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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Category: Distance Education
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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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?
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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On Groups, Networks and Collectives
Jon Dron and I have been having fun developing a paper for ELearn in which we’ve been wrestling with the distinctions between three granularities of social software. In the process it has helped me to clarify Stephen Downe’s distinctions between groups and networks, the way that certain tools seem optimized for different levels of these granularities (for example blogs are better for networks than for groups) and it has helped us to create a rationale for use of collectives in formal education. Jon has defined the three granularities of Social Learning 2.0 in a recent blog posting.
In this post I provide graphic overviews of the three followed by a table comparing the three applications for educational use.Read More
Book Review – Control and Constraint in E-Learning
I have been waiting for a couple of years now for a work that successfully ties together the emerging social software/web 2.0 scene with established theory and practice of distance education. Unfortunately, I didn’t write it myself. However, Jon Dron has created the first in what I assume will be a series of writing, research and experimentation (his and the work of many others) that helps us harness the affordances for enhanced learning provided through a ubiquitously connected lifelong learning population, an abundance of learning content and judicious use of agents to make it easy.
In a nutshell, Control and Constraint in E-Learning explores how to move beyond distance education’s roots as independent study, through the tight cohorts of students moving lockstep through teacher orchestrated activities, to a context in which ‘many learners, loosely joined” can have the freedom and choice to co-create their own learning. A tall order this, but one that is very much coming to a computer near you!Read More
Slides and Reflections on the Keynote Trail
I’ve been on the road (well make that airplane, train and ‘coach’) for most of the past 6 weeks having gratefully responded to offers from colleagues to present keynote talks at a number of interesting academic conferences. I’m not nearly prolific enough to hit the blog compose button after each event, so am summarizing my discoveries and experiences here and linking to the major presentations now posted on slideshare. Read More