This is my first opportunity to attend a conference specifically devoted to e-portfolios. E0-Portfolio 2007 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).
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Author: terrya
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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The joys of re-entering data!
Here at Athabasca University we are finally getting serious about ELGG and bringing our instance (Me2U) inside the single signon set of apps we provide to all staff and students (portal, library, Moodle, etc.). This means all new login names and thus all data from the old version is lost (sigh…..)
It is annoying having to re enter data in my profile for even my own system, much the less the hassle of doing so for any of the other 1618 Web 2.0l apps (up from 1400 last month) listed now on www.go2web20.net
This frustration lead me check out the blogsphere for any progress on profile portability. I liked Rolf Skyberg’s rant that “It’s not that Facebook hasn’t done some new and clever work in opening their platform, but they haven’t gone far enough to offer the next-gen interoperable experience. People want more, and FB has given them yet another, site to maintain, monitor, and fret over while still locking it away in a gated community.”
Hunter Nield at socio media added some technical detail on the issue with some of the emerging solutions. He described micro-formats and the forever just-around-the-corner Friend of a Friend. But is seems Web 2.0 architects are more interested in gathering eyeballs than in creating the glue to stick apps together and reducing redundancy. Until this happens our capacity to engage with new applications is severely limited due to the ever consuming time pressures needed to establish a presence in every new application and domain. Read More
Scratch one up for Google Scholar
Google Scholar has tremendous potential to aide academics, students and lifelong learners because it is fast, easy to use and always accessible. But how well does it does it work?
Lack of Identity in SecondLife
I’m tempted to make this post just another in a growing list of whines from the edublog community about what I don’t like about SecondLife. I could talk about the terrible support – prepare to restart the whole process of building your avatar if you ever forget your password. Or I could note the disappointment when 20% of your class can’t even use the system due to hardware or connectivity restrictions. I could also whine about challenges of keeping any sense of social order, or facilitating a collaborative walk around in SL without loosing half the group, but some of these complaints are due to my own newbie status and lack of practice.
Mostly, I’d like to note that SL doesn’t allow users to synchronize their real life and their second life. For some this is just fine and the reason they go to great lengths to develop a fully featured secondlife. However as an educator, I want my students to develop insights, explore new information and apply this learning in their real lives.Read More
New tool to mine the collective knowledge
Thanks to the DownLoad Squad I bumped into a very interesting tool to mine collective knowledge. Avanoo is a social software tool that allows members to query others through simple Likert like scale items. Nothing too new here except that everyone gets to view and segment the results according to demographic criteria including gender, nationality, age, income level etc. For example I can create a questions and then determine if Canadians answered that question differently than non-Canadians, men differently than women or the wealthy differently from the poor. If I want I can augment my response to any question with a comment or explanation. Again nothing too new here, except that this type of analysis and results are usually costly to gather and remain the property of the survey owner, not the recipients.
groups networks and collectives – more!
Scott Wilson notes some concerns with the “lack of clarity” between the three entities of the Many that Jon Dron and I have been discussing and blogging about.
An educational taxonomy or a model gains its pragmatic value by the extent to which it helps practitioners and online learning researchers develop, implement and assess learning contexts, environments and activities. This value is enhanced by clarity and lack of overlap and redundancy in the elements of the model. I won’t argue that our work is the “definitive work” but, I continue to believe that it is useful to think of social and networked learning to be contextualized by these three broad domains. A quality learning experience might be focussed at one level of the many, but learners gain greatest value by exploiting the affordances of all three. In fact one could also argue that an educational experience is not complete unless it exploits the affordances of groups, networks and collectives.Read More
Is collective the right name?
Jon Dron and I were pleased to see Stephen Downes’ comments on our proposed “Model of the Many“. The model focuses on the communication among the many at three levels of granularity the group, the network and the collective.
We’ve been trying to map the model to current and projected Net based learning activities and interventions. Stephen suggested that we could do better in labeling the largest granular level, which we referred to as the “collective’. In this post I try to further define the characteristics and affordance’s of the “collective” and then argue why the term collective works – at least until someone can help us with a better term!!
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