When worlds collide

In yesterday's post I gave the first part of a review of the latest issue of the journal Interactive Learning Environments, which is a special issue entitled: 'Towards eLearning 2.0 University'. There are 7 papers in the issue, each of which focus on social media that are being used to support and enhance learning in higher education. I promised I would continue the review today, right here on this blog, so here goes...

The research by Wopereis et al, with the title 'Weblogs as instruments for reflection on action in teacher education' set out to analyse how student teachers used them during their training. The paper concludes that although some reflective content was created by students, blogs do not naturally promote deeper forms of reflection without some scaffolding through tutor intervention. Interestingly, the students reported that they found the blogs useful for reflecting on action, and the authors postulate that with tutor support over a greater period of study time, meta-reflection might emerge as a result of prolonged blog writing, and revisiting of content.

Two papers reporting on research into the implementation of personal learning environments using social media provide a little controversy for the special issue. The first, by Valjataga and Laanpere, focuses on learner control of the environment, and how it poses a challenge for instructional design. This is reminiscent of the discussions held at the recent PLE conference in Barcelona, where some theorists attempted to defuse the tensions between didactic institutional provision and individualised PLEs by proposing a compromise. To reconcile the two seemingly polemic positions of learner control vs institutional provision, the authors of this paper propose that the PLE requires an elaboration, which 'integrates important instructional functions for learner control'. They argue that learners are in varying stages of readiness to create and adopt their own personal learning environments and that a deeper understanding of this is required to ensure future success.

The second PLE paper by Cascero et al, proposes an even deeper form of compromise, suggesting a middle ground between institutional provision and personalised tools and spaces. The iPLE (institutional PLE) sounds like a contradiction in terms but the authors are actually proposing 'a shift from the monolithic model of traditonal virtual learning environments to a more heterogenous and open model'. The authors propose a conceptual architecture of the iPLE and show how they propose it could merge the best functions and features of both worlds. Cascero et al justify the iPLE by arguing that 'iPLE is an attempt to build a PLE from the point of view of the university, so that every institutional service can be integrated, but flexible enough to interact with the wide range of services learners could consider important during their lifelong learning'. Sounds like two worlds are about to collide....

An institutional PLE? Impossible or feasible? This last article certainly offers a controversial and fascinating read, and will doubtless provoke some fierce debate.

Image source

When worlds collide by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.