant architecture in that they were all designed to support a more or less traditional educational concept. They are added to a traditional mix of lectures and core readings. And most teachers use them for very basic tasks like uploading lecture slides. Sure, they have added all these features in response to the market, but what you get is over-featured applications that try to do too many things and, as usual, do nothing really quite good.

This is also recognizable in the IDEL setup. The VLE is basically used for two things: content pushing and online discussion. For the rest, other applications are preferred. I am starting to feel more comfortable using the discussion board, but more substantial posts go to my blog as well, where I have more of a sense of ownership (yes, there is a connection here with the portfolio discussion) since I know for sure that at the end of the course everything in the discussion boards will disappear, or at least become inaccessible to me.

To end my discussion of the Wilson reading: I checked two of the projects they mention in their article, Plex (http://www.bolton.ac.uk/IEC/EducationalSoftware/PLEX.aspx) and TenCompetence (http://www.tencompetence.org/web/guest). Both projects seem dead to me.

So again not a very good reading, sorry to mention it. The Downes article cited in Wilson (footnote 24) might have been a better choice, but then Downes is somewhat controversial. What struck me most about the article is the near absence of any pedagogy, the references to lifelong and lifewide (a new term for me, I know it as 'real world learning') felt almost obligatory.

Then it struck me that I had read two articles (Mott and Wiley, 2009 and Mott, 2010 earlier this year, one of which explicitly departs from a pedagogical point of view (Mot and Wiley, 2009), Bloom's 2 sigma problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_2_Sigma_Problem).

Mott and Wiley (2009) go on to show that the VLE is mainly used by teachers to 'increase the efficiency of the administrative tasks of instruction'. They see it as a missed opportunity that the VLE has not been used to innovate teaching methods. VLEs have three major shortcomings: (1) it imposes a student-throughput model, (2) the VLE does not afford learners the opportunity to contribute to the learning process, (3) the VLE is a walled garden, disconnected from the larger world. (2 and 3 can be recognized in the Wilson core reading.)

Mott and Wiley propose an alternative, which they call open learning network, which they see as a 'hybrid between the CMS (VLE) and the PLE. This is however only very sketchy worked out.

Finally, Mott and Wiley state that 'our assertions about the weaknesses of the CMS paradigm should also be taken as critiques of the predominant pedagogical model in higher education'.

One might also say that VLEs are used mostly for substituting administrative tasks, rather than as extensions, offering new opportunities.

Jen responded to this article:

>many thanks for these references, Johannes. I am intrigued by the author's claims that an open learning network represents something radically different from a learning management system - its imperatives would seem to be exactly the same (to manage and institutionalise - to striate in Bayne's terms? - student work). On the other hand, the notion that content, environments and discussions should be persistent (in the cloud) rather than trapped inside modules, does seem quite radical (in the context of an LMS/VLE).<

It's not radically different since it wants to marry both PLEs and VLEs. My point of view is that the PLE is mine and mine alone, something that I manage myself. And yes the persistence notion is rather radical and something I don't trust the university to take care of. Although I have raised the idea in 2001 that libraries could create repositories for (parts of) portfolios (Roes, 2001). To shamelessly quote myself:

"By taking a knowledge management approach to digital portfolios, these results can be shared over the Internet or, more likely, the intranet. This implies a new task for the library in the management and indexing of these student portfolios in such a way that they too can be integrated with other information resources offered by the library. In this sense, digital portfolios are an extension of the first domain identified -- digital libraries and digital learning environments -- but now include the intranet. The emphasis here is on the institution as a knowledge organization, and the integration of that knowledge with other information resources."

Oh yeah, I have also a PP, a personal portfolio: http://www.hroes.de/artindex.html

Steve Kolowich (2010), The For-Profit LMS Market, Inside Higher Ed, November 1, 2010, The For-Profit LMS Market, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/11/01/lms (Accessed November 3, 2010)

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)

Tim O'Reilly (2005), What Is Web 2.0. Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software, http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html (Accessed November 3, 2010)

Hans Roes (2001), Digital libraries and education: trends and opportunities, D-Lib Magazine, July / August 2001, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july01/roes/07roes.html (Accessed November 3, 2010)

Wilson, S., Liber, O., Johnson, M., Beauvoir, P. Sharples, P. & Milligan, C. (2006). Personal Learning Environments: Challenging the dominant design of educational systems. TENC Project: Publications and Preprints. http://dspace.ou.nl/bitstream/1820/727/1/sw_ectel.pdf (Accessed October 25, 2010)

 

Keywords: IDEL10

Posted by Hans Roes | 1 comment(s)

November 02, 2010

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Hans Roes

Off on a tangent. Sanger vs (a.o.) Brown and Adler

Jen Ross suggested I'd read the Sanger (2010) article in the WebCT discussion board. Sanger's article is partially a response to an earlier article by Brown and Adler (2008) that I enjoyed very much.

Sanger opens with the question how the internet is changing education, an interesting question indeed and one that I find a bit missing in the IDEL readings (so far). Sanger discusses three 'strands of thinking about education and the internet'.

1. 'Instant availability of information online makes the memorization of facts unnecessary or less necessary.'

2. 'The virtues of collaborative learning as superior to outmoded individual learning.'

3. 'The insistence that lengthy, complex books (...) are inferior to knowledge co-constructed by members of a group.'

In fact, only the second issue responds to Brown and Adler. Issue # 1 is more against Tapscott, while issue # 3 is against Shirky. All three arguments by Sanger are really off in my view, although he has the best of intentions.

The basic error that Sanger makes in all three arguments is that he more or less accuses his self chosen opponents that they claim the internet is replacing something. I did not do a word count on replace and substitute and their variations, but you'll find that these words are used a lot. Sanger misses the point that the 'fancy new set of tools' (p. 19) that the internet offers are extensions, a point that is also being made in one of the readings for this week (Cousin, when she paraphrases McLuhan that 'every kind of technology is an extension of our nervous system'.)

Memorization. I totally agree with what Sanger has to say here, it's just that I don't think that anybody seriously claims that we don't have to learn facts because we can look them up so easily on the internet. You need to have at least a basic understanding of a subject to be able to judge the facts. But once you have that, the internet is a great help. (And the invention of writing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedrus_(dialogue) look for Thamus and Theuth) did not kill our memory, neither did the invention of the printing press.) And of course it is easy to come up with examples from education, especially from primary and secondary education where kids do an assignment by cutting and pasting from the internet. I am afraid that in most cases that was just the assignment they got. Kids usually do what you expect them to do. And of course, the internet is also great for debunking wrong facts or urban legends, like the one in the Barret / Carney for reading these weeks. Eskimos have many words for snow? Wrong (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow).

Social learning. If I remember correctly from the Brown / Adler article, they don't cite really hard evidence that group learning leads to better results than individual learning (is there?). Yet again, Sanger makes the same move and posits that his opponents say that group learning should replace individual learning. Again, extension is the better word to understand what is going here. Sanger should know that, since he cites Brown / Adler as talking about 'extending education' (p.20). He goes on to state that you can read the Decamerone online, 'but you must mentally process it yourself' (ibid.). Of course, but discussing the Decamerone in a group will lead to a better understanding, especially if you don't have much background in medieval Italian literature. Sanger calls writing an 'essentially solitary act' (ibid.). It is, but writing a blog, or post that is being read by my fellow students surely is different from writing an assignment that is merely being glimpsed at by my tutor (as in most primary and secondary education). I am writing for an audience, so I need to choose my words carefully, and I might get feedback. On the same page, Sanger goes on to criticize online group discussion: 'My notion of a good scholar  - perhaps standards are changing - is someone who is capable of thinking independently'. I think it works the other way around: by engaging in critical discussion with others I learn how to discuss with myself.

Books. Again the word replacement. 'Is participating in online communities via social media a replacement for reading boring old books'. (p. 22) Social media extend my reading experience. I write small book reviews an publish them for my friends (most of whom are more professional acquaintances) on Facebook. I pick up ideas for reading from there. Another quote: 'Blog and Twitter posts, Wikipedia and YouTube contributions, which arguably weaken our attentional capabilities (...).' Uh no. My 50+ RSS feeds act as an important filter. Wikipedia came up as I tried to remember where it was that I heard that the Eskimo many words for snow story is bull. Sometimes I use YouTube as jukebox when discussing songs with my friends. And of course books are not being replaced, book sales go up and up every year. E-readers are taking off real fast now.

I have said it before, I see the technologies that are so rapidly developing among us as opportunities for enhancing learning experiences. But we need to learn how to put them to good use.

Sanger, Larry (2010), Individual Knowledge in the Internet, EDUCAUSE Review, March / April, http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM1020.pdf (Accessed November 2, 2010)

Brown, John Seely and Adler, Richard P. (2008), Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 EDUCAUSE Review, January / February, http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0811.pdf (Accessed November 2, 2010)

 

Keywords: IDEL10

Posted by Hans Roes | 1 comment(s)

November 01, 2010

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Hans Roes

iGoogle and my PLE

So one of the tasks is to create our own personal learning portal using iGoogle. I had played around with iGoogle some years ago, but never found a good use for it. Not sure what problem iGoogle could solve for me. Amazingly enough, iGoogle does not appear to have evolved in the past few years, so my impression is that Google does not love the product very much itself.

I already had described the way I see my own PLE, and how it works for me.

Naturally, I tried to replicate what I now have in iGoogle, that lead to quite some disappointment.

  • Searching for gadgets to add to your iGoogle page made me wonder: is this Google?? Try a search for 'editor' (I wanted a replacement for Notepad). You'll get results that have really nothing to do with what you're looking for, very unlike Google.
  • No gadget to connect to files. As an alternative I finally created a Dropbox account and added the Dropbox widget, or gadget. Works, but I guess that uploading my library would take about a day.
  • I can't find a way to add links to the iGoogle page, I would have liked a link to, for instance, the Holyrood Park Hub. A workaround might have been a gadget for delicious, but searching for delicious only seem to give gadgets related to cooking.
  • Amazingly enough, there are no gadgets for the Google products that I use frequently: Google reader, Google Docs.
  • I found a way to add Google Mail, but that's only handy to check whether new e-mails are coming in, but then I'd need to look at iGoogle all day ;-).
  • I was able to find a Webskype gadget, it does not work in Google Chrome, it appears broken in Internet Explorer.
  • iGoogle has a chat option, but that is not tied to my Windows Live Messenger. I found a widget but that gave an error message in IE.
  • Added a todo gadget to make a task list for IDEL week 6 and 7.

Even with the few widgets / gagdets on the page, the page is already overcrowded. See the two screendumps (igoogle1 and igoogle2 - nope, I managed before, but can't find how I did it, yet another frustration, please see the discussion board where I will repost and hopefully manage to attach the files) I made to get an overview.

 

So, mapping my PLE as it is right now is impossible.

Keywords: IDEL10

Posted by Hans Roes | 1 comment(s)

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