eLearning journal

I finally had a go at Second Life this weekend inspired by this youTube video.



My SL name is Tulip Debruyere and I've spent some time on Orientation Island working out the basics of dressing, moving, flying and searching etc. No problems so far, actually it was somewhat easier than I had expected ... but early days yet! Here I am on the Island.

We’ve just had the opportunity to look inside Facebook (a phenomenally successful social networking site), thanks to Ellen our 19-year old guide. She began using it as an easy way to keep in contact with overseas friends. And the emphasis does seem to be on easy and fun, for this age group anyway, a bit like sitting in the pub catching up with your mates. You create your online identify with personal details and other interesting / quirky features, like your strippers name and quick contacts, for instance, friends may choose to lick, kiss or poke you!, as well as sharing what’s going on with your life, your photos, etc. And the user has control over who can access their site and what information they share.

But there seems to be a darker side to all this fun. Over the past month social networking sites have been in the media with stories of cyber bullying, gangs using them to recruit members, police surfing them for information about crimes, identity theft, and the ease of misrepresenting oneself for dubious purposes. There’s also the concern with Facebook owning all the information posted (does this include original art work or your own photos?), and how they may then use this information.

All this negative stuff aside, how might Facebook be used for education purposes? The following excerpts from Educause Learning Initiative (May, 2007) hint at its potential.

The current concerns …

that the actions and activities on the site may lack substance. Keeping in touch with a circle of friends and colleagues is fine, but if Facebook enables trite, superficial interaction, there is little educational value.

But there are possibilities it may develop into something more significant …

The interesting question is whether expanded access and a growing number of functions will lead users into more substantive activities on the site. Face­book may become a channel for dialogue and a destination for people interested in learning about or sharing information on current issues.

It could be used as a campus marketing and communication tool …

a campus can advertise jobs, a campus election, or other activities to students at that institution or perhaps also at nearby institutions.

And to forge more meaningful relationships between campus students and teachers in an informal social setting …

a central part of the college years is “learning to be”—experiment­ing with different personas, engaging with a variety of groups, and developing a set of core values. By allowing users a range of tools to negotiate and inhabit online networks, Facebook and sites like it can be an important part of this developmental process.

From this very brief introduction to Facebook I couldn’t see any immediate use for it in my teaching (or personal life), so I haven’t signed up. But people probably said that about blogs and youTube, so who knows, it might be worth keeping an eye on it.

In the last 10-minute talk Derek Chirnside described features of a constructivist, learner-centred, collaborative online course that he teaches. Here are some of the points that were discussed.

Blogs and journals encourage participants to reflect on the course content and their learning experiences, and interact with each other through sharing their stories and problems. Weekly postings and collaboration are a requirement of the course.

Learning experiences revolve around authentic (personally relevant) activities and projects.

While some parts of the course are open and public (for example the student blogs), there are closed environments and opportunities for private discussion between the course participants and individually with the lecturer. This stimulated quite a lot of discussion around the necessity for closed places in health courses where participants can safely share their experiences in private.

As the course progresses, students begin making connections beyond the course and become part of a wider learning community.

I was very interested in the strategies Derek used to encourage and support participation and interaction. He was realistic with participants about the challenges ahead in the course, was clear about course expectations and requirements, provided an environment that allowed participants to build up confidence, identified and supported at-risk students, used teaching activities that required contribution / peer feedback / collaboration (for example, sharing stories and problems), provided teacher feedback that invited more discussion and helped to connect people / ideas / examples, and linked participation to assessment.

I’m beginning to appreciate the complexity of online learning communities and achieving the optimal mix of challenge, participation, connection, independence, and support. And the roles that facilitators and participants play in bringing this all together to meet the needs of each particular group of learners and individuals within a group. This discussion certainly provided some useful insights and practical advice towards this.

I haven’t left the course but have spent the last couple of weeks engrossed in exploring a number of web tools and playing with them. I’ve found that there seems to be two parts to this course, firstly there’s setting up and learning about the web tools themselves and then secondly, considering how they can be used to communicate, share and collaborate, in developing and maintaining a community.

So far my priority has mostly been on the first part. I have set up rss and google reader, have iGoogle as my homepage, have got del.icio.us and tags for bookmarking, explored flickr and uploaded some photos, used skype for chatting, explored youTube, worked on google docs, used gliffy and bubbl.us to make concept maps, tried out audacity, and taken a peek around myspace and bebo, and most recently have been looking at how to podcast, set-up slideshows and videos. This is a huge achievement given where I began!

I have to say though that even getting this far, nearly didn’t happen. Earlier on I was floundering around in cyberspace, completely directionless and disorientated; it would have been easy to give up. I knew I needed to fill in some basic gaps in my understanding of these tools, but I wasn’t sure how to do this. And then by chance, I found some resources that gave me the structure and guidance I needed:

Learning 2.0 program: 23 things, a course for librarians. I liked the course blog format, introductory podcasts, resources and discovery exercises, all with an emphasis on having a play and some fun.

Workshops and Resources wiki from University of Manitoba’s Learning Technologies Centre, with lots of really useful background information, advice and examples of using the web tools.

These both helped enormously and have kept me fairly busy over the last couple of weeks.

The best bits so far

• the knowledge gained about these tools and my confidence in using the web has grown substantially
• having the opportunity to hear from expert speakers in the 10 minute talk series
• following everyone’s progress in their blogs and email forum

The worst bits

• the earlier times of complete confusion
• getting around to blogging (I have never managed to keep any kind of journal before! I’ve got some posts partly written, but it’s easy to lose the moment and find yourself engrossed in something else)
• and leading on from the last one, not being a more active online participant in general, being here but mostly invisible (my online personality definitely doesn’t match my real-life personality and I’m not sure why, maybe it’s a confidence thing)

Two weeks ago I felt quite down and demotivated, overwhelmed by the technological mountain before me, what with blogs, wikis, del.icio.us, rss, tags, flickr, slideshare, twitter and a whole heap of other mysterious words. I felt quite inadequate; I simply wouldn’t be able get up to speed with all these web-based technologies. Not only was I struggling as an online learner (having difficulties managing my time, focusing on a particular task without zipping off here and there following pathways of interesting links, or even making some contribution to others in the group … needless-to-say I’m still struggling with all of these but working on it), but even worse, would I ever be able to make it as a good online teacher. Fairly depressing stuff!

But then I tuned into Nancy White’s talk about how much we learn by looking over someone else’s shoulders (here’s her website). I recognized immediately that this is how I have learned most of my (somewhat limited) computer skills, watching someone else, it’s like they turn the key and open the door a little for you to then venture inside yourself and try it out. In this course I’ve been looking over people’s shoulders to see how they set up and use their blogs, and how Elluminate and some of these other tools can be used (I like Elluminate, it’s immediately applicable to my teaching area (bioscience), although I’ve found I can listen and watch the slide screen but not follow the text at the same time!). And it’s been really useful, I’ve picked up a lot but to be honest, it’s a slow and difficult process when you are not an overly confident computer/web-user and doing it all online rather than having that person sitting next to you. But this will be the challenging reality for many online learners that don’t have any f2f, so it’s good to be aware of it and to consider how I can help students to feel comfortable and able to move beyond the technology.

There were several things that really struck me from Nancy’s talk:

Her chatty style mixing information and personal stories, her sense of humor, and ease of responding to the written text and questions; I felt like we were in the same room, I could almost see her waving her hands about as she excitedly spoke.

Much to my relief she told us that online facilitators don’t need to know all the techno stuff but it’s helpful to have a geeky friend who does (that’s Leigh, Bron and Terry I think). She said a wonderful line “it’s OK to be unknowing and comfortable in your unknowingness”. It was great to hear that, I don’t need to know everything about all the techno tools and words that keep popping up, just enough to see whether a particular tool will be useful in my teaching context and then using it well. So I’ll just focus on a few things (and keep a list of others to catch up with later on).

And it was even better when Nancy referred to the power of the newbie or new ”bee” buzzing around carrying new ideas to other people. What a confidence booster! Later that week I excitedly showed my husband some of the communication tools I am becoming familiar with (google groups, blogs, wikis) and he began wondering how he might be able to use this in environmental management at a national level. I really was buzzing!

And lastly from Nancy some tips on what makes a good facilitator: they are self aware, they practice and get feedback so they can identify their strengths and weaknesses, and they know how to ask good questions. This was great stuff.

So where am I now? I forged ahead and changed my web browser to Leigh’s suggestion which seemed to upset some of my other applications, although I hope that’s all sorted now. And I set-up my RSS feeder (I really liked the YouTube video (RSS in plain English by Leelefever) that described what it was, this video was really simple and effective). Then back down to reality with the number of posts appearing on the reader after a number of days away distracted by work and family commitments, and finding myself unsure what to do with my Gary Larson cartoon for our Bb exercise when I discovered it and the link to it breached copyright (which is why it hasn’t appeared anywhere), and then missing the talk last week because I thought it was on a different day (thank goodness they are recorded). I know I still have a long way to go but what a ride so far!

Just as you set up the normal classroom and use a variety of teaching practices to create an environment that supports and encourages student learning, so too should you apply this to the online environment, says Konrad Glagowski, in his recent talk to us about ‘classrooms as third places’. The theme of his talk was about creating a place that allows an online learning community to emerge; not building it for the students but building it with them.

Using the four key attributes of a great place (uses and activities, comfort and image, sociability, and access and linkages), Konrad described the teacher’s role in helping to set-up “the kind of environment where learning experiences can take shape”. He does this by providing opportunities for creative and expressive writing that is personally relevant and beyond the normal coursework; allows students to customize, define and build their own web space and online presence (individual student blogs); promotes dialogue by using a readerly and participatory voice aligned with instructional scaffolding / conversations; actively encourages interactions and the formation of networks; and provides a visual representation of the community so that the members, content and interactions can be seen and easily accessed.

His experience involves online learning as an extension of his normal classroom teaching where he sees the students daily, so that the two overlap and build on each other. Even so, he takes considerable time (about a month) establishing the community before they then start on course-related work; is this related to his young students (13, 14 yrs) or does it actually take more time than we realize to lay good foundations? Personally I like the idea of taking time and allowing everyone to become comfortable with the environment, technology, and the process of revealing one’s thoughts. I particularly liked his visual representation of the community (eg a building with named windows that link to each student’s blog). I think this representation can help to create a feeling of ‘a group’ with everyone having a place in that group. It’s good to be reminded that very simple things can have a big impact!

In his blog, Konrad talks more about the five stages of creating learning experiences that have emerged from his own teaching.
1. Discover: student looks for a topic of interest from a course theme and begins exploring
2. Define: student narrows and defines their research topic and how they will approach it
3. Immerse: student becomes immersed in topic: blogs, reads, creates, and becomes part of online learning communities/networks
4. Build: begins to build their own knowledge that is evident on their blog
5. Contribute: creation of unique and individual artifacts to the field they are researching

Constructivism in action! This framework along with his talk reinforce important characteristics of online learning that have become increasingly evident since beginning this course: personally-relevant learning (authenticity), having an online identity, ownership of material, co-participation of the teacher and student, social learning networks (collaborative learning), transparent learning and the importance of the process rather than just the product.

I’m still considering the extent to which blogs and the processes described here could be used in a meaningful way in my teaching context, in that it adds value to the students learning. I can see that a project investigating a topic related to the body would provide the type of in-depth exploration Konrad describes with his students, but I’m also weary that for many beginner-level tertiary students, simply managing the large amount of content in the bioscience course in an online learning environment is challenging enough already.

I would certainly like to create more opportunity for interaction and social learning in the online environment, perhaps using student blogs as learning diaries where they have a place to share relevant knowledge / experiences / links, explore a topic of interest in more detail if they wish, make comments on topical issues (I think this incidental learning is really important), begin to have relevant conversations, and to reflect on their own learning. Maybe this is how it starts out in the first half of the course, progressing to using it for a project in the second half of the course. It certainly has given me lots to think about.

After visiting Stephen Downes website to find out more about eLearning 2.0 (or Web 2.0 as it is also known), it seems to be the future of online learning. In his ‘Trends and Impacts’ video he describes how eLearning has developed from an online learning environment that delivers content largely supporting traditional classroom-based learning, to the new age of eLearning 2.0 defined by ‘immersive learning’ (learning by doing) and ‘connected learning’ (conversation and interaction via computer-based learning networks; social networking). In this type of online learning, the learner essentially has a ‘personal learning centre’ where they create their own learning by using and mixing content and materials from the web and other sources according to their own needs and interests.

And here comes the “blog”, which two weeks ago I had barely even uttered the word, to now when my head seems to be bursting with stuff about and on blogs. A blog can be this ‘personal learning centre’, used to create and showcase a learner’s work. He says about blogging, it “is very different from traditionally assigned learning content. It is much less formal. It is written from a personal point of view, in a personal voice. Students' blog posts are often about something from their own range of interests, rather than on a course topic or assigned project. More importantly, what happens when students blog, and read reach others' blogs, is that a network of interactions forms-much like a social network.”

In the recent Distance Learning article, Stephen Downes describes how eLearning 2.0 could be applied to an online course. His essential requirements for the course: “the learners choose their own technology - whether blogs, discussion boards, audio feeds, or whatever ...” and “the content is not imposed on them, but is rather, self-selected”. I’m wondering how could a teacher manage all this flexibility, how could standards be maintained, how could students possibly manage to cover all the (typically huge) course prescription?

And he admits this isn’t going to be easy in a tertiary education setting, as there’s too much predefined content and classes, and thinks “the best that can be done is to mitigate the disadvantages. Basically, what this means is throwing a lot of stuff out there and letting people craft their own course out of it”. This sounds even worse than the previous statements!

However his description of what could work is better: content area for course material but with as little design imposed on it as possible (I’m not sure about that, some structure and guidance is surely needed), course blog or similar which would be a focal point for resources and discussion, online synchronous chat like Elluminate, course community for social connections perhaps by discussion list or student blogs. Hang on, this all sounds familiar, isn’t this what we are experiencing in the facilitating eLearning course. Aha, the proof (of how good eLearning 2.0 is) will be in the learning!