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

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!

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.

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.

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.

Once you have registered with DimDim any number of meetings can be scheduled in advance or one can be started immediately on an ad hoc basis. Invitations are sent out by email. The email provides a link to the meeting and details of the agenda, scheduled time and so on. However, the email does not provide logging in details and any one who obtains the link to the meeting would be able to attend. When an invited attendee clicks on the link it takes them to a joining page that has already filled in their email and the name of the meeting. They just need to enter a screen name to enter. Any email address can be entered here so the meeting url can be sent to any one or made into a link on a web page or in a blog post.

Before letting you in DimDIm does a check of your browser and version of Flash. If it not 9 or above you can install at this point.

Once in there you can see a list of attendees. The main area can be used for viewing the host’s desktop and any applications being run, a Powerpoint or PDF file, or a Whiteboard. This is controlled by the host. There is an option to chat with all - opens chat area - or initiate private chats with any of the attendees. Chat and audio can be disabled for individuals by the host.

If the full screen option is chosen this makes the maximum space available for viewing an application or presentation but some scrolling is required by the viewer to see the whole of the application window unless the host has sized and positioned it on their desktop to fit what area the viewer can see. In effect this puts some contol of the scrolling that is necessary in the hands of the host. If the viewer needs to scroll this can be guided by the host via audio or text communication. The system provides audio and video communication. To share an application the host has to minimse the DimDim meeting window so is not able to see what viewers can see. Control of applications or slides cannot be handed to viewers but they can collaboratively use the whiteboard and annotate slides. Switching between these desktop, slides and the whitebaord is a single click. The screen refresh on viewers’ screens is not bad but there is an inevitable lag.

It looks like a maximum of 20 attendees are possible and only 3 of these can share the microphone (i.e. use the audio channel).

I have tried DimDim this by running my PC as host and a laptop logged in as an attendee. I couldn’t use sound as the feedback nearly brought the plaster of the ceiling!

One possible use of this is as an alternative to Skype meetings. Skype allows multiple users to talk, text and video but all participants need to be registered Skype users and have Skype installed on their PCs. With DimDIm only the meeting’s host PC needs an installed client. In addition there is the facility to share documents and applications.

I am thinking of testing it by running a session(s) for introducing LeedsBlogs, our Elgg installation, to new users to demonstrate the basics of posting, joining a community blog, uploading files, embedding files and images, what ‘friends’ are for, tagging, use of access levels, creating bespoke access lists and using them and so on. Or run LeedsBlogs help desks, or a master class, perhaps….

In business, the investment cost of producing anything risks creating a systematic bias in the direction of acceptance of the substandard. You have experienced this effect if you have ever sat through a movie you didn’t particularly like in order to ‘get your money’s worth”. The money has already gone, and whether you continue to watch Rocky XVII or not won’t change the fact. [...] Curiously in that moment many people choose to keep watching the movie they have already decided they don’t like, partly as a way to avoid admitting they’ve wasted their money. So it is in many organisations. The systematic bias for continuity creates tolerance for the substandard.

This applies to the protection of large scale investments and the prohibitive costs of doing something else once the system is in place and embedded. Examples would include investment in VLEs where a great deal of time and other resources have been invested in staff development, fixes and fiddles to make it do what you want it to do (sadly this often means changing your methods and procedures to fit the technology - A about F as far as I’m concerned), and for many a large personal emotional investment in the system.

Another thing that I found particularly interesting was Shirky’s report on some research on originality and ‘good’ ideas within organisations. The methodology, at least as reported, seemed reasonably OK. The most consistent source of innovative and useful ideas are individuals and groups that operate across and therefore partially outside of specifically functional groups. In general terms they can see the broader context but at the same time understand the purposes and needs of the narrower functional groups as well as the strategic objectives and needs of the wider organisation. These individuals have a wider spread of links and more connections between groups. Within the more compact and focussed functional groups the exchange of ideas has something of the character of being in an echo chamber of accepted ideas, customary and implicit attitudes and procedures and a natural tendency to reinforce the comfort zone and the status quo. This is a bit of a gloss, influenced by what i see going on around me, but I think is in the spirit of the report.

This seems to me an argument for developing networks and making it possible for staff to operate or at least think outside their particular silos. I’m sure the social network we now have at my University, based on Elgg,  is making a valuable contribution to this end already. It is also an argument for looking at how units already working across the whole University can contribute to innovation, like the staff development and support units, educational technologists, Library staff and teams and no doubt others. It also is an argument for secondments and internal sabbaticals.

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.

Use of discussion boards seems to be on the increase again and I wonder if this is a sort of backlash against the relative complexity and time commitment of using communications tools based on blogging functionality. As a great fan of social networking and systems like Elgg and Ning, I have spent the last few years encouraging colleagues to use these in preference to the old fashioned, heavily structures, largely text based threaded message forums. But, for some things, I have found discussion boards in our VLE and Student Portal, the Forums here in Eduspaces (once upon a time) and those available in Ning groups more effective and significantly easier to use. I am gradually forming a better idea of what systems like Elgg are good for and what is better suited to focused threaded discussion. I hope to turn this into some sort of guidelines/best practice document, probably collaboratively written in a Google doc in due course. I would be grateful for any thoughts on this and any observations on your own experience, dear Reader, of the two different systems.