Terry’s Blog

True, I had had a couple of glasses of Rioja but this news video brought a tear to my eye. What’s that all about then?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7468832.stm

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Last Tuesday I went to the latest event in the excellent Talking about Teaching series put on by SDDU at the University of Leeds - Challenging or conforming: the art of blended learning presented by Allison Littlejohn, Chair of Learning Technology at Glasgow Caledonian University. I found this extremely useful and got a number of ideas to follow up in my own teaching and to develop further in discussion with colleagues. The presentation and supporting materials are all available on-line now and the session was videoed but I’m not sure if or when that will be available.

A particularly useful aspect of the 3 hour session was the way it alternated between presentation to introduce both the more conceptual and pedagogical aspects of blended e-learning and concrete examples of blended learning activities. This included an introduction to a number of tools for designing and planning activities, from a simple proforma to specify the problem the proposed activity will address, a brief and general description of the solution, i.e. the activity itself, and the aims and objectives, to much more detailed and concrete specification of the activity - its timings, specification of tutor and student activity, the activities themselves and assessment. We then had an opportunity to work in pairs to propose problems in our own teaching and activities that could provide solutions and begin to construct the more detailed designs. The sharing of these problems and the discussion of the activities suggested was very interesting - from dentistry, the Business School and others.  Allison also pointed us to a number of repositories of blended learning designs and activities that have been constructed in such a way that they can conveniently be repurposed for a variety of different subject areas.

A few points came out of the afternoon that I found particularly thought provoking. Allison is involved in researching and advising on e-learning for large corporations including Shell. Self-paced, self-initiated and self motivated continuous professional learning is becoming a common requirement of employees in the corporate world that many of our graduates will be joining. Employers now claim that it takes approximately 5 years in the job for new graduate employees to bridge the skills deficit for operating in this way and that this deficit is growing. It has also been observed that the massification of HE has led to less student learner independence and self direction than was previously the case. What is required was described as helping the students develop their ’social capital’, in the sense of developing the networks of resources and people that will provide them with the social learning contexts that underpin much personal and professional development and becoming an expert life-long learner. The recommendation is that we look hard and critically at and learn from the parallel developments in e-learning in the corporate sector.

The opportunities to address these general problems by exploiting blended e-learning are compromised by a lack of understanding of the affordances and possibilities the new technology has by staff and by the difficulty of motivating students to work in this way. This suggests students need to be much better informed of why this is important and why it is to their advantage. This is not the first time I have heard a presenter point to the paradox that students are often very familiar with some of the e-tools and aspects of social networking and often operate in vicarious virtual learning processes without being able to consciously bring that knowledge and facility to the more formal learning arena. I think there are a number of interesting questions raised here about students’ prior experience of formal education and the expectations they come to us with. This ties in with the very revealing account about contemporary secondary education given to us by a ’super head’ at last January’s L&T Conference. On the issue of motivating and engaging students in blended e-learning activities, Allison said the chief driver of student learning behaviour is still assessment and changing assessment tasks and strategies will be key to our success. Although this is probably true it is a little dispiriting, that we will need to manipulate students’ satisficing tendencies to make progress. This is not quite what I would like to see - students and staff working together in a community and culture of enquiry and knowledge construction in a spirit of collaboration and sharing. But then I am a child of the sixties!

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This video seems to have trouble loading and running sometimes. It is available at http://blip.tv/file/855937 

A version of this talk, Gin, Television and Social Surplus,  is a post at the Here Comes Everybody blog, worth following in its own right. Thanks to a Joan Vinall Cox tweet and a blog post, Waking Up With a “Cognitive Surplus”  by Stephen Downes on Weblogg-ed for sharing this.

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Over Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week I attended the Emerge online conference Digital Communities & Digital Identities. (Josie Fraser, who did a great job organising it, has posted on this in more detail). I contributed as a presenter some time ago to a JISC Webinar on Web 2.0 applications for HE but this was the first full-on on-line conference I have attended and it worked very well. The sessions were run in Elluminate and all the features were used, breakout group sessions, whiteboard, slides, video etc. The audio quality was pretty good (once speakers got their levels right and everyone turned their speaker off in open mic sessions!).

I was surprised how useful the chat window was for sharing ideas, making comments and asking questions. There was some real brainstorming going on. It contributed significantly to the value of the presentations and is an aspect of on-line conference sessions that would be difficulty to replicate in a ‘real’ conference (unless everyone had a laptop and used a web service like Cover It Live - now there’s a thought). The chat really enhanced the sessions, made it easy for the presenter to see what was interesting the audience and helped give a focus to the audio and text discussion at the end and the summing up. It also was very sociable and entertaining! At times it was a bit like a group of naughty school kids chattering, swapping jokes, and winding up each other and the presenter. Personally I felt the sense of community grow throughout the 3 days and felt this made a significant contribution to ambience of the serious discussion too.

I felt pretty comfortable in the environment quite quickly once I got the hang of all the bells and whistles and there was quite a lot of spontaneous mutual support and advice as the community sorted itself out. One of the ‘old hands’ at this sort of thing remarked how better we had become operating in this sort of environment, not just the techical issues of knowing how the functions and tools work but how to make effective use of them in the presentations and the peripheral activities around them. I guess we will all be experts at this in a few years time, and hopefully our students will learn good and effective practice in these environments while they are with us.

I am attending the Next Generation Environments JISC conference next week as a member of a discussion panel but this is a normal face-to-face conference. Several people who were ‘at’ the Emerge on-line conference will be there and I am looking forward to comparing notes. I think on-line conferences will never replace f2f for many reasons but as additional and in-between events I think they are enormously valuable and effective. There can be more of them, they can be highly focussed (mini-conferences) with more targetted agendas, they are cheap (often free) and do not require travel and accommodation. And of course, the 2 modes can be merged when f2f conferences also run Elluminate (or another suitable system) and provide wikis, social networking and blogging. This opens up conferences to individuals who cannot other wise make it. And often the sessions can be recorded.

There is a growing understanding of the main differences and the main pros and cons of each conference mode. One disadvantage of the on-line mode is that I had to buy my own beer. On the otherhand I didn’t make a fool of myself at the disco. Actually the Emerge conference did have a very successful social event in Second Life with a DJ and fashion show. Sadly I couldn’t make it because I found my home PC was under spec for the new SL client and it wouldn’t install.

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I overheard on the radio this morning, while scraping the toast, some mention of twitter and the fact that some person in Downing St. is twitting (tweeting?) regularly about what’s going on there. I made a mental note to look it up on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme listen again. Partly because I usually mislay mental notes and partly because my small group of twitter mates might be interested I posted a tweet (twit?) mentioning it. Within a short time someone posted a reply giving me the URL to the programme and how far to fast forward to find the relevant bit (14 mins 30 secs) and telling me that the Today programme  runs a twitter channel itself. Looking at this I see that most, perhaps all, BBC Regional news services have twitter channels too. A little later my original tweet got another reply with a link to the Downing St. twitter channel and to Bill Thompson who was being interviewed on the Today programme, from where I found the interviewer, Rory Cellan-Jones. This in turn led me to another tweet with links to a Guardian article about the Downing St. twitter-er.

I must say I find the twitter phenomenon fascinating. It is ripe for sociological analysis and I’m sure someone somewhere is already doing it. It exemplifies so many aspects of on-line social networking  - networks within networks, the power the ‘friends of a friend’ connections, the importance of reputation and status, the collective and collaborative evaluation and dissemination of information and resources, and much more. Who would have thought that a stream of short messages (max 14o characters), often about where people are, what they are eating, watching on TV, what mood they are in, what the weather is like where they are, that they are in a traffic jam eating chocolate, and so on could also be such a powerful research tool. And the seemingly trivial nature of many posts is not trivial at all in the context of groups of twitter-ers and the nature of their identities and relationships and the reality of their ‘virtual’ community. I’m getting close to abandoning the notion of’ virtual in these contexts. It just obscures more of the nature of these sorts of communities and their relations than it illuminates. The experience is real, the information is real, the people are real, their activities are real and, dare I say it, the feeling of attachment and even to some extent obligation are real. Or at least as real as in some networks and communities I am involved with off-line.

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