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 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?

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!

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?

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.

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

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.