Skip to main content
Virtual Canuck

Web Learning about Web Learning for teachers

Written by terrya
4 Comments

On one of my shortest transatlantic jaunts, I spent 3 days this week with an international  team developing a series of eight web based tutorials on e-learning for university faculty. The series is a bold, entrepreneurial attempt to speed the adoption and effective use of e-learning and online education resources beyond early adopters to the notoriously pedagogically and technically conservative, mainstream faculty employed in our universities. Unlike typical publicly funded professional development ventures in this arena, this project was sparked by Epigeum Ltd a spinoff from Imperial College, London.

Epigeum’s business model for this venture is to find a number of postsecondary institutions willing to fund the development of web based tutorials. These first, investing institutions get use of the materials and also provide reviewers, critics, pilot testers and consumer voices to insure the product meets real needs and administrative expectations.  The financial model calls for additional institutions to sign on for licensing of the products after production – providing a profit for Epigeum.

The collaborative development model employed selects a grand guru, intellectual leader (in this case Diane Laurillard, of conversational learning model fame) and a team of module authors, ‘expert reviewers’ and end users – or at least those employed to train the end users.  An author and an expert reviewer are selected and assigned to create curriculum for each of the 8 topics selected by the initial investing universities, the grand guru and Epigeum staff.  In this case these ranged from Intro to E-Learning; Using third party content, Net based communications and five others.  I’m not sure how I was selected to be a part of the development as an expert reviewer, but the development process sounded interesting, I’ve a lot of respect for Diane and we all know how desperate is the need for effective PD related to e-learning among this crowd.
The carbon footprint abuse comes from the proscribed Face-to-Face meeting which was held this week in London. Authors, reviewers and reps from investing institutions came from 6 countries (but mostly the UK) and converged for a day and half meeting. Hopefully effective use of google docs as well as lots of email will eliminate the need for further F2F meetings.

The process began three weeks ago with the course authors drafting and sharing for comment,  a proposed syllabus (using Google docs). In order to maintain consistency each ‘module’ consists of an introduction, 12-15 ‘screens’ of content, a summary, a multiple choice quiz and a list of resources for further exploration. The design model also insists that modules are not cross linked to allow for modular use as learning objects. The Google docs spreadsheet module was employed so the content, and especially the learning outcome of each ‘screen’ is articulated by the author and vetted by the ‘ expert consultant and other members of the development team. Each module is designed to take 60-90 minutes of end user time to complete. Fortunately, Epigeum technicians and media experts will actually create the screens which  (I understand) will make liberal use of video, animation and other multimedia resources. The modules are formatted to meet IMS content packaging standard so that they can ‘eaten up’ and delivered by a variety of LMS (OK make that VLEs, in the UK) delivery systems.

I’m looking forward to seeing the products as they evolve and we discussed a multiple case study design to study their actual use – given the wide variety of contexts and manners in which they COULD  be utilized and supported in the subscribing and subsequent purchasing institutions.

My greatest concern is with the “direct instruction” teaching/learning model employed. Australia’s famed educational theorist, Shirley Alexander asked a pointed question to Diane Laurillard, after her initial ‘what is this all about’ presentation,  questioning  what learning (or instructional ) model was being employed in the design. Uncharacteristically, she dodged the question, but direct instruction jumped to mind.

I know that professional academics are busy people and are used to the “tell ‘em what you are gong to tell ‘em; tell ‘em; and then tell ‘em what you told ‘em; model” of instruction and this MAY work for the real thirsty. But I wish we could learn to spark interest in the most exiting and revolutionary technology ever to be used for formal instruction, in ways that were just a bit more designed to fire the imagination and engagement of users – both as learners and as teachers.

I’ll report later as this project moves to release of product (about 9 months) and distribution to initial and additional consumer institutions.  Meanwhile I am sure Epigeum would welcome further inquiry into purchase or support and it is nice to see PD models emerging that are not dependent upon whining for new money from government.

Distance Education, My Work

Creating Personal Networks as Learning Outcome

Written by terrya
1 Comment

Thanks to Stephen and Graham Atwell, I discovered a fascinating development in the Personal learning Environment development. To date most of the PLE implementations I have seen have been aggregators of RSS feeds, with not much more functionality than a iGoogle or Pageflake portal. The paper “Designing for Change: Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments” by Fridolin Wild, Felix Mödritscher and Steinn Sigurdarson introduces (to me) a markup language by which designers or learners create scripts of learning activities that in room time mashup a host of Web 2.0 tools that allow individual or groups of learners to create their own learning context and content. In the process, of course, they gain skills of media production, increase their social capital by expanding and deepening personal networks and create archives of artifacts available for retrieval by themselves and others.

The background to the paper overviews the importance of the creation of an adaptable context that the learner creates to support and retain their own learning. They note ” It is not about learning design it is all about learning environment design”. By letting learning emerge from rich inquiry, collaboration and publication tools, learners are able to play active roles in the creation and sustenance of their own learning contexts. These skills, the contexts and the products of course do not end when the course LMS site is closed, but rather become life long learning attributes and capacity. Thus the creation of a rich learning environment that the student creates, owns and continuous to build with is the major learning outcome, the specific knowledge domain outcomes are useful but less important outcomes in a life long learning context.

Wild, Mödritscher & Sigurdarson Iintroduce the Learner Interaction Scripting Language (LISL) which they argue is less cumbersome and more easily configured by users to create and exchange learning activities. The model derives from activity theory with roles for tools, actors, activities and actors and grows from a bottom up perspective as opposed to the top down perscriptions associated with IMS Learning Design. These are scripted and supposedly a run time engine mashes various applications (such as Wikis, schedulers, link aggregators, mindmap tools etc in real time. The activities can saved and edited in chunks the size of patterns.

While the article is not detailed on the availability of a run time engine to execute the scripts, the work seems very promising. Beyond the pedagogical insights of environmental development, is the promise of learning activities that can EASILY be created, shared, contextualized and exchanged.

My Work, PLEs

Everything (almost) you wanted to know about Athabasca University, but were Afraid to ask

Written by terrya

My friend Jennifer Maddrell (of EdTechTalk fame) has completed a systems analysis of Athabasca University.  She posted the report to Scribd and it can be downloaded or read, but I think you have to join scribd (which is likely a useful activity in any case). I assume the report was done as coursework in her Old Dominion University PhD program in Instructional Design and Technology

The report gives a detailed overview of Athabasca – mostly derived from the web site and official reports. It is an outsider’s view, quite comprehensive and well written. It will be useful for distance educators as a comparison model  and for potential students or employees to garner an overview of the business of  Canada’s Open University.

Thanks Jennifer for both doing the work and publically posting it.

Distance Education, My Work

African Association for Distance Education Keynote

Written by terrya
1 Comment

I thought I would take a moment to link to the slides and the paper I wrote for this morning’s keynote at the ACDE’s 2nd  Congress being held in Lagos and hosted by the National Open University of Nigeria. This talk has forced me out of my comfort zone, as I’ve had to do more thinking about contexts without a prevasive Net. In researching for the paper I discovered that Nigeria has the highest percentage of Net users in Africa (according to 2008 Internet World Stats) at 10.0%. This compares to a world average of 21.1% or 71% in North America. But the rate of Net use has been increasing very rapidly and part of my presentation focused on challenging distance educators to use Net tools in the operation of their own organizations, as a means to train and educate themselves, in advance of use of the Net for wide-scale deployment of net based learning opportunities. I was also forced to get back to my roots and realize that there is a long history of effective use of pre-net media (notably text) to support effective distance education.

Besides access to the Net, of course access to formal education is also problematic – the Nigerian Miister of Education yesterday admitted that there was only post secondary training available for 10% of those eligible.  I also learned of the near absence of technical postsecondary education in Africa , such as delivered by community colleges and technical institutes in Canada – How many lawyers does a developing country need?

I also noticed considerable interest in Open Educational Resources and was very encouraged by the work of oerafrica.org and peoples-uni.org in introducing and supporting the produsage of shared resources in Africa.

The trip, the discussions with many African and other regional distance educators and of course the warm hospitality of West Africans have been very enjoyable, though I can’t help reflecting on the wealth (or lack thereof) in this teeming country.

Distance Education, My Work

Another Issue of IRRODL and Impact Factors

Written by terrya
2 Comments

Volume 9, No. 2 of the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (www.irrodl.org) is now online.

I like this issue for a number of reasons:

I managed to twist the arm of a colleague, Jon Baggaley, to guest edit the issue, as I am still officially on sabbatical. Jon, with the usual able assistance of the Managing Editor, Paula Smith, did an excellent job of gathering and reviewing 8 full articles, 1 research notes article, 2 Technical Reviews and 2 book reviews – all of which are available in PDF and Mp3 format.

Second the articles reflect international perspectives with articles from Brazil, Greece, Sri Lanka, Canada and the US, and reviews of distance education developments in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. I won’t describe the articles as Jon has done this in his editorial.

Read More

Distance Education, IRRODL, My Work

Australia Gets It

Written by terrya
1 Comment

Thanks to a tip from OLDaily, I note that Australia’s Flexible Learning Framework just announced funding for 147 projects values at a total of $5.3 million. This averages $36,000 per project. This is exactly the type of grassroots, action research type projects that we need in Canada. The money per project or overall, given the strategic importance of the initiative is not large. But $36,000 provides an incentive such that innovation doesn’t have to come out the time and quality of life of the few overworked innovators and early adopters. Further the money can be used to hire and train hundreds of research assistants to help them become effective produsers of e-learning practice and research processes. I hope the Australians have funded a small amount to pull together the results (both good and bad) from all the projects.
The Framework also was not driven solely by the interests of early adopters and researchers, but rather reflected 6 strategic themes –
1. Rural and remote 2. Primary industries 3. Indigenous 4. Health and community services 5. Trainees and apprentices 6. Upskilling of existing workers and RPL (recognition of prior learning).

My Alberta provincial Department of Education has funded a similar program(24 high schools) with a mandate to use technology to enhance students engagement, especially amongst high risk students. I am working on RFP to do an overall evaluation of this program.

This one province project is great for K12 education, but what is saddest in Canada, is that their is no strategy to meet the critical skills shortages developing in the country, with effective e-learning strategies or pilots to meet any of the 6 issues addressed by the Australians. I believe that e-learning’s most powerful affordance is the capacity to meet both formal and informal learning needs of lifelong learners. Hopefully, the Australians will educate enough lifelong learners and as a constant net importer of global skills, many of them will end up living in Canada! sigh………

Distance Education

Collectives, Borgs and Hive Mind

Written by terrya

Jon Dron and I have been writing a book chapter on our “Taxonomy of the Many” – groups. networks and collectives. In the process we’ve been thinking (again) about the challenge of the term collective to our individual sense of unique self. We continue to see applications evolve where data mining and aggregation of large numbers of Net activities, opinions, artifact organization and postings yields very interesting and useful results that can be used to guide decision making and increase effectiveness of Net activity for individual, group and network benefit.

But there is something inherently threatening about the loss of individuality associated with the hive mind and of course amplified when human choice to participate is eliminated as in “Resistance is Futile”. Searching further (using the hive optimized Google search tool ) I found a very interesting article Speculations on Hive Minds as a Posthuman State by Anders Sandberg. In the article Sandberg discusses various type of borg like entities including social insects, individual cells in an organism or component parts of a complex organ such as the human brain. Sandberg goes on to discuss the nature and psychology, weaknesses and strengths of these borganisms.

While interesting, Sandberg’s analysis assumes a coercive and all consuming state of borganism, where the benefits of borganism are available only to those who have given up their individualism. I see collective activity in a more tool like fashion where I exert my individual agency to exploit an affordance provided by collective tools. I realize that my activities on the Net are constantly being mined and aggregated. But I don’t think this is too much more loss of control than I give to a traffic engineer or a radio station traffic reporter counting the number of vehicles using an intersection at any given moment. Knowledge of the collective activity helps me make individual decisions.

Of course the collective may make mistakes and we see evidence of group think, erroneous meme proliferation and illegal extraction of individual and identifiable activity from collective activities, but misuse and inefficiencies accompany all forms of human organization. One must judge the value of the tool use, as compared to these costs.

Sandberg references a 1999 article Metasystem Transition by Turchin and Joslyn in which they describe the emergence of metasystems that coordinate and control lower level activities. They show that these higher control systems have developed from control of movement, through control of individual thinking to emergence of human culture. Again, I don’t like the coercive connotation of the work control, but I do acknowledge that as life has evolved to more complex entities, meta systems are necessary for survival.

But these are tools, not mindsets. even though, as Marshall McLuhan noted “We make our tools and then our tools make us“. We need practice and time to evolve tool use in ways that allow us to optimize our indiviudal selves in a complex and collective universe. Resistance may be futile, but in the resistance we recreate the technologies to meet our individual and social needs.

collective