Nancy White has done a great series of postings where she creates a simple taxonomy of three types of blogs – single blog centric, topic centric and community centric.Read More
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Author: terrya
Elluminate based demonstration of Me2u social software
This afternoon I recorded a 10 minute demonstration of the Me2u system which is an instance of elgg.net set of social software tools. These tools are being piloted tested at Athabasca University.
The demonstration is available as an Elluminate recording here . Clicking on this link will start the installation of the java based client tool for Elluminate and should begin playing the video, with assorted audio and application sharing features.
I created this video as some people experience disorientation when first exposed to ELGG systems. I hope the demo is useful for potential users of Me2U.athabascau.ca (must be associated with Athabasca University) and for those using other ELGG systems.
I apologize in advance for the poor production values, but the cost was right – free and relatively easy to produce.
Terry
The people formerly known as students and teachers…
The Net has created a context in which students are being transformed into empowered learners. These learners demand quality learning experiences- they know what learning is and what learning they need. Harold Ashe picks up the transformational aphorism “people formerly known as …” developed by Jay Rosen to strike an evocative manifesto for these connected learners. He writes:
The people formerly known as students are those who were on the receiving end of an oligopolist educational system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and few options, and accredited institutions competing to speak their truths while the rest of the population learned in isolation from one another— and who today are not in a situation like that at all. Harold Ashe 2006
To expand these into a listing of particular demands related to efficient, effective and empowered learning, I note that:Read More
PLE's from Alt-C Conference in Edinburgh
The PLE panel session at Alt-C was a big hit.
Graham Attwood podcast his contribution and I liked his sense that PLEs are not an application, but the indiviudalized set of tools he uses to manage and contribute to his part of the Net. I did a brief comparison of the coordinated and controlable option of an LMS (or VLE as they say ‘over the pond’) as below. An educator seems to have the option of using a VLE, individual Social software applications or systems that combine serveral social apps such as ELGG. My point was the complexity and challenge of adoption for educators (and computer services support staff) trying to move from the familiar VLE world to the scary world of PLE’s.
David Tosh (of ELGG fame) began his 8 minute talk by confessing that he didn’t know what a PLE was!
Next Josie Fraser orchestrated a great activity in which we broke into small groups and armed with flipcharts and felt pens tried to create a graphical image of our vision of a PLE. We also showed Scott Wilson’s now famous Future PLE diagram which may have inspired some of the groups.
Our group came up with a diagram related to Scott’s but with more generic capacities or affordances of PLE’s as opposed to particiular products. I’ve tried to recreate it from my rough notes below:
The inside consists of various creation, communication and collaboration tools, as well as specialized tools relevant to individual users and various aides to reflection, problem solving etc. These tools link, via ubiquitous connectivity, agents and appropriate protocols to content, expertise, mentors, and of course since we were mostly employed educators we included “assessment and credentialing”.
Thanks to those attending the workshop, the other presenters and of course the team that created the diagram above.
The Great Paper vs Screen debate – two new studies
At our University (Athabasca) we are in continuous debate about the role of print versus nonprint format for our learning materials. A typical Athabasca course in our undergraduate, continuous enrollment programs consists of 1-3 texts, a study guide, a supporting web site and perhaps a lightly used discussion board (remember these are not fixed date, cohort courses)
I’ve long argued that the study guide (with links to net resources) as well as texts if available should be made available online. The rebuttal is that “students hate to read materials on line” or that I am just trying to rip students off by making them pay for (low quality) printing. I fear most rebuttals come from producers and editors who have a life long love affair with the aesthetics of paper verging on bibliophilia. Arguments that paper is inaccessible to the blind or the consequent destruction of trees do little to sway the paper proponents. I should note that I have nothing against paper, but don’t think that it should be the default means of disseminating learning materials.
Two recent studies (citations and abstracts below) have given arguments to both sides of this debate. As expected most students prefer to read materials on paper rather than on the screen. Of course the questions were not framed in an economic context such as “would you pay an extra $20 to have the course guide produced on paper”?
The Cheng and Ley (2006) study shows that printing of materials is correlated with age and with negative computer experience, but of most interest is that printing of content was not associated with higher performance. In fact those who preferred onscreen had higher performance levels. I am not implying that their reading on screen caused the higher scores, probably these learners are more efficient and age was a confounding variable.
But, the studies show growing (though yet small) interest by Net generation learners in studying from the screen. The recent announcements of yet another generation of ebook readers, give faint hope that the resolution, look and feel and access issues have finally narrowed the aesthetic gap between paper and screen.
In any case I still contend that we should not be subsidizing the forest indutry, limiting access to the visually impaired and most importantly reducing our ability to tag, search and retrieve our materials by retaining and defending the print supremancy. Let’s deliver in electronic format and allow this data to be presented in whatever formats the users choose.
The two articles are:
1. Chang S. & Ley, K. (2006) A Learning Strategy to Compensate for Cognitive Overload in Online Learning: Learner Use of Printed Online Materials.Journal of Interactive Online Learning Volume 5, Number 1,
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between achievement and the quantity of online course materials that students printed and the frequency with which they reported using them. One hundred thirty-two graduate students from one of 11 hybrid or online classes voluntarily completed a self-report survey asking how much they printed (0%, 25%, 50%,75%, 100%), how often they used printed materials (almost never, rarely, sometimes, often, almost always), and preference for either print, onscreen, or none. Neither quantity printed nor frequency used was related to achievement. But learner preference was associated with achievement; onscreen preference learners had higher mean rank scores than print and no preference learners. There were no achievement differences between the online and hybrid learner groups. Learners, who printed more, used more and preferred print online materials and experienced more onscreen reading difficulty than learners who printed less. Learners who used print materials more preferred reading printed materials, had difficulty reading onscreen, and were older.
Unfortunately the second study was printed in a restricted access subscription journal so all I can do is provide the reference and abstract.
2. Norman Temple, Wendy Kemp, Wendy Benson. (2006) Computer technology and student preferences in a nutrition course. Open Learning, Volume 21, Number 1, pp. 71-77
Abstract: This study assessed learner preferences for using computer-based technology in a distance education course. A questionnaire was posted to students who had taken an undergraduate nutrition course at Athabasca University, Canada. The response rate was 57.1% (176 returned out of 308). Subjects were predominately female (93.7%) and nursing students (61.7%). Most students favoured having a web page with frequently asked questions (FAQ) and emailing their tutor rather than using a telephone (76.0% and 58.2%, respectively). Support for having a chat room was weaker (45.7% in favour, 41.1% neutral). Students had generally negative opinions on receiving course materials via a computer, with only 4.0% favouring this for the textbook. Students who were younger or had previously taken a computer-based course were generally more likely to favour emailing their tutor and using computer-based course materials.
My EdTechTalk
Dave Cormier from the University of PEI, invited me to record EDTechTalk #60 last Sunday. Dave and his colleague Jeff Lebow have been recording chats with assorted EdTech types for over a year. The chats tend to get a bit ‘far reaching’ and slightly off topic, and I think mine was no exception. A loyal band of 5-10 life audience members joined via SKYPE and text chat window, to contribute their questions/comments.
I probably tended to talk too much about my own history and in too little detail on some of the ‘big issues’ but it was Sunday evening in the summer, and I enjoyed the chat.
Thanks Dave and those who sat in. The MP3 recording of our conversation is available here.
Terry
An Educator discovers his SecondLife
In this post I relate my experiences exploring LindenLab’s SecondLife with a view to assessing their use in formal educational contexts.
I’ve long been interested in the use of the net to support both formal and informal learning and especially in those contexts where F2F meeting is impossible or severely restricted. Thus, I’ve played with most of the early technologies that provided first for text and later multimedia forms of both synchronous and asynchronous technologies. From both my research and personal observations, learning is enhanced when participants are afforded the opportunity and provided incentives to create a kind of community, that can be relied upon for support, motivation, insight and fun.
Proponents of these virtual environments argue that they afford the creation of vibrant forms of communities of inquiry. Key to many commonplace and dictionary definitions of community is a sense of place. Describing, creating and experiencing a sense of place on the net has been the domain of science fiction authors (notably Gibson and Stephenson) and early developers of text (Moos and Muds), 2D animation (http://www.thepalace.com) and real time videoconferencing. Although each of these developments have attracted experimental educational use (for example Moo’s Athena University, many university Palaces etc.) none have thrived to the extent where they are the home or even attracted major use by mainline or emergent formal educational institutions.
This may however be changing as affordances of the net expand to include broadband connection, end users machines powerful enough to render complex, realtime audio and graphic displays and user experience with and expectation of high quality immersive experiences. The question that remains unresolved is how important both real time interaction is and if that interaction (and resulting learning) is significantly enhanced by a sense of shared presence.
With this background, I set out this weekend to explore what I believe to be the largest and most fully functional of these places – ‘Second Life”
SecondLife
SecondLife went online in 2002 as a publicly accessible, virtual world owned and operated by Linden Labs. Secondlife (SL) membership in Jan, 2005 was approximately 23,000 living on 14.6 square miles of virtual land (McKeon & Wyche, 2006.) Second life requires the (free) download of a client (Windows, Linux or Mac) application. This proceeded without incidence and installed easily on my Toshiba tablet PC.
The first think I observed was that SL client takes a lot of power. I noticed that it regularly consumed over 90% of the cycles available on my machine, used nearly 12 as much internal memory as Microsoft Word. Bandwidth requirements also seemed high especially when teleporting (10 second delay) but proceeded quite smoothly with few delays as I walked through the site. Given these requirements, I learned to reduce the number of applications I had opened before running SL client to avoid contention and possible crashes.
Each member of SL adopts and adapts the form of an avatar that can be customized to a very high degree creating what you look (or wished you looked) like. The avatar forms can be nonhuman, but most everyone I encountered this past weekend, was shapely and provocatively presented and attired as a 20 something human. One begins the experience by choosing an avatar that one then customizes and clothes. As you see in figure one, none of the avatars available looked even remotely like the slightly overweight 55 year old college professor that I glimpse in the mirror these days. But I did pick a male figure and reduced ‘my’ burgeoning biceps, cut ‘my’ hair and altered the tuxedo to look like a pair of cutoffs and t-shirt, which seemed to match my midsummer mode.
Of course, as a ‘real man’, I didn’t read any of the directions and thus spent some time figuring out to sit, run and even fly. I also spent a few embarrassing moments walking underwater observing the underside of the wharf that I had just walked off! But using the arrow keys and right and left mouse clicks, gave me a sense of simple navigation competence within about 45 minutes. Orientation can be a problem (especially with the capacity to teleport), but either of two maps can be displayed that indicate one’s position and field of view in GPS style.
I did see other players walking about and engaged in a bit of text chat. The first person I really chatted with ended up giving me some new clothes to wear and answered some of my newbie questions. I probably should have taken one of the guided tours of SL or tried to hook up with a guide, but I also wanted to experience the learning curve without ‘hand holding’.
There are much more detailed descriptions of the features of SL elsewhere (see for example McKeon and Wiche 2006 Life Across Boundaries: Design, Identity, and Gender in SL) but I’ll list some that seem especially useful for an educational context:
– SL is scaleable, as a single computer manages a small area on the grid, supporting interaction of the occupants on that one small subset of the environment
– Users or groups of users can buy land and create and furnish their own structures
– Forms of intellectual property (codes and scripts that create everything from sailboats, to artworks, furniture and gambling machines) are owned by individuals and may be sold, bartered, customized
– Commercial exchange is supported through the use of Linden dollars $L that currently trade at about 250 to the American dollar
– Basic membership is free, but if you wish to buy land ($5- $200 US month) and receive weekly stipend (welfare??) of L$1000 a month you need a $9.95 US /month premium account.
– Users can fill out a profile where they can share details of their ‘real’ life or other personal information if they wish
– SL integrates with the WWW in the sense that one can display web pages on bulletin boards, link out to the web, read email etc.
SL features an excellent ‘find’ feature that allows you to find individuals, groups, popular sites and special current events – yard sales and dance parties seem especially popular. Many of these sites are marked “mature” and a visit to one of my first ‘parties’ found a women shouting (both in text and audio) F*** this and F** that over and over, so I wasn’t overly impressed. There was also a number of trivia and bingo type contests going on, with prizes awarded in $L. I later learned that Linden pays hosts of popular sites providing them with cash to pay dancers and others that bring life to the site.
Education at SL. Using the find feature and keywords ‘university’ and ‘college’ I was able to find and teleport to a number of sites with an education focus. SL has an education division and offer trial use and discounts for educators who want to buy whole islands of their own. :
Penn State has recreated on of their art galleries, but alas the roof is not finished, but I don’t think it rains in SL
University College Dublin, has a more developed campus, but there was nobody around (but it is summer holidays!)
SL itself runs SLCampus: described on their board as
“Most of the Campus: Second Life classes are held right HERE, on this region named “Campus” (easy to remember, eh?). If you look around this region, you’ll see different classes working on various projects on their individual plots of land. Here on Campus we also have a public meeting area, a sandbox for temporary building, a public pictureboard for sharing fun photos, a sculpture garden for relaxing between classes, and a campfire for late-nite fireside chats.”
The SL Campus featured experimental use with proximal voice chatting, but I was a bit reluctant to add more plugs to my installation, so was left with either IM or text chat.
Linden labs also supports an education site, wiki and professional advice for educators plus an extensive series of online forums.
There are also blogs (see Matt Tarber’s “The School of SecondLife) or Second Life Education Wiki and other community of SL educators about.
Discussion: There are a number of features of a ‘real campus’ that Marilyn Lombardi describes in a recent EduCause article and notes how they are being recreated in virtual contexts. Nonetheless, it doesn’t take too much imagination to see that this environment offers everything that Moos and Muds had with the important affordance to create ones own gestures, buildings and activity scripts. Of course we know that busy students and harried teachers are not usually interested in new hobbies nor programming tasks that eat up time. But the capacity to buy or barter such artifacts opens lots of possibilities.
The capacity to create spaces in which multiple forms of human discourse can flourish, while still retaining access to the Net’s resources is very compelling. I imagine that in a dedicated learning environment, the avatars may more closely resemble their human owners, much as anonymity has not been a big feature of online learning. The very low cost, plus capacity to engage in simulations, discourse, collaborative projects and web quests are features very much in demand by online designers and educators. These well supported in SL. As with many new technologies, some of the features of SL – such as text chat, profiles, private space are provided through other social software applications and learning management systems. Therefore one must have a compelling need to engage simultaneously in order to justify the learning curve and technological requirements of these systems. I imagine that for opening sessions, special guests and other multiple site activities, SL would provide not only excitement but a great deal of dare I say “realism’ that likely justifies the effort.
I smiled when I came across a site selling fireworks (reusable no less) as it brought memories of a pioneering virtual conference I hosted in 1995. The MOO site of that era featured fireworks as well- but they exploded in soundlessly in text! Didn’t quite do it for me!
I was very pleased to discover the April 2006 release of the Croquet Open source virtual environment for education. This seems similar to SL, but an individual or school can install there own instance and thus create a more restricted space. One of the most important aspect of a learning community is the capacity to maintain safe spaces for learning. Physically campus based institutions have created safe spaces within which academic and others sorts of freedom are nutured and protected. Creating an educational environment in close proximity to enterprise focused on sex, rock and roll and gambling, presents a host of moral and ethical concerns. Much as we want the education world to be open and accessible, it should also be a safe and non-threatening space in which learning and scholarship need not compete nor conflict with alternate uses of that space. Perhaps Coquet will allow institutions and learning organizations to create that safe place for learning.
The bandwidth and process requirements of SL will be problematic for many potential users. However, the ongoing deployment of high speed networks coupled with continuing increase in processing power, should make these tools more accessible as time goes by. I’m looking forward to exploring these environments at greater length this fall in my Athabasca University Masters of Distance Education course next term
All in all, I enjoyed my time in my Second Life, and didn’t really mind the time away from my first life- but then it is summer!
Afterthought: Being landlocked, some distance from my boat, I was also interested in how SLers sail. I visited a few marina’s, saw some nice racing dingies and a few more classic creations including ones that floated in the air!. Alas, I didn’t have a chance to talk to any sailors, but did watch a race and read the invitation to sign up as a crew member – which I may do!
Me, checking out the boats
Shameless Self promotion – for Mom
From the AU News Room:
Dr. Terry Anderson’s appointment as Canada Research Chair in distance education has been renewed for five years. He was presented with the award at the Convocation ceremony on June 10.
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| Leslie Chivers, communications director for MP Brian Jean, presented Dr. Terry Anderson with the documentation to officially renew his Canada Research Chair in Distance Education. |
The CRC program, which is funded by the Government of Canada, will provide $500,000 in research funding over the next five years. Canada Research Chairs are selected by a college of reviewers, composed of experts from around the world, to recognize exceptional researchers, acknowledged by their peers as having the potential to lead in their field. Terry was first awarded the chair in distance education in 2001.
For the past five years, he has been investigating the kinds of interaction that occur among teachers and students in online learning environments and how the degree of interaction impacts learning, satisfaction and completion rates. Over the next five years, his research will focus on unpaced learning and how social software tools can build communities of learning online despite the individual nature of the process.
“Distance learning has come a long way since the days of mail-out exams,” Terry said. “Today’s technology allows for the near-instantaneous exchange of material between teacher and student and between students. The Internet challenges educators to look for ways of improving teacher-student interaction while creating cost-effective learning experiences.”
“Enhancing and expanding distance learning methods through research is a continuing priority for Athabasca University,” President Frits Pannekoek said. The university has specialized in university-level distance learning for over 30 years. It employs a variety of electronic technologies as well as print materials and telephone-tutoring in its teaching. More than 85 percent of AU’s courses are now wholly or partly online.
“Dr. Anderson’s research in network technology is vital for Athabasca University because it speaks directly to our mandate,” President Frits said. “Athabasca University is one of the world’s leading distance education specialists. By focusing on innovation in learning, we continue to remove barriers and makes exemplary post-secondary education more accessible.”
Terry is Tops
The accolades for Terry Anderson keep on coming. In a letter from Dr. Michele Jacobsen with the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology (CJLT), she advises him of a prestigious recognition:
“It is my pleasure to inform you that you have been chosen to receive the 2006 CJLT Editor’s Award for your Volume 31, Issue 2, Spring 2005 article, Design-based Research and its Application to a Call Centre Innovation in Distance Education.
“The CJLT Editor’s Award is presented by the Editor of AMTEC’s Journal to an individual who has provided the most outstanding article to CJLT during that year. In making my recommendation for this award, I have relied entirely on feedback from the Editorial Board … your article emerged as the clear favorite.”
Terry’s article discusses a new methodology for distance education research and applied the model to work done with call centre innovation in AU’s School of Business.
In his acceptance comment at the CADE/AMTEC conference held in Montreal in May, Terry reminded delegates that at various times in his carreer he had submitted and had articles rejected from both CJTE and the CADE Journal, but that “one shouldn’t let such setbacks stop efforts to share the insights from one’s research and practice.”
Congratulations!
Another AU connection from the CADE conference: Liam Rourke, Ph.D. adjunct faculty in Centre for Distance Education and former Canadian Centre for Distance Education Research (CIDER) employee, now with Nanyang Technological University, won the Excellence in Graduate Research award.
PLE's getting fleshed out (conceptually) and COI Model
Stephen Downes nicely ties ideas of ownership, control, learner centricity and choice from PLE’s into notions of the mutlimedia and readwrite nature of web 2.0. Great stuff! Wish I had been there!.
I was especially interested in his update of the Community of Inquiry (COI) model that Randy Garrison and I created some years ago. This model was done to help us conceptualize and measure learning communities that we were building using computer conferencing and analyzing the results with transcript analysis. This work has spawned quite a few studies and maybe just a few insights into text based and asynchronous learning (see communitiesofinquiry.com )
In particular the Venn diagram (below) we created has been used as a conceptual tool in many studies.
Stephen provides the first major edits to the model in 5 years as follows:
The COI exists within the larger context of the educational semantic web. I also envisioned the larger Net with all of its social, teaching and cognitive stimulation and support as being outside – but directly linking in to the “three presences”. Visualized as the whole the model immersed in the flow of the Net. Stepehn’s additions make that more clear and explicitly site the encumbusing effect of the Net on learning and living these days.
The second change substitutes ‘self’ for the ‘educational experience’ in the Centre of the COI. This is similar to the way in which a psychologist traditionally views the world through the lens of the individual psyche, whereas the sociologist tends to look at life through a social lens. We focused the COI model on the social because it was meant to explicate the social and paced environment emerging in CMC based formal education courses. In this context the ‘educational experience” was our focus and we assumed that creating a stimulating, supporting and challenging environment (by noting the three presences) would create an environment for the ‘self’ to grow and learn. I am sympathetic to the need for a great more individual freedom than afforded by most formal education systems. (see Anderson, 2006) But we also need to create and visualize the ways in which communities of inquiry and especially the type that people pay for (formal learning). The freedom of relationship in which learners are empowered to create the type of social relationship they find most beneficial is of critcial importance to many learners and too great an emphasis on the self, CAN diminish the energy needed to sustain powerful learning relationships Untangelling the social from the individual has been a very knotty challenge (see ideas on social cognition and especially Brown and Dugoid’s Social Life of Information.). I don’t have any problems seeing the individual at the centre of the community, but I’m not sure it really helps us to focus on the networked social learning that the model is designed to inspire and measure. Being explicit about the social expereince of a cohort based system and maximizing the input of various members of the community is a very powerful way to learn. The judicious use of social sofwatre will allow these groups to form more spontaneously and be supported over different boundaries of time and space, so there is a sense in which the individual will be able to create the mix of social and self that most meets their needs at any given moment. But many will still want to frame at least their formal learning in a social context
We haven’t been going to pubs and churches for hundreds of years for nothing, when it is cheaper and more convenient to drink (or worship) at home!!
Thanks for the great slides Stephen.
Wiki as conference evaluation tool
We sponsored a full day PreConference workshop on Distance Education Research sponsored by the Canadian Institute for Distance Education Research CIDER at the Canadian Association for Distance Education (CADE) and AMTEC conference held last week in Montreal. Most of the presentations are online at the CIDER site, but I wanted to discuss the use of PBWIKI to facilitate the workshop participant evaluation.
Unlike like a good adult educator, I had not gotten my act together to create and photocopy the traditional exit survey. However, I did have the email addresses of the registered participants, so I very quickly (maybe 20 minutes max.) set up a site (cidereval.pbwiki.com) at the free PBWIKI site and typed in 4 questions (the usual, what did you like, best, least, suggestions for next year) and invited reflection on the use of the WIKI for this evaluation.
I chose to make the site visible to others (check it out) but restricted editing capabilitity to those who had participated in the workshop. We had a very small learning curve as we learned (thanks Elizabeth Murphy) to place a line with single space between comments. This allowed each unique comment to each question to appear in a separate text book- looks very smart.
There are three obvious advantages to using a WIKI for this purpose.
- Ease of creation and administration, lack of cost and saving of trees
- Using the WIKI benefits not just the organizers, but the participants as well. Everyone gets to read the reactions of others and comment on them. The visibility allows participants to gauge their perceptions against those of others. This auto validation serves to enhance the reflective nature of the evaluation, forcing participants to not only present their own reactions but judge those reactions in comparison to those of others – questioning any discreancies.
- Finally, the process is efficient for all participants as they don’t need to write what has already been posted, but rather can expand, contrast, discuss or illustrate thier own perceptions.
Of course I didn’t get the usual means from Likert scales assessing each presentation nor a sense of how many people actually edited or just read the evaluations, but that data seems to not really add much value to my plans for enhancing next year’s conference.
So the ease of use, extremely low cost (thanks PKWIKI) coupled with metacognitive nature of the reflection seems to make WIKI’s a very useful tool for this application.