http://terrywassall.org/blogs/learningandteaching/

and will continue to be developed there.

“It is essential to destroy the widespread prejudice that learning is a strange and difficult thing just because it is the specific intellectual activity of a particular category of specialists or of professional and systematic learners”.

“It must be shown that all men are learners by defining the limits and characteristics of the ’spontaneous learning’ which is proper to everybody”.

The closest I have come to email like activity in gwave is pinging gwave contacts. All your personal gwave contacts are listed in the Contact panel. When a wave is open in the viewing panel of full screen, all the wave members’ icons are displayed in the wave’s header bar. If you click on a wave member’s icon in a wave header or if you click on a contact’s icon in your contact panel, a box will open giving you some details of the person and some options. If you have clicked a contact icon in the contacts panel the options are:

New wave
Ping [contact's name]
Recent waves

Clicking on ‘New wave’ starts a new private wave in which you and your contact are the only members. This appears in both your and your contact’s in box. As far as I can see, clicking on ‘Ping..’  does exactly the same thing with the possible exception that the new wave opens for you and your contact (if they are on-line) in a pop-up window. Either way it still ends up in both inboxes. So this is a one-to-one private message appearing in both individuals’ inboxes. However, it is a wave so discussion can take place within the message and other contacts added to it (by either of you at the moment!). Clicking on ‘Recent waves’ lists any waves that the contact has been active in recently that your are also a member of so it is essentially a filter of your inbox. I have no idea the time scale of ‘recently’ but it fails to list some waves I would expect to see.

If you click on a wave member’s icon in the header of an open wave you get a slightly different set of options:

New wave
Ping [member's name]
Remove [member's name] – this is greyed out and doesn’t work at the moment

If the wave member is not one of your contacts you are also offered an option to ‘Add to contacts’ which will add the individual to your contacts panel. This makes them available to be added to your waves(or any other waves  you are a member of) if you wish. You can only add contacts to waves.

If you choose the ‘New wave’ option it works as described above – a new private wave is created and appears in your and the wave member’s inboxes. However, if you choose the Ping option a new private wave appears embedded in the wave at your insertion position. It is a ‘child’ private wave embedded in ‘parent wave but only visible to  you and the person you pinged. But like any other wave, you (and the person you pinged to create it) can add other members from your contacts panel. This ‘child’ wave is not listed separately in your and your contact’s  inboxes.

Now I know what you are wondering! What happens if you add a contact to a child private wave that is not a member of the containing parent wave? The answer is that it appears in their inbox just like any other wave. It will open just like any other wave and they can use it just like any other wave. For them it is just another wave in their inbox. However, if you subsequently add them to the parent wave, this will appear in their inbox in the place of the child wave and their access to the child wave will be as an item in the main parent wave.

How all this will work in the final release version of Google wave remains to be seen, but the ability to embedded waves with restricted visibility and access could be useful.

The structure of a wave (waves, wavelets and blips)

A wave is the whole document in its entirety. It comes into being by entering the first piece of text in a blank wave. This first paragraph of text  is automatically made bold and becomes the wave’s title. For this reason it is best to make the first paragraph just one short sentence. This initial text, including the title sentence, can be edited by anyone who has access to the wave (different acess rights will hopefull be possible in the full product). Other users can either edit the text, reply to the text or insert comments within the text. Replies are referred to as wavelets and comments within the text are called blips. Blips can be inserted in blips so nested blips are possible. Blips can be collapsed (hidden) or expanded (exposed) by any reader so the text of the wave and its wavelets can be read in a clearly structured form if required. A blip with reply blips is a bit like a little message board inserted into the text where needed for discussing a particular point, asking a question, making a suggestion or a reference, etc.

So replies appended to a wave are wavelets. Replies to replies are also wavelets. The structure of replies and replies to replies is rather complicated but seems to work well in practice. The following image gives an idea of how things work.

If you can make any sense of this you’re a better man than I! What seems to happen is that the first reply follows the replied to text immediatelyafter with no indentation. But subsequent replies to that piece of are inserted above the first reply and indented. All other replies to the text (the 3rd, 4th andso on) are inserted in chronological order at the same level of indent as the second reply. (I think). In other words, if you constantly reply to the last reply everything is listed chronologically with out indentation. Once something is replied to more than once an indented thread is started from that reply onwards. See? Simple.

Despite the apparent confusion above, in practice our wave is working OK. Pat started by adding a number of pieces of text, each one a reply to the previous piece. Others have added replies to these which (as 2nd and subsequent replies) have indented nicely, and all is reasonablyclear. In addition to this we are using blips to annotate specific sentences or locations within the text. This is achieved by clicking once on the text box to get the focus on it (puts a green box round the text) and then double clicking within the text where you want to make a comment (i.e. a blip). Double clicking brings up a 2 option menu – reply or edit. If you select reply you can type in a comment. Clicking on Done will insert your comment in a box within the text at the point you selected. However, it will be accompanied with a little graphic of a minus sign which will hide the blip if clicked at which point it becomes a plus sign which can be clicked on to make the blip visible again. This is illustrated below:

If the little plus sign graphics are clicked the blip (or blip thread) will be displayed, as illustrated:

Replies can be made to blips and become part of a blip set or thread that collectively is hidden or exposed. And blips can be inserted in blips and can be exposed or hidden independently although you can only read blips inserted in blips if they are exposed first.

I hope this makes some sort of sense! I would say it is well worth persevering with Google Wave if you have the time and patience. At the very least I will be using it in place of Google Docs for some of my collaborative projects as it has functions for adding discussion to a document that are very clumsy to try and replicate in docs.

Looking through the abstracts for papers and presentations there are so many things I would like to go to but can’t because of time clashes. However, some of the delegates will be using Twitter and the Friendfeed group to comment on sessions they are going to and every session has a discussion area set up in the conference Crowdvine. One way of another I hope to pick up on the sessions I will miss via these discussions and reflections. I’ll probably use a combination of all 3 depending on where the on-line action seems to be for each session.  The Crowdvine set up lets you know who has expressed an interest in each session and you can see their individual programmes if they have used the calendar tool to create one. In this way, and via any session based on-line activity, I hope to identify people who may be happy to continue a discussion or who are likely to blog on their sessions. I will try to discipline myself to write a series of posts here on the sessions I go to. And since I have added this blog as a service to Friendfeed any new posts here will be pushed to my Twitter and Friendfeed profiles. Oh what a tangled web we weave!

Update 29th August. My Schedule so far http://altc2009.alt.ac.uk/profiles/52918/talks. Also although posts from this blog are pulled into Friendfeed they don’t seem to then get pushed on to Twitter.

This raises the question of metadata, a subject I found unexpectedly interesting! As Libby Bishop said in her very impressive presentation about the Timescapes project that is using the LUDOS repository, “metadata is just data about data”. The whole point about learning and research objects in repositories is that they should be discoverable and used, again and again. This means discoverable by the right people across a range of different disciplines and research areas. An image of a human rib cage will be of interest in a medical context and could easily be described with metadata that would be found by medical reseachers and teachers. But it may also be a very good example of a cantilever system (it may not; not my area, but you get the point) that would be of interest to engineers. However, it would be unrealistic to expect the image to have engineering metadata formally attached to it by its originators. It would perhaps only be seen as as interesting and useful object for engineering students or researchers by an engineer who had nothing to do with the original contex of the creation of the object. This is where user generated metadata comes in – social tagging. A particular engineer may have an interest in looking for examples of engineering principles in Nature and would perhaps, thinking out of the box, look for images of human anatomical bits and pieces as examples, structural, hydraulic perhaps, who knows. She may well find stuff and tag it (add metadata) with her and her students’ interests and objectives in mind. This is where truly ‘open’ content with a user tagging facility comes into its own. And why not go a step further and add a commenting and discussion layer to the repository too. The objects come alive via the animation of the dicussion. Perhaps.

This whole business of metadata is so vital for the whole archive/repository and open content movement and far more important and interesting than I thought. The issue is epistemological in its scope. In fact ontological! What more could a professional procrastinator with an intellectual bent ask for?

The second thing I discovered today at a VLE Project meeting is that 75% of ‘visits’ by students to the VLE are from off campus – 25% from Halls and 50% from who knows where. We now need data on peaks of activity to supplement this picture. Hundreds of students logged in on Christmas day and 1 member of staff was logged in at the stroke of midnight 31st December 2008. That doesn’t sound like much of a party!

3.14 But there is reason to believe this ready access to content is not matched by training in the traditional skills of finding and using information and in “learning how to learn” in a technology, information and network-rich world. This is reducing the level of scholarship (e.g. the increase in plagiarism, and lack of critical judgement in assessing the quality of online material). The Google and Facebook generation are at ease with the Internet and the world wide web, but they do not use it well: they search shallowly and are easily content with their “finds”. It is also the case that many staff are not well skilled in using the Internet, are pushed beyond their comfort zones and do not fully exploit the potential of Virtual Learning Environments; and they are often not able to impart new skills to students. (On-line Innovation in Higher Education Professor Sir Ron Cooke).

The gist of the argument I am following up is that in the new ‘free market’ in information offered by the web does not translate unproblematically into a free education or to the process of building knowledge. Access to information is one thing. Having the information literacy skills to turn the information into knowledge is quite another. Information needs a context to inform what counts as information and a context for evaluating available information.  That context is provided by knowledge. So I’m getting a picture of the relationship between information and knowledge that sees information as feeding the knowledge construction process. There seems to be a movement from existing knowledge to the setting of a problem or defining an objective that requires information. The information is specified and evaluated on the basis of knowledge and integrated into the knowledge building process accordingly.

Of course the distinction between information and knowledge (where does data fit in?) may be too crude. And as was noted at the beginning, they are both social constructs of one sort or another. There is nothing in ‘nature’ that is prelabeled as one or the other. It’s ‘us’ constructing the concepts and looking for the demarcation criteria. If this is the case then perhaps an analysis of common usage would be a clue. What distinguishes the terms in actual use? As a preliminary contribution to this, it seems to make sense to talk of information processing but the notion of knowledge processing doesn’t sound quite right. Perhaps knowledge is the outcome of information processing. But this would suggest a dialectical relationship between information and knowledge not dissimilar as that between facts and theory. Information is only information to the extent it is pre-specified in some way by a knowledge context. Knowledge is the outcome of information processing but not just information processing.

Another approach would be to think of the current focus in Higher Education on knowledge transfer. We don’t advertise these endeavors as information transfer. What is it that the notion of ‘knowledge transfer’ captures and promises that ‘information transfer’ doesn’t?

My main interest in this is what it implies for how we understand learning and the role of professional educators. If knowledge is simply information we have it in abundance and its out there for any one that wants it. But I wouldn’t want surgery conducted on the basis of Googled information or social policy made on the basis of Googled undergraduate essays. Clearly information is a precondition for knowledge but knowledge is required to make judgments and build on experience, our own and others. Knowledge provides the context for giving significance to information and for connecting it to decision making processes and action. The model that seems to be emerging here is that of students + information + teachers = knowledge creation. This sounds like a community of learners and learning objects. The specific role for teachers seems to be a combination of a model of professional learning (i.e. an expert learner), a learning mentor and a knowledge broker. This doesn’t seem to be far away from the model of apprentices and master practitioner. A key characteristic of an apprenticeship is membership of a community of practice where formal, informal and vicarious forms of learning are available. What would the process of module design, learning and teaching and assessment look like on this model?

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

Chris invited us to tell what our personal learning environments consist of. Here goes a first shot at it.

Text books, research monographs and papers, libraries, journals, newspapers, TV and radio news, RSS feeds from selected news and information sources (e.g. BBC, Earthwire, CommonDreams, Union of Concerned Scientists, RealClimate, etc…).  Google Scholar.

Novels, films, TV and radio documentaries. Biographies, autobiographies, political, economic and history books. Friends and family. Listening to my wife.

Conferences. Conference bars. Staff development events in my Uni. Email correspondence with colleagues.

LeedsBlogs (Elgg based social community). Lurking in a number of Ning communities. Eduspaces. A fairly extensive, mainly educational, blog roll.

I’m sure I can add to this with a bit more thought and imagination. Like Chris says, it’s all networks of one sort or another. Even to engage with a journal article is to enter into some sort of dialogue with the author, their status, reputation and the context in which they wrote the article. For me it is always engagement and dialogue with others, face-to-face, on-line, synchronously, asynchronously, or with the words of past generations. Marx, Weber and Durkheim, Foucault, Chomsky and Alan Bennett are all nodes in the networks that make up my personal learning environment.