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’.