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I’ve been working quite abit this weekend on my Spanish course. I am getting behind and need to put some effort into it. Had fun using a set of flashcards associated with the course and using these as a basis to create a vocab mindmap using the Freemind mind mapping software. How sad am I? Also was sent a great link to an online dictionary. via a tweet. At the same time I have just asked the students on our H809 course how they are finding things so far. It’s really interesting to reflect on the learner/teacher thing. The students who have responded so far have been positive overall about the course, but are finding it tough going. They have also been discussing the balance of activities on the course and in particular the role of the discussion forums vs. their blogs. Opinions as you might expect are mixed. Some students like the reflective nature of blogs, others don’t and prefer the more targeted discussions which are possible in the forums. We wanted the students to get a feel for the technologies so that they could then make up their own minds on the different affordances of the technologies and their own personal preferences. Reading their discussions on this in the forums and their blogs they sure seem to be doing that! In terms of my own learning - how’s it going so far? Nerve-wrecking in short. Being a student again is such an emotional thing! I’ve been close to dropping out,  even reduced to tears, and in contrast felt great when I’ve got a good mark in an assignment or when I feel I am making progress. So what do I think are the different aspects of learning and their impact on me? I think there are four main things, listed below - along with my reflections on my own experience with these:

1. The content and activities - I have to say the materials for the course are superb, beautifully constructed and pedagogically excellent. There are a nice blend of different types of activities - reading, writing, listening, speaking. The pace is good, the exercises well structured and of about the right length, the quality of the audio files is great. 
2. Structure - one of the reasons I wanted to do the course was to be given some structure, to be forced to do something within a timeframe. The course is doing that for me - my study calendar drives me, the periodic assignments force me to work at a certain pace. I have been wanting to learn Spanish for years and have numerous audio cassettes but have never got very far. 
3. Accreditation - not really important for me, I don’t need this professionally, but relates to point 2 - ie forcing me to work towards a goal within a given timeframe.
4. Support - on the plus side the feedback I’ve received on my assignments has been excellent - detailed and helpful. Now the negative. One of the other reasons I joined the course was to be part of an online community with other students. I can see that that’s happening in our H809 course - the students are supporting each other and the tutors provide excellent overall support and guidance. On my Spanish course communication is via an audio conference, Lyceum, once a fortnight, and that’s the problem - I can’t access it, which means I have no communication what so ever with the other students, and no chance to practice my speaking with others. Pretty major problem for a language course!! I am not technically stupid and use alot of other audio and video conferencing systems as part of my job - I used Eluminate on Friday in a video call with Canada. But despite many, many, many hours of trying and hours on the phone to the help desk, I still can’t get in. I’ve been amazed at how emotional I’ve been about the whole thing - really really upset and really really angry. It’s sobering to be reminded how tough being a student is - I think we forget that sometimes as teachers. 

I’ve been meaning to get a copy of Camtasia for ages and so was really pleased to see, via Tony Karrer’s blog, that version 3.1 is now available to download for free alongwith SnagIT. Was also interested to see the interactive conversational approach to getting across concepts being adopted by Jellyvision and the simple but effective video clips that commoncraft produce (both found via Cathy Moore’s blog). Am looking forward to experimenting with them.  Clearly these have fantastic potential educationally, offering alternative means of presentation and interaction with learners exploiting the full potential affordances of the media. Two questions: How can we get these ideas taken up by teachers, many of whom are still struggling with the basics of their institutional LMS/VLE? How can we ensure that right mix of tools, mapped to learner preferences? 

John Naughton has a nice post about slow journalism:

You can get junk food on every high street. And you can get junk journalism almost as easily. But just as there is now a Slow Food movement, I should also like to see more Slow Journalism.          

And is the same true for learning? I’ve mentioned before Peter Goodyear posing the idea of slow learning. Clearly the social and communicative aspects of web 2.0 technologies have tremendous potential educationally. But to what extent have these been realised?  As usual the hype doesn’t quite live up to the reality.

 This slide picks up on the framework we developed in our computers and education paper, arguing that different learning theories can be viewed along three dimensions (individual-social, passive-active and information-based-experience-based). It then lists some of the key characteristics associated with web 2.0 against what can be argued to be the key characteristics of ‘good pedagogy’. Sooo just as slow cooking needs good ingredients, an expert cook, time and space to indulge in the experience of enjoying good food, the same can be applied to slow learning… The ingredients are the ways in which the learning is supported or scaffolded through good pedagogy, the expertise is the designer of the experience and those who facilitate or support the learning process, time and space is the enabling environment using the affordances of technologies capitalising on the social and communicative dimensions of web 2.0 technologies. Well that’s the theory anyway, I don’t think we are quite there yet…   

This diagram is a variant on a slide I have used in numerous presentations over the last few years and interestingly I think it’s still as relevant in the current “web 2.0 meme” discourse, although I might have a go at extending it to explore more explicitly some of the pros and cons specifically relevant to social networking… informality, privacy, openness are words that immediately spring to mind.

  The pros and cons of technology Below is a transcript of the text that normally goes along with this slide.. What’s fascinating about technology is the way in which whatever aspect of it you look at there are pros and cons… So yes the internet now means we have access to vast quantities of materials, but there are increasingly real issues about information overload and issues about assess, and about assuring the quality and authenticity of materials.  The wealth of new tools for communication offer opportunities for new forms of dialogue and collaboration but bring with them associated issues of a need for new forms of literacy skills. The internet provides the potential for new forms of community, but often learners are confused and feel isolated in these virtual environments. Some students relish the opportunity to communicate online, others don’t and prefer face to face interaction, lurking in online discussion forums. Also communication is different online, a slight joke in a face to face setting can be viewed very differently online, causing offense. The internet offers us instant access to information. Which means events unfold immediately as they happen. However this can result in a rather surface approach to what is happening as the Iraq war or September the 11^th demonstrated, we watched the events unfold online but somehow they did not seem real – it’s  like watching a movie. Finally there are the potential for new forms of virtual representation, such as medical simulations, virtual worlds and the ability to adopt personal avatars. However this can result in a feeling of a lack of reality not knowing what is real and what is fake. I recently felt this very strongly when I was being shown around the Nursing school’s Virtual Interactive Practice suite [This was at Southampton University in ca. 2005] which is a mock hospital ward with interactive computer dummies where you can simulate heart attacks, etc. I was for a moment confused by which were the dummies and who were the students!  Would welcome people’s thoughts and comments on this!! 

 

 

 

 Following on from the last post, another thing I have been playing around with in the last few years is using identification of the pedagogical affordances of tools and tasks as a means of selection criteria in the creation of learning activities. The figure lists ten common pedagogical affordances that a teacher might want to promote - the opportunity to provide students with an authentic experience, getting students to critically reflect, enabling them to communicate or collaborate with others, etc. Then the idea is that as part of the design process you decide to what extent particular tools or tasks promote these pedagogical affordances and use this as a basis for tool and task selection in the creation of a learning activity. We tried this out as an exercise in some learning design workshops we ran in the OU earlier this year and the feedback was generally positive, i.e that participants found this a useful and novel way of thinking.     

Mapping pedagogy, tools and activities is something I have been interested in for a long time. What is the relationship between these things and can understanding/articulation of this relationship help use design better learning activities? So I really like Steve Warbuton’s diagram about interpreting technologies in use. He maps technologies along three dimensions 1) isolated-social, 2) active-passive and 3) formal-informal. Some of the examples he gives include a wiki as a collaborative document, an RSS feed about a course announcement, a blog as a reflective journal. What’s nice about this is the dimensions bringing out the characteristics mapped to the use in situ – ie the context will change where something is located on the 3D matrix. This really resonates with a framework we developed. (A description of some of this is in a Computers and Education article we wrote). 

 We reviewed different learning theories and came up with three key dimensions 1) individual – social, 2) active – passive, and 3) information – experience and then mapped where different learning theories were situated in relation to this.

We had a nice table in the paper showing how different learning theories were situated in different parts of the framework,  so behaviourism was individual, passive and information focussed, whereas experiential learning was high on social, active and experience based. In some further work I went on to look at how technologies in context could be mapped onto this framework - in much the same way that Steve has done. For example have a look at some of the final slides from a presentation I did at Queen’s University which shows that a) a learning object moves around the framework depending on how it’s being used and b) how ‘chat’ which you would ordinarily think of as high on the active, social dimensions, moves to the passive, individual dimensions when the archive of the chat is used by an individual after the event as an information source (something we found in some of our evaluation studies on online courses). This got me interested in trying to map – pedagogies, tools and activities and I spent a lot of time doodling tables and matrices trying to look at the relationship between these. However I always ran into the sand because although initially this seems an obvious thing to do as a means of articulating the affordances of tools and how they can be used for learning the problem is that the inter-relationship of these three things is very context specific. So it’s the ‘it depends thing’. I can use a pencil as a tool to write with (which you could argue is one of its most prominent affordances) but I can also use it as a teaching aid to talk about the properties of lead, to discuss the social evolution of tools for writing, or to spark a debate on modern design. So is chat better for communicating than a discussion forum? What are the pros and cons of each? It depends… sigh… {As you can see this is still very much a work in progress!!}

 

How does the technological medium through which we choose to give feedback to students influence the nature of that feedback? I’m very aware of this at the moment as I have started my OU Spanish course - LZX194 for those of you who are ‘into’ OU course codes! As I work through the textbook there are various exercises to complete, with answers at the back in good old traditional form, these are complemented by short audio clips with gaps for me to repeat sounds and words. This week I also took part in an online audio conference tutorial using Lycium. The oral feedback from the tutor was key and helped bring the course alive. For me the social dimensions of the course – the chance to interact with the tutor and other students is an important, motivating factor. There is something very motivating about speech as opposed to text!

Lots of people are now interested in using podcasts for educational purposes. Ed-Cast, Education Podcast Network, and UK podcast are all examples of educational podcast repositories and of course iTunes has an education category. Educause has a nice simple guide to Podcasting and how it can be used in Education. Certainly I am finding my Spanish podcasts invaluable to listen to in the car to and from work. Wesley Fryer’s blog is peppered with podcasts and includes an entry on the use of podcasts with respect to digital storytelling. Chris Ribchester did an excellent talk at the Education in a changing environment conference entitled ‘Podcasting a tool for enhancing assessment feedback’. Chris outlined a number of benefits of adopting this approach: the fact that it made the feedback more personal, more animated and that podcasting enabled him to give the students a richer form of feedback. He described how students receiving traditional feedback on paper tend to be primarily drawn to the overall mark, so that they don’t necessarily take in the detailed comments. In contrast with the podcast, students had to listen all the way through – the actual ‘grade’ perhaps only occurring towards the end of the podcast.

Niall Sclater welcomes the fact that the trendiness of ‘podcasts’ as a label (even radio four are into it!!!) has reawaken educators interest in using audio for teaching and learning purposes.

At least pretty much everyone has heard of podcasts now. There’s a novelty about the word which gives new life to the concept of an audio clip. Audio has been used educationally for a long time of course but podcasts now make it more accessible - particularly to the mobile learner.

Chris’ presentation made me wonder if I should consider using podcasts as a way of communicating with my PhD students – it might provide a more personal and interactive form of dialogue. I certainly find annotating word documents using the comments facilitating far from ideal for feedback purposes. Text on the page can appear very harsh whereas the same comment spoken can have intonation added to it to ‘soften the blow’ as it were!!! However a downside of a podcast is the time it takes to listen – you can’t go any faster than the speed of the person speaking, in contrast with written text – you can scan read at a much faster rate. So I guess as always it comes down to the affordances of the different media – each has pros and cons and therefore use in an educational context needs to weigh these up.

I’m at the OpenLearn conference and have just done a talk on learning design and its application to the reuse of Open Educational Resources. John Seely Brown gave a fantastic keynote this morning drawing together for me many of the threads on the current direction of technlology developments and implications for learning. He talked about learning 2.0, indeed XX 2.0 seems to be a common meme across the talks - Andrew Ravenscroft and Patrick are now talking about the changing nature of learners and learning posing the question have we moved from ‘boot camp’ (ie structured, formal, etc) to ‘holiday camp’ (informal, user directed, etc.)? Patrick is supporting his arguments with data collected as part of the OpenLearn project - in terms of how users are interacting with the OpenLearn materials and their motivations for using the materials. Interestingly both John in his opening keynote and Andrew reflected on a number of learning theories and what they might mean in a modern context. John talked about situated learning, Andrew quoted confucius - ‘I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do I understand’. What struck me most was John suggesting in his keynote that things are really different now - that we have reached a critical point and the potential for new and innovative pedagogies capitlising on the affordances of new technologies and harnessing of the best of web 2.0/social networking.

I just love the video on Christopher Sessum’s blog of a kitten playing with a Mac! Christopher says

While I regularly use both a PC and a Mac, the Mac generally makes me happier.

I totally agree. I have always been a perfectly happy PC user, but switched to a Mac this summer primarily because it seemed to offer better software for doing presentations. I was a little nervous about switching and had some initial teething problems but now I have to say I am totally hooked. It feels like driving a rolls royce after driving a battered second hand mini for years. And it is as Christopher says something about the design of the Mac intermingled with my feelings - oh dear I can hear that word affordances again…

Oh and by the way the kitten in the video in uncannily like our cat “Mouse”!

OK confession time… I have only just ‘got’ RSS feeds – please don’t tell my employers… an admission like that with a job title like mine is tantamount to a sack-able offence! Let me unpack this a bit more… Of course I knew what RSS feeds were, I remember Debra Hiom – from SOSIG (now part of the intute gateway of subject resources) explaining to me years ago when I worked at ILRT how they were using RSS feeds on the site. But my understanding of it then was at an abstract level, as a concept. A year or so ago I painstakingly set up a personalised Google page and Google Reader and subscribed to various sites but it wasn’t very satisfactory and half the time the pages didn’t load – my fault probably – but after a while I stopped bothering. It just wasn’t worth the time and effort and I couldn’t see the point. Over the summer I started using a MacBook Pro and found that the way in which the browser Safari enables you to set up bookmarks and RSS feeds was so, so easy that using them has now become embedded in my daily practice. So in a sense I have gone through three levels of learning it seems to me:

1. Conceptual – where I understood the concept of RSS feeds but couldn’t/didn’t use them,

2. Applied – where I could use RSS feeds but it didn’t transform me/change my practice,

3. Transformative – where the use of RSS feeds has actually changed the way I do things.

Maybe there is a No. 4 too – now that I really do ‘get it’, I can’t for the life of me understand why I ever had a problem with them and frankly am feeling a little sheepish But there is another point I want to make. Part of the above is about me and the way I learn. I get impatient with new technology and can’t be bothered to take the time to find out how to use it – that is until I get the motivation to use it, then I become a real geek, get under the bonnet and get my hands well and truly dirty! I just couldn’t see the point with RSS feeds, until recently. So my motivation made a difference, but the intuitive nature of the Safari interface made a big difference too. John Naughton makes a similar point about the ‘iPod moment’, arguing that it’s not the iPod in isolation:

It’s slightly misleading because it implies that the appearance of a gizmo is the crucial event. Not so. The genius of the iPod was that it was paired from the outset with iTunes software — and that that software had a beautiful, intuitive interface.

Now I don’t want to open a whole can of worms here but dare I say it the word ‘affordances’ springs to mind? I know there is lots and lots of debate on the use of this in our area (see for example the debate Martin Dyke and I had with Tom Boyle and John Cook on the paper Martin and I wrote putting forward a taxomony of technology affordances and also the review by McGrenere and Ho). In our paper we cited Gibson’s original use of the term as cited by Salomon

“Affordance” refers to the perceived and actual properties of a thing, primarily those functional properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. (Salomon, 1993, pg 51)

Gibson’s original definition was

The affordances of an environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. … I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment. (Gibson, 1986: 127)

So my reflection on my ‘nirvana moment’ with RSS exemplifies this – i.e. it was a combination of me and my style of learning, the context/time (and associated trigger in terms of motivation/need), the core functionality of the technology (what it could do, but also what it could do in relation to my needs at a particular point in time) AND an intuitive interface.

References

Conole, G. and Dyke, M., (2004), ‘What are the inherent affordances of Information and Communication Technologies?’, ALT-J, 12.2, 113-124

Gibson, J.J. (1986), The ecological approach to visual perception, London: Lawrence Erlbaun Associates

Salomon, G. (ed) (1993), ‘Distributed cognitions – psychological and educational considerations’, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.