Reviving my blog

In the last few years I have noticed that blogging in academia has become more of an accepted and encouraged activity rather than something happening on the fringes. When I was recently asked to work with a colleague in the Department of Education at the University of Bath to develop a community website for sharing research outputs and practice I must admit to being a little skeptical about being able to realise the ‘community’ dimension of the website.  However as a proposal turned into a design brief it became apparent that a real shared purpose to promote and celebrate research activity collectively was developing among my academic colleagues.

When the Education Research @ Bath group blog was launched a shared ownership and let’s call it ‘identity’ had also emerged. While I may not feel confident in calling this a thriving community just yet,  it is certainly building and is something which the Department should look to with pride.

 

Reflecting on how this came about a number of factors seemed to be important. Timing for one. There was a shared and pressing need to raise the profile of research in the department. In addition involving a number of stakeholders and potential contributors in determining the look and feel of the platform and the content of the static pages helped to create ownership. The functionality was molded to accommodate contributors’ comments and suggestions and changes were made as modes of use developed. The platform was not an imposition but rather a responsive medium that enabled the contributors to make it work for them rather than vice versa.

This is what has inspired me to revive my own blog!

Escalate e-learning workshop

Last week a colleague and I attended the Escalate e-learning workshop event at Swansea Metropolitan

University. The humanities department, situated in the Townhill campus provided stunning views over Swansea bay which was reward in itself for the challenging walk up from the station!

Our motivation for attending this workshop was to find out more about how the PebblePad e-portfolio system was being used at the University of Wolverhampton. Julie Hughes gave us some valuable insights into how to support and facilitate a reflective community of students using a blogging network.

The Salmon 5-step model underpins Julie’s approach to online facilitation. The early stages of ‘access and motivation’ seemed particularly important which resonates with my experiences of facilitating learning communities using discussion fora. Access to participation was made easier through the provision of templates for setting up individual blogs and supported sessions in the IT suite. Julie taught through the blogs modelling the way in which she wanted to encourage the students to engage. Extrinsic motivators were used in the early stages for example the students were expected to write weekly blog posts to which Julie undertook to give feedback before the next session – these were turned around quicker than requests for feedback by other routes. The time students spent on blogging tasks was taken from face to face sessions rather than being added onto sessions.

Julie stressed the importance of the blogging environment as a social space (level 2 of the Salmon model) and how the writing was more akin to talk than formal writing. It would be interesting to see how the idea of e-tivities had been adapted and developed for this blogging environment.

An intense period of tutor feedback on individual blogs gave way to group blogs where peer support could grow. Each member of the group blog had their own named page signalling an expectation for contributions to be made by all members of the group.

Negotiation of rights and responsibilities of tutor and students and the development of appropriate online cultures seemed key in building the community that was to occupy this learning environment created out of networked blogs.

Although Wolverhampton has a VLE it did not feature in the course that was taught via the e-portfolio system. What was Julie’s advice for getting started? ‘Start small for example one tutor group, be willing to take risks and be ready to put in a lot of time up front giving feedback and support.

Interestingly Julie’s research webfolio gives useful insights into how the PebblePad e-portfolio system can also be used as a tool for research.

http://eportfolio.wlv.ac.uk/viewasset.aspx?oid=184235&type=webfolio

Are you sitting comfortably?

Yesterday I returned from the ‘And they all learned happily ever after….. ‘ digital story telling workshop run as part of the University of Gloucestershire’s Pathfinder programme. The workshop was situated in the impressive Centre for Active Learning building . The building design is underpinned by the ‘pedagogic philosophy of active learning’. This was to an extent played out in the format of the workshop where we were engaged in an active story telling ice-breaker (tell your neighbour about your journey to the workshop, then retell the story you were told) and group discussion around what characterises deep reflection using graduated scenarios. This was led by Jenny Moon (see http://www.cemp.ac.uk/research for more information about Jenny’s work and the teaching materials she uses).

We were shown some impressive stories created by individuals and groups of students. Group stories were used as part of a first year induction programme and for group presentations, as part of an accountancy programme, where the stories were later peer reviewed and then formally assessed. For me the individual presentations were particularly powerful e.g. where the authors shared their motivations to study Landscape Design or how involvement in sport had shaped and transformed students’ personal identity.

These stories seemed to be serving a variety of educational purposes:

• to develop presentation skills
• to develop group working skills
• to develop digital literacy
• to develop skills for (critical) reflection e.g. critical incident analysis
• for personal development – making sense of personal experiences

In addition Jenny Moon presented further purposes for story:

• to develop teaching skills
• stories that became scenarios or case studies (fiction and/or non fiction) in professional settings

All stories presented in the workshop were created from an audio commentary recorded using Audacity and still images (obtained from a variety of sources!). The images and audio track were then integrated using Windows Movie Maker.

A number of issues arose from the discussion around these stories:

Copyright and data protection – The need to give guidance to students about how to use third party images legally and the need to obtain appropriate permission from subjects who were being photographed. The need for teaching staff to model good practice when they used images, video or sound in their teaching.

Public or ‘private’ stories? – Some stories were created by individuals for the course tutor for assessment purposes. There was a feeling that a requirement to create stories for a public audience might have constrained the student authors.

Assessment – There was a feeling that new ground was being broken in determining appropriate criteria for assessment. It was acknowledged that assessing the stories in a transparent way was a non-trivial task. There was a general agreement from those practitioners who had used story as part of their courses that it was important to value them as part of the assessment and in a number of cases the stories accounted for 50% of the marks. Jason Ohler has advice on his website for developing a rubric and includes some examples.

Clearly the examples of digital stories that we saw were particularly good examples of student work. I was left wondering what the full range of student work looked like. I also wondered whether some groups of students had a particular affinity for working in this way or if other groups were disadvantaged. Anecdotally the digital story was thought to be enabling for disabled or international students who might be less confident in presenting ‘live’ to their peers.

Overall I think it is worth experimenting with digital story to enhance student learning and perhaps there is also potential for using it as a vehicle to develop digital literacy among teaching staff. However I still have some questions:

1. How much guidance is enough? – given that we want to enable students to get started but not to constrain creativity.

2. Where to start? – with a script, with a set of images, the audio track? It seems that the interplay between the images and the narration is important so perhaps each shape the other?

3. To what extent does the technology used to compile the story influence the nature of the story? The group at the University of Gloucestershire also experimented with Photostory 3 but felt that this constrained the narrative by imposing rather artificial chunking. According to Alan Levine there are at least 50 web 2.0 ways you can tell a story using various free internet based tools. I wonder which are most fit for which purposes?

4. The stories we heard were told via a single voice – I wonder what multiple voices might add? Would it be possible to present stories about the same event from multiple perspectives? Does this then become a kind of role play or rich case study?

5. In what circumstances is it best to use group stories or individual stories?

6. If defining assessment criteria is a challenge how can peer review be included in an equitable way?

7. How does digital story telling link to reflective journals, e-portfolios and PDP?

Overall a useful and thought provoking day! Over the next few months I think I’ll be trying to develop my story telling technique, trying out different technologies for capturing story and experimenting with story for different educational purposes.

25 tools for learning

New e-learning tools are emerging almost everyday which makes Jane Hart’s directory of learning and performance technologies a particularly useful resource.

http://c4lpt.co.uk/25Tools/Tools/index.html

This link takes you to her pick of the day.

http://janeknight.typepad.com/

Reflections on NLC 2008

The Networked Learning Conference is held every two years and this was the first year that it had been held outside the UK. The conference venue at the Sani Beach resort just outside Halkidiki in Greece certainly represented ‘a world I don’t usually inhabit’ in more ways than one ! I’m going to use this post to focus on a couple of themes across the conference that stood out for me. I’m sure many others have blogged this conference for example Grainne Conole provides another view here.

Learning Design

Three speakers, Yannis Dimitriadis (keynote 2), Diane Laurillard (keynote 3) and Grainne Conole et. al. (paper) all focussed on Learning Design or designs for learning. There was broad agreement that learning designs that appropriately integrate technology should build on teachers pedagogical knowledge and therefore on the need to support teachers in developing and sharing designs. All three speakers were involved in projects to develop tools to support teachers in creating technology enhanced learning environments. However the approaches proposed by each of the speakers, and hence the tools they were developing, were somewhat different.

Conole et. al. were interested in

• understanding design
• guiding the design process
• visualising the design process
• sharing, re-use and re-purposing of designs

Through interviews with teachers and curriculum developers throughout the design process they were hoping to ‘capture the implicit’ and build a flexible tool based on the way teachers thought about their course designs. So far they see a great diversity of approaches and noted the need to support this in a flexible way. They are developing a variant of the dialogue mapping tool, Compendium for this purpose. This group were concerned with supporting and enabling creativity and innovation in learning design.

Yannis Dimitriadis proposes a more mechanistic approach whereby teachers could assemble a ‘scripted collaborative learning environment’ using an integrated tool set. The toolset is populated through the analysis of case studies of good practice. Design patterns and IMS were central features in this proposal. Finished designs could be delivered via a VLE with interaction analysis tools hooking into the access logs to delivering evaluation measures back to the teachers.

On the other hand Laurillard’s view was more administrative. She reported on her JISC D4L Project – the pedagogic planner. This tools aims to help teachers/lecturers.

• identify learner needs
• design learning activities
• assess learning outcome

Key features are a kind of audit of current practice and optimising the time that is available to tutors and students for most effective teaching and learning. The idea is that the teacher is presented with a number of structures forms and depending on what is filled in various suggestions are put forward.

I think the central problem of supporting teachers in creating effective technology enhanced learning environments is complex and that these three approaches illuminate different areas of the same landscape. However I would suggest that we are a long way off from a time when learning technologists are no longer needed to mediate the sorts of conversations that these systems attempt to encapsulate.

The Tyranny of Participation!

Although I didn’t go to this session the abstract and the paper caught my eye. Ferreday and Hodgson in their paper ‘The Tyranny of Participation and Collaboration in Networked Learning‘ made me aware that some of the norms of communities could attain a status such that they are rarely or never questioned. I wonder if this has been the case with the ‘rhetoric’ surrounding participation and collaboration. In this paper the authors tell us about the ‘dark side’ of participation where it can be an ‘instrument of domination’ which learners may feel as ‘oppressive and controlling’.