Artybartfast

On the afternoon of Friday October 2nd I’ll be giving a short presentation at the FOTE (Future of Technology in Education) conference in London. I’ll be sending out some ideas about social media (particularly blogs and Twitter) and what all of us can do to get more people (colleagues and students alike) building learning networks in which to share their thoughts and ideas.

Please feel free to add your views to the conversation; I’m particularly interested in reading about your experiences of using social media with students and your thoughts on the blending of formal and informal learning. I’m also very keen to hear from those working on the technology side and have a view about how we can make our systems more learner-centric. But all responses to any of the points made in the presentation are more than welcome!

I’m beginning to feel frustrated by my lack of technical knowhow. I’ve spent the last two years in a job where everyone thought I was some sort of programmer. One university bigwig glazed over whenever I opened my mouth and responded to whatever I said (even if I was merely commenting on the weather) with ‘oh, I don’t understand computers’. Some of the people I worked with thought I’d written Moodle. Most of them assumed I had some kind of power over it that they didn’t.

I am a educationalist. Useful technologies excite and inspire me. I can find my way around VLEs. I can set up RSS feeds. I know the HTML code for creating a basic hyperlink. But that, frankly, is about it. And now I’m having ideas about the kind of things that might actually be really helpful for learners, but my tech-literacy is so poor that I can’t actually be certain that they don’t already exist.

Something I’m very interested in at the moment is the idea of a user-friendly aggregator that allows learners to pull in feeds from both extra-institutional (blogs, twitter) AND institutional online ’stuff’ (VLEs, wikis); effectively the homepage for a Personal Learning Environment (PLE).  I think I understand the papers that have been written about it (mostly coming out of the JISC CETIS project). They use words that are familiar to me, like ’system’ and ’service’, but I suspect these words hold a context-specific (e.g. cybernetics) meaning that I’m not familiar with, so there are blank spots in the conclusions I make from the papers.

I guess the root of this problem is the graphical user interface and its near total detachment from the inner workings of a programme. Many of us working in e-learning support and development actually have little idea how the system is working – I couldn’t fix a bug in Moodle even if I had access to its soft underbelly. My general concern is that there is a widening knowledge gap between the educationalists and the technologists (programmers). My specific and personal concern is that I can see what I think is needed but I don’t have the skills to realise it.

Is it too late for me to learn?

Life has been fairly hectic of late as I prepare to leave Bath - and, for now, the world of distance education.

For just over two years I’ve been working on a transformative project with an MSc distance learning programme. It’s been an extremely rewarding project that appears to have made a great deal of difference to a lot of people – and I’ve learned a lot from it. A number of case studies have come out of it – most recently one on assessing students through online role-play (soon to be available through CEBE) - and the entire project has been written up twice; once from an e-learning perspective (to be published in Issue 4.2 of the Journal of Engineering Education), and once from more of a change management perspective. The latter piece of work was submitted towards an MA in Education, for a unit called Leading and Managing Educational Innovation. The full text is available here for those of you who are interested in the change management perspective of developing online/distance education. It’s a “warts ‘n’ all” account that doesn’t attempt to sweep anything under the carpet (I am getting better at metaphors these days)… enjoy!

Following on from my previous post, which asked: what can we do to push the frontiers of understanding about learning technologies in general and Web 2.0 in particular? I’d like to pose a question to all the educators out there who have recently undertaken a formal course of teacher education – a PGCE, a University Teachers’ programme – that kind of thing.

What I’d like to ask is… how was/is the issue of social and collaborative learning – in particular the use of web 2.0 tools to enable this – addressed within the scope of your course?

Perhaps technology-enabled collaborative learning was embedded into your learning experience, through online discussion and/or social bookmarking? Maybe this wasn’t actively encouraged or required by the course facilitator or tutor, but you or a group of you benefited from engaging with this type of activity out of your own choosing?

Perhaps the use of such tools in teaching and learning was explicitly ‘taught’ and/or assessed? This might have been a compulsory or an optional element of the course or programme.

It would be great if you could not only share your experience, but also your views. Do you think formal teacher education should explicitly cover the use of online tools for collaborative learning – forums, blogs, wikis, microblogging, RSS, social bookmarking, etc..? Should this be a compulsory aspect of teacher education? Should teacher educators go one step further and embed these tools and activities into the learning and assessment process?

Here’s my views and experience to kick things off…

I completed a PGCE in 2003, when ‘learning technology’ was not in the general educational vocabulary. The Internet did not figure within the learning outcomes of the programme. We had to pass a basic ‘IT skills’ test which focused on word processing and spreadsheets. My PGCE tutor – a brilliant and inspirational teacher – recently contacted me (via Facebook) to ask what the deal was with ‘e-learning’; it sounded like he was feeling pressured to change the way he taught (and what he taught) and was considering hanging up his lab coat. So I’m interested to hear about what’s going on with the PGCE and its approach to all things ‘e’.

At the institution I’m with at the moment, we have a relatively new PGCAPP course for new lecturers. ‘e-learning’ is ‘covered’ (sorry for all the inverted commas, I hope you understand why I’ve used them) in one (optional) unit, which aims to explicitly educate new lecturers on the use of web 2.0 tools and other technologies relevant to learning, and also encourages the use of web 2.0 tools like social bookmarking and blogging as learning processes within the unit. However, I do feel that the participants on the programme would be more likely to use these tools (and gain more benefit from them) if their use was embedded across the programme rather than restricted to a single optional unit. I also have concerns about having a distinct ‘e-learning’ unit and the message this sends out about the use of technology in education.

What do you think?

So… there’s a debate raging! Should we be encouraging learners to develop and use their own personal learning environments (PLEs) rather than hemming them in to an institutional VLE?

James Clay, Matt Lingard and Steve Wheeler have added some great points to the debate – check out their blogs if you haven’t already! In a thoroughly digested nutshell; many people feel that VLEs are controlled by the institution, can inhibit creativity and student control and limit the learning context. However they are also relatively secure, safe and provide a useful one-stop portal for learners and instructors. PLEs can broaden the learner’s network and learning context and may allow for more creativity and social presence. However, the majority of educators are not empowered to foster this kind of learning with their students.

I’d like to stick my neck out and say that, for us users of personal learning environments, there is no debate. We keep abreast of the tools available, we share case studies, we try things out and we make considered and educated judgements about what tools we use for our own learning and what we encourage and enable others to use. There may be exceptions to this – and if so, I’d be interested to hear them. Has anyone wanted to use a Web 2.0 tool in their teaching and/or learning and been prevented (either directly or indirectly) from doing so because of institutional policy?

Now let me stick my neck out a second time (ouch), and propose that, for the majority of the educational community (as highlighted in James’s post), there is also no debate. This is because the debate won’t mean anything to them and, as it’s taking place on Twitter and the blogosphere, they won’t be aware of it anyway.

For me, the debate is…
As the builders, users and advocators of personal learning environments (whatever we feel about VLEs), what is OUR role in the expansion of the learning experience?

Do we:

1. Rest on our laurels, proud of our rare abilities to build networks and have serendipitous learning conversations using a variety of media
2. Beaver away at our own projects, disseminate good practice and continue to gain status and credit within our own personal learning networks (and gather evidence towards our National Teaching Fellow applications)
3. Stand outside the library every day with a placard giving out free doughnuts and shouting “The PLE is coming and it will save you all”
4. Focus on finding innovative ways of getting the message out there to educators about learning technologies in general and Web 2.0 in particular – regardless of whether tools sit within or without the institutional walls…?

I’d like us to share stories of how we’ve taken the message out to the wider educational community; not just what we’ve contributed but also what we’ve learned along the way. What alienates people? What pulls them in? How can we present ourselves in a way that says to our fellow educators ‘I’m just like you’ rather than ‘I’m an expert’?

That’s the debate I’m interested in.

Due to popular request I’m posting this short video (5 mins) on how and why to use blogs to engage students in the curriculum. It’s due to be shown at the International Blended Learning Conference on June 18th but please feel free to comment here before and after.

There’s also an accompanying paper which presents further explanation of how I’ve interpreted Garrison, Anderson & Archer’s work about social and teaching presence (and also the work of James Farmer, founder of Edublogs), and it would be great to hear your views. Here’s a link to the paper…

Here’s the video…

You can watch a higher-quality version here: play WMV version

We kicked off the University of Bath’s e-learning summer seminar series today with a lunchtime seminar on using Moodle for Peer Assessment; something we’ve been doing a lot over the last 12 months with our distance learners in the Faculty of Engineering. If you missed it you can view a (shorter) video version of the presentation here; sorry if my mug gets in the way of things every now and again It’s around 12 minutes long:

http://wms.bath.ac.uk/live/LTEO/SSS1.wmv

We had a fine mix of educators present from a diverse range of disciplines (from physiotherapy to languages to maths), and they asked all the right questions plus some I wasn’t expecting too

Apart from talking about the Moodle workshop module itself and what it offers, we also got down to the nitty-gritty of how best to introduce students to peer assessment, and how to encourage them to take part. We considered the pros and cons of making peer assessment mandatory and/or awarding such an activity a proportion of the summative grade.

We also talked about what expectations we might have of the outcome of a first stab at peer assessment, and how we might present these to students, and we also talked about the levels of tutor support and guidance that might be appropriate in different circumstances.

It was especially interesting to hear from Sian Coxall (School for Health) about an online activity the School are piloting with their distance learners where students work together to develop their own criteria for a low-stakes assessment. It was also great to hear from Keith Graham, a physiotherapist in the Department of Sports Development, about some face-to-face peer-assessment and role-play work he’s been involved with.

There was quite a lot of interest in setting up a special interest group within the University for those interested in innovative assessment practices; this is something Andy Ramsden and I have discussed before so watch this space…

At the end of the seminar we shared ideas for how we might use peer assessment in our own contexts; these included getting peer feedback on a range of projects and assignment drafts prior to final submission, low-stakes peer assessment of presentations in the School for Health, assessment of videos of student performance in Physiotherapy, peer assessment of students’ websites on Maths topics, and as an induction activity for Masters’ level programmes.

All in all I personally found it a very useful session and I hope all the participants did too Please don’t let the conversation stop here; regardless of whether you were there today, please leave a comment with any questions, experiences or ideas you’d care to share!

Righty-ho… been focusing on my MA blogs – Assesslog and Metablog – over the last ten months. I think it’s time to get going again!

I’d like to kick off with some thoughts I’ve had about getting feedback from distance learners. If anyone else has any ideas on this I’d be delighted to get a conversation going The issue I suppose we have with getting feedback from distance learners is that they still pressured for time even after their modules have finished, and motivation to participate can be low – similar problems to getting feedback from (e.g.) full-time undergraduates, but the physical distance and part-time mode of study exacerbates the issues.

The University of Bath has standard unit evaluation questions, but in order to get good quality data for ongoing development we also design online feedback surveys through the Bristol Online Surveys tool (we used to use SurveyMonkey but BOS has better data reporting features). The standard unit surveys often focus on issues that aren’t as relevant to distance learners, and as we’re undergoing constant, intensive programme development we have particular things that we need good-quality feedback on. We may also from time to time want to sneak in a little diagnostic question to inform future developments that we’re thinking about – last time it was the SMS pilot, this time it’s about personal learning networks and what web tools the students currently use to find and maintain/manage contacts and information related to their work and studies. Questions like these not only help us figure out what direction to take, but can also serve to surreptitiously raise students’ consciousness of concepts like personal learning networks and how they already relate to their own practice.

Our surveys focus on which learning activities students use and value, and to glean constructive comments from them about the various activities, means of assessment and sources of feedback. A month after the surveys are completed, we respond to all students to summarise what they’ve told us, and what we’re going to do about it (and by when) – we’ve found that this is crucial for fostering an environment where students are motivated to spend time giving us feedback.

In addition to the formal module feedback surveys, we also encourage students to feed back openly through the module forums. Often we ask for immediate feedback in this way after a particular activity has run, especially if it’s the first time we’ve tried it out. We make an effort to engage in positive & constructive dialogue with any student who contributes; this has a motivating effect on others to join the discussion, and also serves to create an atmosphere of transparency & trust.

I went on a Leadership course a few weeks ago. I’ve finally got around to presenting my notes in a semi-readable format – the timing is just right as this stuff feeds into what I’m trying to do with the professional learning community (see my previous post).

Leadership course notes

So… I’m in the middle of an exciting project that aims to bring together the two teams for the ICM and EPS programmes. It’s going to be based around an online area where all the tutors, administrators and other staff involved in the programme are invited to join in a fortnightly discussion related to teaching and learning. Feeding in to this will be images and sound recordings from face-to-face discussions with the EPS tutors, who are based on-campus. I’ll be trying to weave together the discussions and glean some group conclusions. It’s going to be positive, it’s going to be collaborative, and I’m rather looking forward to it!