Archive for the ‘e-learning 2.0’ Category

More on the summer school – how could it be organised?

June 14th, 2009 by Graham Attwell

There has been a lot of discussion regarding my post on the TEL summer school held two weeks ago in Terchova in Slovakia. Many of the respondents have replied at some length. Most were at pains to stress the positive sides to the event, whilst pointing to how it could be improved in future. It was a desire to see a public debate with participants in order to think how the Summer School could be improved that motivated my initial post.

Two main themes emerge, I think, from the different comments. One is the format of the summer school, with a desire expressed to move beyond a traditional lecture style of delivery to more active means of shared participation in knowledge sharing and development. The second is to question the divide between teachers and learners.

Ambjorn Naeve concludes  his contribution to the discussion by saying “Let me end this comment with a constructive suggestion for the future. Next year, let us have the lectures recorded in advance (e.g. in Flashmeeting), and the powerpoints (or other documentation) made available to the students at least one month in advance. Let us then require of the students that they watch these presentations and come up with (and post) at least three (non-trivial) questions for each of them. And let us then devote the lecturing time together to discussing the questions that have come up?”

Here would be my contribution based on the extremely successful recent Educamp in Germany.

The summer school traditionally runs for five days, from Monday to Friday. I would run the first two days as a barcamp event. All participants, teachers and students would be free to propose workshop or lecture sessions. Thsi would allow everyone to present their ongoing projects and work.

After the first two days, a new agenda would be drawn up based on the major themes emerging from the presentations and concerns of participants. These themes would be the basis for the following two days of intensive workshop activities. The workshops would develop their own aims, with one being to practically advance knowledge and ideas around the theme they were discussing.

The final day would be devoted to an exhibition where each thematic group presented their work to others, incorporating, if they wished, multi media presentations.To add a competitive edge, there could be a (small) prize for the best exhibition.

Given that the summer school is residential, the times for workshop activities could be moved around, to allow for activities, not juts sport, but active learning activities, to take place in the day, with more workshop being scheduled for the evenings. Participants would themselves be encouraged to organise the social programme, with a premium on social and learning activities.

Of course, this raises the issue of the role of the ‘professors’ at the summer school. Instead of presenting lectures, they would have the task of guiding and mentoring the thematic groups and of supporting individual and group learning.

None of this contradicts the ideas put forward by Ambjorn. But rather than just providing lectures in advance of the school, why not stage a series of online interactive seminars in the run up to the event. And lets use a social networking platform to aggregate and discuss our work, both in advance of the summer school and throughout the event, linking up with other researchers not fortunate enough to be able to attend., Indeed, the thematic groups could draw on the wisdom of the distributed community to help in their work and discussions.

In other words, let us develop a pedagogy for the summer school which reflects our own emergent uses of TEL for teaching and learning.

I would welcome futher suggestions of rhow next years summer school might be organised. I have agreed to pass on all comments on the blog to the Stellar network who will be responsible for organising the 2010 event.

Issues in PLE development

June 8th, 2009 by Graham Attwell

I go through periods of having little new to say about Personal Learning Environments and times with many new ideas. I am at the moment in one of the latter periods – inspired by so many interesting talks at the European Technology Enhanced Summer School last week and at over the weekend at a meeting of the Mature-IP project partnership.

Here are a few of the things I have been thinking about (and will write about over the next two weeks):

  • the emergence of some consensus about a mash up (Mupples) approach to PLE development based on widgets
  • the relationship between (informal) learning and knowledge development and maturing within organisations
  • The relationship between individual learning through a PLE and organisational learning
  • the idea of bricolage as the basis of an emerging pedagogic theory of learning outside the institutions
  • the potential for a mobile device based PLE (code named a WOMBLE – Work and Mobile Learning Environments)
  • The digital identity of learners expressed through a PLE
  • the idea of appropriation (linked to bricolage) of software and applications for use for learning
  • the potential of Google Wave as a platform for a PLE

Anyone care to add to this list?

Refelections on the European Summer School

June 7th, 2009 by Graham Attwell

I am back from the European Summer School on Technology Enhanced Learning. The summer school, which is targeted at PhD students and is co-organised by a number of European research projects and networks. was held near Terchova in the Slovakian mountains. It is a very beautiful area. Unfortunately it was wet and cold for the whole week. Worse the network connection was insufficient for 90 people and only skype worked with any degree of reliability.

Ok, these problems happen. But what of the summer school itself? Here are comments from students at the summer school:

“I didn’t want to bonded with lecturers …I would prefer to meet ‘relevant’ people, to have discussions, to know at least what today’s lecture is about.  Interesting things are mostly between lectures”.

“Bar Camp Format”
“Work during workshops, not just listen activities”
“ Get Summer School participants (after the selection period) involved in the organisation of the Summer School programme”
“ Not too much aggressive advertisement & self-appraisal of projects”
“why so much focus on projects rather than areas of research?”
“Presenters should have better presentation skills”
“more practical sessions”
“Lecturers & students F2F and get advice on PhD topic”
“Take account of cultures – religions & dietary requirements: why ask if there are dietary requirements and fail to offer choice or take account of the responses to the questions asked”
“Use less traditional approach.  Instead of a 50 min lecture & a 10 min discussion: the lecture does a 10min and the remainder discussions.  Maybe having 2/3 lectures and then splitting into groups to discuss specific issues”
“More online activities leading to the summer school week”
“Internet connection is a must”
“The organisers should know the topic of all PhDs. The could form groups of interest with a competent advisor so that they can discuss & work on the topics”
“Voice for the novice researchers”
“More from an educational background”
“It seems that we are mostly IT and some of us are education oriented, but we have an agenda for ‘computer science for educators’ or ‘education for IT people’ – that is confusing!’
“Round table discussions. E.g. meet with 6 people for 15 mins & then switch & mix-up again”
“Equality between lecturers & students.  Instead of ‘traditional’ lecture styles, the sessions could be improved by actually using TEL”
“A session with PhD students only – like the one we had on the first day”
“More ‘democratic’ choice of topics for the lectures/workshops”
“A presentation should be 10 slides, 20 mins, 30 as a min font size”
“Workshop on how to create posters”
“There should be a meeting to get to know each other at the beginning &  topic outlines from students”
“Can we control/select the topics of classes?”
“It would be interesting to have game-based learning sessions”
“Lectures & projects in short form”

Overall, students were critical of the summer school. Whilst talking about the uses of technology and new forms of pedagogy, the summer school was organised in a somewhat old fashioned didactic format. There was a sharp distinction between lectures and students (the lecturers even were allocated better bedrooms in the hotel!) and each morning was given over to a series of one hour lectures. Many of the afternoon workshops tended to be lecture like in format with limited interactivity and limited opportunities for discussion between participants. And whilst there were a number of interesting presentations, as the feedback suggests, it seemed that the agenda or programme for the summer school had been determined by offering slots of the sponsoring projects, rather than being based around the needs of the participants. The general philosophy appeared to be one of knowledge transmission, with PhD students supposed to learn through listening to the views of experts (this was sometimes a little surreal as we talked of moves from an expert model to crowd sourcing and knowledge exchange through Web 2.0).

Nevertheless, a free pool table, the great Slovakian beer and so many talented people guaranteed many fascinating conversations. A big hullo to Maria, Mike, Ashley, Chris, John, Ricardo, Eva, Carl, Zina and everyone else. Any time you fancy a game of pool, juts give me a shout.

Sounds of the Bazaar goes Mobile

May 26th, 2009 by Graham Attwell

Regular readers will know that I love audio. I have a great face for radio or so they tell me! And for a long time I have been wanting a way to easily record podcasts on the run. So when I say a tweet from Josie Fraser about audioboo I was instantly curious.

OK it looks a bit underdeveloped. A basic web site and recording limited to the iphone. But it is a great idea – a youtube for audio. And so we bought a microphone for the ipod touch, signed up for an account and away we went. Here is the first offering. You may be relieved to know audioboo only allows you to only record 3 minutes at a time.

Listen!

Crowd sourcing my presentations

May 26th, 2009 by Graham Attwell

Much as I enjoy doing presentations at conferences it does seem oh some Web 1.0 ish. So i am working on how to make such events a little more interactive. Twitter is great – if conference organisers can make available a second screen at events. At least then people can ask questions during the presentation (I always tell people they are free to interrupt me but they seldom do). I have messed with buzz groups during the presentation but this always seems a little artificial.

I like the presentation Dave Cormier did at the WIAOC conference last weekend. I wasn’t at it, neither have I watched the video but his community crowd sourced slides both provide a wealth of shared learning and give the impression the event was a lot of fun. For explanation of the idea behind it see his blog.

I am going to try doing something like that next week at the ProLearn Summer School in Zilina.

I have just been writing a long overdue abstract for my keynote presentation at the DFG Research Training Group E-Learning conference on Interdisciplinary approaches to technology-enhanced learning (IATEL) in Darmstadt in June.

I was not quite sure what to talk about – the overall theme I was given is Learning in Networks – from learning in the Network to the learning Network and back.

So I am crowdsourcing the abstract to blog readers. What have I missed out? What other ideas should I include? All contributors will get a citation on the final slide!

Abstract

Graham Attwell will look at the evolution of learning networks.

The presentation will also look at the development of educations systems and the spread of mass education through an industrial model with curriculum based on expert knowledge. He will go on to examine key issues including control at the level of content, institutions and curriculum.

The presentation will look at the changing ways people are learning and developing and sharing knowledge using Web 2.0 and social software tools. Such practice is facilitating the development of personal learning pathways and integration within dispersed communities if practice.

The presentation will examine recent ideas and theory about learning in networks including the idea of rhizomatic curricula and connectivism.

As learning networks become more important, the issue of digital identities is attracting more attention. How do individuals interact in learning networks and whet is the role of tools such as Twitter? How important is the idea of place within learning networks?

The presentation will consider how learning takes place in Personal Learning Environments drawing on the work of Levi Stauss on bricolage and Goffman’s dramatulurgical perspective.

Finally the presentation will consider the implication of ideas of learning in networks and Pe

Web 2.0 cultures and conventions

May 25th, 2009 by Graham Attwell

The Guardian newspaper has published a very level headed article about the findings of the recently published UK report on “Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World.”

I haven’t read the report yet (it is on today’s to do list) but according to the press release “findings from the report show that students typically spend four hours a day online, a figure that looks set to rise as teenagers make increasing use of Web 2.0 technology in their daily lives.  One of the challenges for the higher education sector is therefore to ensure that staff can keep pace with the advancing technology which many of their students rely on every day, using the technology to enhance the student learning experience.”

The Guardian interviewed Martin Weller and Brian Kelly. Much of what they said was predictably sensible. I was, however, intrigued by this quote from Brian Kelly.

“Some university student unions are also warning students about online ethics and the danger of slagging people off online, or posting pictures of drunken nights out that they wouldn’t want their mother or future employers to get their hands on, he says. “We’ve had no time to develop a culture. Everyone knows how to answer a telephone but it takes time for those conventions to come about, and there are no conventions for cyberspace.””

I think he is wrong. One of the remarkable things about Web 2.0 and social software is how fast cultures and especially conventions have evolved and become accepted, despite the novelty of the applications. Take Twitter. Twitter is still new and fast growing and despite the lack of any rules (or hardly any) a vibrant culture has emerged. RTs. FollowFriday. Hash tags. And so on. Just take the hashtag convention. That is emerging in a context of social use and is negotiated informally within the community of users. This is where i think Twitter get it right and Facebook get it so wrong. Twitter encourages the community to negotiate its rules and conventions. Facebook tries to impose the rules though manipulating access to APIs and data and ends up producing something which we feel we do not own. And it is the ownership and sense of ownership within the community which enable us to define our own digital identities, rather than having them imposed on us. Enough for now, but I will return to this issue.

NB Congratulations to Jisc on their latest website overhaul. The incorporation of Twitter comments and a general more Web 2.0 approach have transformed the Jisc site into an interesting and vibrant space – that is not something you can say for many institutional or agency web sites. European Commission – take note.

E-learning, work based learning, e-portfolios, mobile devices and more – the podcasts (2)

May 24th, 2009 by Graham Attwell

Here are the remaining podcasts recorded when making the Jisc e-Learning Show.

Rob Ward is Director of the Centre for Recording Learning Achievement. He talks about progressions routes and e-Portfolios in this interview.

Sandra Winfield is project manager at the Centre for International e-Portfolio Development at Nottingham University. She talks about the use of e-Portfolios to support work based learners.

Tony Toole, from the University of Glamorgan, talks about the use of mobile technologies and social networking applications to support work based learners in Wales.

Alan Paull is a consulatant who has been working on the development and implementation of the XCRI standard for exchanging course information. Here he explains what the standard is and how it can be used

E-learning, work based learning, e-portfolios, mobile devices and more – the podcasts

May 24th, 2009 by Graham Attwell

I did a series of interviews to gather materials for last weeks Jisc e-Learning Show radio broadcast. If course we could only use very small parts of the interviews in the programme.

Now we are releasing the full version of the interviews as podcasts. There is some rich material here for anyone interested in the use of technology to support e-Portfolios, work based learning, mobile learning, the exchange of course information etc. This is the first of two posts – the second will contain the remaining interviews.

Bob Bell is Fe in HE coordinator for the Jisc Northern Regional Support Centre. In this interview he talks about work based learning.

Clive Church works for EdExcel. He is particularly interested in the development and use of e-Portfolios.

Derek Longhurst is Chief Executive of Foundation Degree Forward. In this interview he looks at the challenges changing forms of learning and knowledge development pose for universitie sand discusses future policy options.

Lucy Stone is project manager at Leicester College, where she is introducing mobile technologies to support work based learners.

Lucy Warman is developing a Jisc project designed to involve students in sharing experience at the University of Central Lancashire.

Thanks to all the interviewees for their time and ideas and to Dirk Stieglitz for post production work.The music is called Musiques en Principauté de Boisbelle and is composed and played by DaCapo. It can be found on the Creative Commons music web site Jamendo.

The music is by

The Jisc e-Learning Show podcast

May 22nd, 2009 by Graham Attwell

Here is the podcast of  the first broadcast of a new pilot live internet radio programme, the Jisc e-Learning show. The programme is based on a symposium on Lifelong Learning, led by Jisc earlier this spring.

The issues discussed include

  • the use of mobile technologies and e-Portfolios to support learners.
  • engaging with employers
  • Project mainstreaming and sustainibility
  • developing and supporting work based learning
  • changing the culture of higher education
  • funding models and policies

and much more.

Guest include Derek Longhurst from Foundation Degree Forward, Clive Church from Edexel, Lucy Stone from Leicester College, Tony Toole from the University of Glamorgan, Bob Bell, HE in FE consultant for the northern region, Sandra Winfield from Nottingham University and Rob Ward from the Centre for Recording Achievement

the show also features a live panel discussion with Oleg Liber from CETIS, Claire Newhouse from the Lifelong Learning Network national forum and Andrew Ravenscroft from London Metropolitan University.

This was a pilot programme and is a little different in style from our sometimes raucous Sounds of the Bazaar. We would particularly appreciate feedback. Is this the kind of programme Jisc should put out? What do you think about the format? Is the programme too long (or too short) and what would be the best time we could broadcast on? What about the music – too much, too little (or too classical :)). Do you have ideas for future Jisc radio shows? You can leave comments below or I would especially appreciate it if you could leave any comments on the Jisc e-Learning blog which also provides a link to the podcast feed.

The music is called Musiques en Principauté de Boisbelle and is composed and played by DaCapo. It can be found on the Creative Commons music web site Jamendo.

The programme was produced by Dirk Stieglitz.

More about the eLearning Show

May 20th, 2009 by Graham Attwell

I have spent the last two days putting the finishing touches to tomorrows pilot internet radio programme – the Jisc eLearning Show. The programme, which is being broadcast at 1800 UK Summer Time, 1900 Central European Time, is based on a symposium on Lifelong Learning, led by Jisc earlier this spring. Part of the programme is prerecorded and I have spoken to both policy makers and to project developers about the issues. The interviews were very interesting – indeed my major problem was choosing what not to include in the final edit for the programme.

The projects are engaging in much more than the introduction of technology and developers were keen to talk about changing pedagogic approaches and the policy implications of the work they were doing. The projects covered a wide range of applications – including the use of mobile technologies and of ePortfolios to support learners. It was encouraging to hear of the degree of engagement with learners in developing technology based projects. There was much discussion on who the ‘new learners’ were and what were their needs. The issue of change management was a recurrent theme, as was that of sustainability. Many of the projects were looking at the process of embedding developments within the every day practice of institutions. But this could raise cultural issues, especially when it came to work based learning. From a work based learning approach this was involving new partnerships with employers.

And as Tony Tool pointed out – elearning raises many issues for the funding models presently being used. Equally the development of work based learning may call into question the present policies for extending participation in higher education.

Fascinating stuff. Tomorrows programme will pick up on these issues and more with a live panel comprised of Oleg Liber from CETIS, Claire Newhouse from the Lifelong Learning Network national forum and Andrew Ravenscroft from London Metropolitan University. You can listen to the programme by going to http://radio.jiscemerge.org.uk:80/Emerge.m3u . The stream will open in your MP3 player of choice. You can take part in the chat room at http://tinyurl.com/sounds08. Just add your name and press enter – no password required. And you can leave comments and questions on the Jisc elearning blog.

We will also be making the full versions of the interviews available on the elearning blog as podcasts after the show.

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