With all the buzz about blended learning coming from our campus based colleagues, it got me thinking about the value of “blended learning” in distance and online courses. I realize that there are a number of different ideas and “blends” associated with the term ‘blended learning’, but it seems the common institutional and educational use is to describe blending online and Face-to-Face(F2F) education programming. What strikes me as especially salient is the blend of synchronous and asynchronous learning activities and opportunities. The increase in availability, coupled with reduction in cost for online forms of synchronous (audio, video, text and immersive) conferencing, got me thinking. Maybe what is critical in the F2F experience is the immediacy and social presence associated more with synchronous activities than with the face-to-face, body language enhanced gathering. And maybe this provides a promising theoretical rationale for 0nline blended learning.
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Year: 2007
Big New Issue of IRRODL now available
It was really nice to see a big issue of International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning IRRODL hit the cyberstreet this week. As I am on sabbatical this year, I manged to get my colleague Heather Kanuka to guest edit this issue. Unlike paper journals we are not as constrained by publication economics and so managed to provide a large issue with 9 main articles, 3 ‘research notes” 2 book reviews and links to 9 CIDER sessions via Elluminate. Also of interest to our African colleagues we have issued a special
Call for Proposals ~ Trends and Issues in Open and Distance Learning in Africa
Co-editors: Dr. Rashid Aderinoye and Dr. Richard Siaciwena
Each article in IRRODL is provided in HTML, PDF and MP3. Curt Bonk writes in Hearing your words via computer: Podcasted research is a whole new teaching tool! about the value of the MP3 files. He also provides a list of potential learning activities for the audio files of the articles. I’m sure both Curt, myself and others are interested in hearing of ways in which you find the MP3 files of use (please add a comment to this post). These files are created semi-automatically using commercial text to speech tools. For a quick preview of the quality of the transcription and voice, here is the link to the abstract of Davide Annand’s interesting article Re-organizing universities for the Information Age
Ego, object-centric or adhoc educational social software?
In a very interesting post titled Social Network Transitions, Fred Stutzman discusses the often lemming-like move of the masses from one social site to another. Of particular interest is Fred’s distinction between between object and ego based social software sites. Fred writes “An ego-centric social network places the individual as the core of the network experience (Orkut, Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster) while the object-centric network places a non-ego element at the center of the network” (Flickr, Digg, del.icio.us etc.).
In our attempt to design and build education social software sites to support distance education students, I wonder what combination of ego-centric versus object-centered site is most appropriate? Obviously artifacts created during learning activities are important components of any educational social software (ESS) application. Thus, the capability to upload, share, version, collaboratively edit, and add multimedia to documents is critical and aligns our needs with other object-centric network sites. The most prominent of these artifacts will likely be the e-portfolio, in which learners aggregate, synthesize and reflect upon their learning. Like other object sites, ESS should allow the owner to set access and edit rights to the objects that they wish to display in their personal network space at the site. These rights should be categorized such that classes of people (those enrolled in the same course, friends, the wide open net and even personally defined classes such as “my relatives”) can easily be created, managed and assigned to indovidual and sets of learning artifacts. In fact the object-centered collections already owned by learners, such as lists of favorite references (CiteULike) should be easily linked to and manipulated within ESS applications.Read More
Naming aggregations
David Snowden in an interesting post titled Aggregative or emergent identity? Rethinking Communities
(thanks for the pointer Stephen Downes ) argues that we need more discussion on the aggregations of individuals to note the emergent capacity of aggregations – beyond those of individual members being connected. He notes the confusion and multiple meanings around aggregations such as communities, networks, groups, teams. crews, collectives, cliques etc. etc. While acknowledging the need for further discussion, I don’t think his suggestion of adding ‘crews’ to the lexicon of aggregations helps us much.
According to Snowden a crew’s unique features are:
- When the crew assembles the individuals go through a set of rituals (for example the pilots checklist) which instantiate the requirements of that role in the individual. They also frequently wear uniform which adds another ritual to the process.
- The crew is only expected to perform for a limited period, and then moves into a layoff period before it reassembles (but almost certainly with different individuals). This limited period is key to the success of the collective capability of the crew and the subordination of individual qualities to those of the role and the role interactions.
According to the taxonomy of groups, networks and collectives developed by Jon Dron and myself, a ‘crew’ is just another name for a group, much as ‘team’ is often used for a group in business contexts. I like the nautical inference of ‘crew’, but think the distinction implied by the two criteria above fit as well for many of the forms of ‘group’ that Jon and I (and others) have addressed. For example, the classic education group – called a class, also goes through a series of rituals (from first meeting introduction, to the end of class party), members may well wear uniforms or some type of identification, and is usually time bound.Read More
Passing through Elgg
On the train yesterday, through the beautiful fall colored Swiss countryside, I was delightfully surprised to speed through the small town of Elgg – It is located between Zurich and St Gallen. It seems the kind of town you’d feel comfortable owning a pet Jersey cow but I image you could get by with a St Bernard dog or two as well. Unfortunately, I wasn’t prepared with my camera, so the opportunity to capture a shot and share it with the ELGG community evaded me! But  ELGG exists!
As an aside, we see online trumping the real world as I looked for a photo of Elgg Switzerland in Flickr and found 1476 tagged photos, but after looking at the first 20 screens full of thumbnails, I saw many pictures of elgg screenshots, elgg gatherings and Ben and Dave, but alas no REAL Elgg photos – so you just have to take my word for it that it exists!! Maybe the real world Elggians better get a photo up before they are eclipsed by the online world!
Terry
Having your Cake and eating it Too – Part Two.
In 2005 I published, The search for learning community in learner paced distance education: Or, ‘Having your cake and eating it, too! with colleagues at Athabasca University. This article discussed learners’ interest in social learning activities in self-paced distance education programming. Over the past 2 years we have been (slowly) developing tools and techniques which we will be implementing in pilots over the next year. In this (rather long) post, I overview the benefits and challenges of this type of intervention and then I discuss five approaches that are being tested to allow learners to pace their own educational programming – yet at the same time to enjoy and learn with others. Thus, having their cake (control over one’s pace of learning) and eating it too (enjoying and learning with others who are also controlling their time commitments). The post is also an invitation to others interested in this type of programming to become involved in a series of design-based developments.Read More
E-Portfolio 2007 – Maastricht, Holland
This is my first opportunity to attend a conference specifically devoted to e-portfolios. E0-Portfolio 2007Â is the 5th in a series sponsored by EiFel. The audience and speakers are some of the most diverse I have experienced at a medium/small (250 person) conference. At one end are technical experts from both Universities and private companies developing and implementing standards that formalize the technical infrastructure underpinning e-portfolios. These are most influenced by ontology developments and the different standards proposed to allow for intelligent search, aggregation and transfer of e-portfolios across different applications. At the other end are school teachers, trainers and university types struggling to implement an e-portfolio system at a variety of levels – from course, to program to institutional wide installations. Finally, unlike in North America, there are a number of private companies -mostly working in the Human Resources area, who are offering e-portfolio systems as a way for a company or government organization to manage the support and professional development of their staff. Notable within this latter group is support for the development of Human Resource Markup Language (HRML).
What I won at Handheld Learning Conference 2007
The Handheld Learning Conference attracts mostly UK educators interested and funded to pilot, develop and assess formal learning using mobile devices. The conference attracts the gadget freaks and sales staff from companies selling the ever newer, smaller, more functional and often cheaper tools and toys. Probably 50% of the attendees come from K12 school system, which was somewhat of a surprise, given the very scant attention to mobile devices by k12 teachers in Canada- well accept to insure that personally owned devices (cell phones and smart phones) are not used by students while “in class”.
I left the conference with a sense of how useful these devices can be for organizing and documenting one’s personal learning. For example hearing of case studies where PDA’ s were used to photograph physical educational activities, gather data from field trips, find data from Net resources and most importantly combine personal learning and interests with formal education. Examples of the heightened integration of home and school by ‘at risk’ students being able to share (with excitement) what is happening at school via these devices, was very impressive. These tools have a place in schools most notably to prepare learners for lifelong learning. It seems almost a no brainer to assume that all of us will continue to use ever more powerful mobile learning tools.
Chalk Assisted Instruction (CAI)
The presentation at the European Conference on E-Learning ECEL 2007 of Jon Dron and my paper – on Groups, Network and Collectives had some exciting moments. It was scheduled in the first slot of concurrent talks after the opening keynote. I scurried to the lecture theatre, loaded my memory stick of 50 or slides and began 15 minutes of playing with the control system at the speaker’s counsel. Sadly, the projector refused to project from any of a number of input devices and machines. Fearing loss of audience, the chair suggested that I plunge ahead. After so many years of Powerpoint dependence, I wasn’t sure I even remembered how to speak in public without bulleted prompts!. Anyways, the audience was spared most of the cartoons and jokes, and fortunately, the room was equipped with a blackboard and at least 20 stubs of white chalk. I did manage to create one of my ubiquitous Venn diagrams and made it current and topical by adding ‘2.0’ to the term “social living” which I placed at the intersection of the three overlapping aggregations of the Many.
I’ve placed the slides that never played on Slideshare .
The paper Jon and I did rehashed our distinction among groups, networks and collectives but we refined the distinction and added policy suggestions for dealing with each level in formal education contexts. I led off the track titled blogs and wikis and the subsequent papers showed interesting applications of blogs in UK and German universities. Most noted the tensions of using network tools like blogs in group based contexts and the issues of access and ownership that arise behind any garden walls.
A s usual, the networking at small multinational conferences is great and it is enlightening to compare life in the e-academy from multinational perspectives.
Distance Educators and Dogma
I just spent a very enjoyable and learning packed three days at the 12th Bi-Annual Cambridge Distance Teaching and Learning Conference. My keynote went OK, and the other three were outstanding! A notable (and very welcomed) addition to the conference was the number of African attendances as well as others from Europe, North America and the US. The conference is quite small with daily “home groups” and everyone eating together at a Cambridge college, so it was a cozy event.
One of the contentious issues (as usual with distance educators) concerned the use of technology in delivery of distance education programming. This may seem strange to those new to the DE field as ALL distance education, by definition is mediated by some sort of technology (from postal service to SecondLife), but there is a real ideological split between those who advocate maximizing access and those more interested in maximizing learning effectiveness. I could hardly cast myself as a neutral player in this debate, as I’ve long been a proponent of exploiting the technologies when they offer learning advantage. However, the ‘other side’ seems to think that unless the technology is ubiquitous to at least 99.99999% of the population we shouldn’t use it. This thinking has a very strong and long tradition in DE – after all increasing access has been the defining feature of DE since its inception 150 years ago. The well respected researcher Ormond Simpson from the British Open University gave a presentation on the issue, claiming that a technology to be used had to meet four criteria – illustrating each using perhaps the world’s first use of pneumatic learning (blowing a balloon up with the lead letter inscribed in felt pen as he introduced each criteria). The criteria Simpson identified are Access, Reliability, Cost/Complexity, & Price. I noted that he had forgotten to add an e- in front (to be topical these days) and an Australian colleague noted that rearranging the lettered balloons then produced e-CRAP – but that was a distractor.
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