Category: educational social software

This week I am in the process of moving my office  from Athabasca University to home. It was a lot of work sorting, selecting and shifting.  Most of the books that I THINK I still want are now on the bookshelves here at home. However, I have doubts as to their usefulness, as the texts (of course) are not searchable, except by very slow and pain-staking review. I’ve read them all once at least, but do I remember the juicy quotes??  I find increasingly that my references, original articles, illustrations etc. all come from the web – notably Google Scholar

In any case, I took the opportunity to put all the books  (no duplicates) that I have authored, co-authored or written a chapter for on a single shelf.  It came to 24 inches worth or roughly 2 inches a year, over my 20 year academic career. Of course some of the larger tombes (i.e. Handbooks at right) I only have a small chapter, so can’t honestly claim all 24 inches  for myself!

It is fun to scan the titles. It makes me realize how narrow the academic focus of my work has been – almost all distance or online education stuff.  Obviously my first great Canadian novel, has yet to be written!

In one of the worst ed tech articles I’ve read in years, Morris and Parker, attempt to find a link between technology use in a new, home grown social network and “engagement” in the classroom. On the face of it this seems reasonable. Students use a social network ergo they get engaged in the course. However this ignores  the fundamental rule about educational technology – it is not the tool but the way it is used that matters.

The article initially got me feeling uncomfortable when it attempted to make the case that there is such a thing as a “technological pedagogy”. We’ve long argued that technologies (from clay stylus, to blackboards to Second Life) can and are being used to support  and enhance many types of pedagogical instruction and interactions (see  Jon Dron and my Learning technology through three generations of technology enhanced distance education pedagogy).  Morrie and Parker go on to present a straw dog, later torn down, arguing that “the rhetoric and packaging accompanying many of these new technological teaching tools suggests that usage alone will increase student engagement and learning.” Who has ever argued that?  Technology can afford new ways of thinking and acting, but it doesn’t by itself change engagement or learning. This is of course an old argument see (Clark and Kozma) from the 1990’s. But I think we have learned that doing the exact same activity with a different tool, is not likely to change outcomes.

We learn that a rather large (187 person) American undergrad Political Science class was surveyed (33% return) after one-term use of a social network tool. Nowhere in the article do the authors say how the tool was used, if use was rewarded with marks or associated with learning objectives, what pedagogical principals were implicitly or explicitly used to design the learning activities, what training or experience the students or teacher had etc. etc?

The survey instrument too was home grown. I am unsure why a standardized tool of measure engagement was not used – there are a number readily available. But in any case the authors choose to focus the article on the underlying constructs of their instrument and its psychometric properties, these students perceptions were then tested for relationship with amount of activity on the social network

The validity of the survey is questionable. Multivariate analysis shows that the survey items were associated with  three constructs: 1 – Learning Community (LC), 2 – Constructivist Pedagogy (CP), and 3 – Equity (EQ). The amazingly bad part of this experiment was that the first two constructs (Learning Community and Constructivist Pedgaogy), were derived from Likert scales  which asked students their  perception of what the teacher did!!! How would one expect correlation between student engagement  and social technology use by asking questions about what the teacher did or how constructivist was their pedagogical interventions!  What were those interventions? The final Equity Construct assessed  the balance between teacher and student input, but again does the technology alone determine that?

The authors conclude “that usage of an award winning engagement tool is not enough to create a greater sense of engagement under the conditions adopted in this course.”  Exactly!! and why would they expect differently unless they actually modified “the conditions adopted in this course”.

I continue to believe that use of high powered social networks can and will be associated with increased engagement, but to do so, these tools must be skillfully woven into the objectives, assessments and activities of the course.  Finally, ways to assess engagement that are pedagogically compatible, relevant to the learning activities and outcomes of the course and the students and finally that reflect real learning are critically important.  The authors of this article are more concerned with psychometric properties of a home grown survey instrument, than in the effective use or the valid assessment of networking learning technologies integrated with effective  pedagogy!

Reference

Anderson, T., & Dron, J. (2012). Learning technology through three generations of technology enhanced distance education pedagogy. European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning, 2012/2.  Retrieved from http://www.eurodl.org/?p=current&article=523.

Morris, R. C., & Parker, L. (2014). Examining the connection between classroom technology and student engagement. Journal of Teaching and Learning with Technology, 3(1), 1-15 doi:10.14434.jotlt.v3n1.4720

This review was published in IRRODL (15(2) and I reprint it here, for greater exposure to a very useful book.

Terry

The Architecture of Productive Learning Networks (2014), ISBN: 978-0-415-81656-4 

Authors: Lucila Carvalho and Peter Goodyear 

Reviewer: Terry Anderson, Athabasca University, Canada 

As I grow older, I come to realize that I shouldn’t let principles always stand in the way of good ideas. Thus, though I’ve made a commitment to no longer contribute to closed scholarly works, I can’t help but at least contribute a review of The Architecture of Productive Learning Networks by Lucila Carvalho and Peter Goodyear. A personal disclosure is that I count Goodyear as a friend and I was present when the book was being planned after the Networking Learning Conference in Maastricht in 2012.

Carvallo and Goodyear have been involved for some years in the interesting intersection between architecture and learning, positing that both the physical and networked spaces that we create have very important (but often unrecognized) effects on teaching and learning or as Winston Churchill aptly put it, “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us”. I was initially attracted to their earlier work on patterns and pattern languages modelled in part on the architectural pattern work of Christopher Alexander, and have thereafter been trying to discern and better utilize both the created and emergent social patterns of effective formal and informal learning.

In this volume the authors set forth an initial set of architectural entities that describe and define a network of individuals associated together in order to collectively achieve some goal. As the title implies, these associations are focused on learning but in a very broad sense that includes formal education, informal and professional learning, and social action. The structures that we devise and sustain to support this learning are referred to as networks – aggregations based upon connections of people and resources, that in this context are focused on learning – and of course doing so productively. Networks imply a more defined aggregation than the nebulous “community” and a less structured form than a group where “everyone knows everyone”. A network is emergent, bursty and defined more by connections and activities than by rules, memberships, or authority.

The book is structured around Goodyear and Carvalho’s theoretical and architectural framing of an analysis structure by which subsequent chapters describe real life (and judged effective by the editors) learning networks. The architecture they proscribe is focused on “what it is that people are actually doing and the tools, and resources and interactions that become bound up in that activity”. The analysis begins by identifying the structures and epistemic elements of each network. I had to look this one up as they define epistemic elements “as those most closely associated with learning tasks, and those that seem to reflect epistemic structuring” (p. 61), which is far too tautological a definition for me. In any case I understand epistemic as the structure and the activities of the network specifically designed to create and support productive learning. They then ask the authors of the case studies to describe the place and the set structure of the network – how the connections and resources are linked, stored, organized, and made available for use and the processes for creation and support of new connections, unlike the way that Jon Dron and I use the term set, as a non group and non network aggregation of learners. The authors attempt to extract the important lessons, patterns, and structures that they find most compelling from the case.

The bulk of the 294 page text is made up of these 14 case studies. The cases range from formal learning activities (both higher and elementary education), professional development (teachers leading curriculum change), social action (One Laptop per Child), school enrichment (iSpot sharing nature) to my favorite – a network focused on artistic creation (the Virtual Choir). The final case study chapter is not really a case study following the model of the others but is an interesting contribution as it describes an open source tool set that can be used for network analysis by researchers and more importantly by network participants to visualize and gain a meta overview of their own emergent networks.

In architectural parallel with the case studies, Carvalho and Goodyear end the book with a synthesis chapter of their own. They begin by reflecting on the relationships amongst the elements in their analytic design of effective networks. Pragmatically, they first instruct us to look to the users’ perceptions of value and efficacy and ease of use as the most important measurements of effectiveness. The editors then dive into principles of knowledge construction using legitimation code theory which (fortunately) soon leads to discussion of six practical design principles – which I found to be (as likely designed) the more generalizable contribution of the text.

Despite the cost (US $44.95 in paper, $155.00 in hardback from Routledge), I found much of value in this text. I hope that at least parts of the work become available openly, as there is much for us to learn as educators, social activists, and human connectors from this timely tome!

Book Review : The Architecture of Productive Learning Networks Anderson Vol 15 | No 2 April/14 284