See our “summer” production on e-learning 2.0 and quality.

[bliptv slGUrHcC]

At the UK ALT-C conference for last two days.

Great fun meeting everyone, drinking too much, talking lots etc.

Not overimpressed with many of the sessions though. To my mind far too many of the papers are not sufficiently challenging – and too much is being accepted at face value. (If this sounds too negative, Josie has just pointed out to me teh food is better than last year).

But this morning I did go to a great session run by Josie, Helen and Frances. The session was a Web 2.0 slam. After a brief and entertaining introduction to Web 2.0 tools and their uses pairs participants were asked to make a short (two minute) performance about some aspect of Web 2.0.

And very good the contributions were too. Great fun, lots of participation, lots of getting to know people – hi Sabina and Nicola – and we got to learn things too.

Anyway – if you missed the session or weren’t at the conference here is the session wiki – and links to videos of each presentation should be available in the next couple of hours.

Technorati Tags: ALTC2007, social software

The UK telecommunication regulatory body, Ofcom, have just published their annual report.

It is a substantial body of work and I have to admit I haven’t read it myself – relying rather on press and radio reports.

There seems to be much of interest in the report. For the first time women webusers have taken the lead in key age groups. At the same time an army of silver surfers has emerged and the over 65s are spending more hours online than any other age group, according to the Guardian.

Predictablyyoung people are spending more time on line, with growing use of social networking sites. This time spent appears to be at the expense of watching television.

Much of the BBC radio coverage was taken to the emergence of older people at heavier internet users than youth. Commentators speculated that this was due to the rise of internet commerce and to women using the web for social networking.

However, the preponderance of older users bares out the survey we carried out of the use of ICT for learning in Small and Medium Enterprises. We found older workers far more likely to use the web for learning than younger employees (albeit for informal learning rather than pursuing formal e-Learning courses). We speculated at the time this might be due to wider web access for more senior employees.

However, we felt, although could not proof, that older workers felt more at home using the internet for informal learning. Tomorrow I will have a look at the Ofcom report to see if it has anything to say about learning. But it remains my feeling that educational technologists have over-focused on developing learning applications and content for younger students and have failed to see the potential for extending and supporting lifelong learning and continuing professional development through the internet.

The term social networking also covers a multitude of activities. the radio reports tended to assume social networking as a leisure time activity – a replacement or chatting on the phone. Women do more of this than men, the reasoning went. I am unsure of this is true. But I would certainly suggest that much of the so called social networking is actually the use of social software for informal learning.

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Back from holiday (I didn’t look at a computer for a week!) and back to the blog. And what better start to the autumn season than this new report from the US National School Boards Association — a not-for-profit organization representing 95,000 school board members.

The study, funded by Microsoft, News Corporation, and Verizon, found the internet isn’t as dangerous as people think, and teachers should let students use social networks at school.

Tech. Blorge.com say the report warns that many fears about the internet are just overblown. “School district leaders seem to believe that negative experiences with social networking are more common than students and parents report,” the study reports. For example, more than half the districts think sharing personal information has been “a significant problem” in their schools — “yet only 3% of students say they’ve ever given out their email addresses, instant messaging screen names or other personal information to strangers.”

This chimes with my long held belief that in a risk adverse society educational institutions spend far more time worrying about potential dangers and ‘what if’ scenarios than they do in helping students learn how to use the internet safely and creatively.

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Why am I suddenly so interested in Blended Learning. Well…partly because Pontydysgu, for whom I work, is a partner on a project producing a handbook on Blended Learning.

Previously I tended to think the term is a little silly. As Frances Bell says in a recent blog post, all learning is blended so why use the term? But I think the various understandings of Blended Learning reflect a movement towards wider and more pedagogically considered use of ICT for learning within the ‘traditional’ curriculum, rather than being confined to Distance Learning or project based contexts. And that surely is to be welcomed.

A team of researchers from the Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development (OCSLD) has completed a review of the UK literature and practice relating to the undergraduate experience of blended learning. The study aimed to review existing research and practice on blended e-learning, identify key studies and issues, and make recommendations to guide future policy and practice.  The review team combined traditional desk research, with institutional visits and interviews with key personnel.           

The review report  addresses the current meanings of ‘blended learning’ across the sector, the underlying institutional rationales for blended learning, the monitoring and evaluation strategies being adopted for ensuring and enhancing the quality of blended e-learning.  The review has found that the student response to the provision of online information to supplement traditional teaching is overwhelmingly positive.  It is clear from the uptake of this area of technology by institutions, the rise of the use of the term ‘blended learning’ and the number of evaluative studies identified in the review, that institutions and practitioners are attempting to engage with blended learning and are doing so successfully.

This is certainly worth a read.

More on last weeks B-learning project meeting.

I invited Tony Toole from the University of Glamorgan to speak at the meeting. The CELT centre at the university is doing some interesting work which deserves a bigger audience. I’ve never been particularly keen on the term blended learning. On the one hand it seems to state the obvious, on the other hand it is difficult to know what it means. The CELT website itself says: “The phrase ‘blended learning’ can mean many different things to different people. Indeed the definitional complexities take up lots of pages of academic reflection. Phrases like ‘e-learning’, ‘online learning’ and ‘technology enhanced education’ are also equally open to a range of interpretations.”

However, I can see the attraction of the term in allowing a focus on pedagogic approaches to the use of technology enhanced learning. The CELT web site goes on to say: “At Glamorgan we have adopted a definition of blended learning which is designed to locate the development of these activities within the wider University agenda of enhancing learning and teaching. We would argue that Blended Learning involves:

CELT has produced an excellent handbook on blended learning – called ‘Smoothies’. It is available for free download from the web site and is well worth a look. I particularly like the practical approach and the provision of templates both for reflection and to develop additional resources for the web site.

I am much taken by a comment by Scott last week: “…we have entered an era of connected media. Connected media does not contain interaction; instead content items are nodes in a network of connections that are the focus of interaction. The content is inside-out. The hot content today is not interactive – Flickr/Photobucket, YouTube, iTunes, RSS feeds all feature non-interactive content, yet the content is highly connected via layers of interlinked metadata (del.icio.us, technorati, recommendations, hyperlinks, comments…).”

Of course he is right. And it is pretty easy to understand the implications in terms of how we work and learn and in how we develop e-learning content. It is less easy to work out how it effects how we report on our work. On the one hand our work will not be in one place – it will be scattered across different media and on different web sites. Last year we started looking at some of the implications of this in a seminar called ‘How Dude, where’s my Data‘. NB I have finally got together a wiki documenting at least some of the outcomes of that seminar.

But students are still assessed largely on the outcome of their learning and in terms of their competence. Not – here are my connections – but here is something I have done and here is something I claim I can do. This is far less easy to document in terms of network nodes.

It may be that the e-Portfolios of the future will have to be based far more on process than merely outcomes – more here is something I claim I am competent to do and here is the interactions I have made which allows me to say this – rather than here is a thing I have made which allows me to claim I am competent.

I still feel that competence is a difficult concept pedagogically and am worried that educational technologists will see competence as a mere unproblematic taxonomy. This matters. If we are to develop and implement e-Portfolios – let alone Personal Learning environments – we have to get clear on these issues.

In the discussions I am having over e-Portfolios there is increasing agreement of the use of blogging type applications as a way of recording learning progress. There is also an awareness of the power of personal networks for peer feedback as an aid to reflection. BUT – and it is a big but – institutions and e-Portfolio providers still (naturally) want some way of representing achievement. How can we do this dynamically? Perhaps competence looks more like a tag cloud or a mind map than a ‘skills journal’.

As part of my work for the the European Bazaar project I am  running a seminar entitled Social Software and Web 2.0: a challenge to the future of schooling. You can find details about the seminar and how you can take part below. But first here is the topic of the seminar.

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‘In a recent blog post Rita Kop says: “There is currently a vast array of communications options available on the Internet. Especially young people have grasped the potential offered to them by blogs, web pages and increasingly personal spaces such as ‘My Space’ and ‘youtube’ to make links with like minded people and to invite comments and messages to their postings. The speed in which communities are being formed has surprised most observers. Participants in these developments, though, take them for granted as expressing themselves to the wider world has increasingly become part of their life style.

The education world has not grasped yet the revolution that is taking place outside the class room. The discrepancy in the way technology is being used inside and outside the class room seems to be growing.

The availability of blog and web authoring tools and their ease of use have made that a vast number of people are now engaged in interacting on the Internet. It has created a huge leap forward in moving people on from being consumers to becoming producers of information.

As educators know, the pace of change within institutions is a lot slower than outside the brick walls, which raises questions about the ability of formal education institutions to keep engaged the generation that lives in a technology saturated world and has grown up with technology.”

At the same time researchers have begun to explore the idea of Personal Learning environments or PLEs. Rather than access a single learning application or a walled institutional learning area, the idea of a PLE is that learners can configure different services and tools to develop their own learning environment, bringing together informal learning from the home, the workplace as well as more formal provision by education institutions. The PLE is controlled by the learner and as well as offering an environment for accessing different information and knowledge allows access to web based publishing and other opportunities for creating content and expressing and exchanging ideas.

The idea behind the PLE is to harness the power and potential of social software and web 2.0 applications for learning.

As Graham Attwell has pointed out PLEs may be a seriously disruptive development, challenging the present model of schooling. The seminar is intended to examine the changing ways in which we are using technology for learning, to look at the potential of Personal Learning Environments and to discuss the implications for the future of our education systems.

This could include (but is not limited to) the following issues:

• Young people are increasingly using social networking sites and social software applications – but are they learning?
• What does the new uses of technology for learning imply for pedagogy and the future role of teachers
• What is the role of school in the future of more and more learning takes place over the internet
• How can technology supported informal learning be recognised
• How disruptive are the new technologies to the education system – is it just a bubble?
• How can Personal Learning Environments be reconciled with the social nature of learning?
• What are the implications of technology supported learning and PLEs for social equity within education?
• What sort of technological infrastructure should the education system be providing for learning?
• If content is increasingly created by teachers an learners and is open for access, how will we guarantee quality?
• Does increasing learner control and autonomy spell the end of centralised curricula?

and

• How dude, where’s my data?’

Click ‘more’ to find out how you can take part.

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Featured this on the Sounds of the Bazaar last week and a number of people have asked me if they could have a print version. OK, here it is.

I got an email from my mate Jenny in Pontypridd.

“Thought you might like to know what the e-generation (of about Owen’s age funnily enough!!) call the people of your generation  (puddings) who they grudgingly accept as nearly ICT literate (and therefore worth talking to occasionally) and are geeky about widgets and gizmos and boys toys (could even have been talking about you) (well, ok was actually talking about you)….

= Blackberry and Apple crumblies.

You’ve been called a lot of things in your time, thought this was one of the better ones – maybe you should admit to it in your blog at some point – or use it elsewhere.

I, on the other hand, don’t qualify. I am apparently an Apple tart – as is everyone with a white Barbie Mac, irrespective of gender.

Jen

PS There are more ….

    Dull but posey or posh bastards with the latest go faster gadgets they don’t understand are Toff E-puddings.

    Those wot pontificate at length about computers,  especially those avant garde types who shout from the rooftops about what the technology of the future is etc are I-screamers.

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Gooseberries (as in gooseberry fool) are those that have cheap tacky versions of Blackberries and think they are the real thing. By extension, anyone who has an MP3 player not an i-pod)

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A chocolate is someone who lives on his phone but has never progressed past texting and phone games and thinks technology stops there. Its also someone who is obsessed with updating to the latest model. (chocolate orange – keep up)

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The also-rans, wedded to Windows, are just Cakes. (PC’s-a-cake if you really want to know!!)

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Noisy anti-apple Windows champions, on the other hand, are ‘Eckles (cakes)

So I ‘spose you are a blackberry and apple crumbly with a dollop of i-scream who hangs around with a past-the-sell-by-date apple tart and hates cakes.

I’m increasing interested in exploring the use of social software for competence development. Of course i know of the problem in developing and agreeing on definitions. I like Sebastian Fiedler’s and Barbara Kieslinger’s assertion that:

…the concept of competence is a theoretical construct that refers to a human potentiality for action or its underlying dispositions.

Competencies acquisition and advancement

Why is this discussion so important? We are increasingly using social software for learning and knowledge development in dispersed communities if practice. But we have problems in understanding the relationship between ‘subject’ based knowledge and competence as applied knowledge and between collective knowledge inherent within the communities if practice and the abilities or capabilities of individuals to use and apply such knowledge.

And I have written before of my worry that techies will see this as a trivial issue only requiring the construction of a simple (probably learning objective based) taxonomy.

Anyway I have developed a proposal for a symposium at the European Conference on Educational research in Ghent this September. The overview for the proposal follows.

Learners are discovering new uses of the technology for learning including instant messaging, file sharing, social networking and  blogging. A growing number of reports have documented how the so called net generation use computers in their everyday life.  As so often happens when confronted with something new, the reaction of the education systems is to control and to restrict it. Young people are told to turn off their mobile phones to go into their lessons on communication! The US government is debating a law banning access to social networking sites in educational establishments.

Of course it could be asked what this has to do with learning? To a large extent it depend on definitions of learning. If we say that learning is an activity which takes place within an institution and guided by qualified teachers, then of course it has little relationship. But if we take a wider definition of learning as purposeful activity which leads to changes if behaviour, then a great deal of learning is taking place.

But it is not just the appeal of communication which is drawing young people to these technologies. It is the ability to create, to share ideas,  to join groups, to publish – to create their own identities which constitute the power and the attraction of the Internet for young people.

The symposium will examine the use of social software for competence development.  Social software is used here in the meaning of software that lets people rendezvous, connect or collaborate by use of a computer network. It supports networks of people, content and services that are more adaptable and responsive to changing needs and goals. Social Software adapts to its environment, instead of requiring its environment to adapt to software. In this way social software is seen as overcoming “the absurd distinction between e-learning and knowledge management software” (Bryant, 2003).

Research  undertaken into the use of e-Learning in Small and Medium Enterprises has found little take up of formal courses. But there was widespread use of the Internet for informal learning, through searching, joining on-line groups and using email and bulletin boards. Google was the most popular application for learning. Age was not a factor.

The symposium which is based on work undertaken in different European projects is focused on research into practice int the use of social software in different contexts. The aim is to provide a rich picture of the different and changing ways in which people are using technology for learning with the aim of developing longer term implications of how new technologies can be used for competence development.

The paper by Graham Attwell and Ray Elferink present research into how social software can bring together different forms of learning for lifelong competence development. Sebastion Fiedler and Barbara Kiesinger look at the relation between domain specific teaching and comptencies in self directed learning. Alexandra Toedt examines how games based learning can develop competencies. Veronika Hornung explores the relevance of traditional educational research methods and concepts of didactical quality and whether they can be applied to the evaluation of technology enhanced learning scenarios. All the contributers will focus on different research methods and approaches for technology enhanced elearning.