OER the seas and far away....

I'm packing frantically to travel down to South Africa and onwards to Namibia tomorrow, volcanoes and strikes permitting. My destination is first Johannesburg, and then a short flight onwards to Windhoek, capital of Namibia, where I will be giving an invited presentation to the UNESCO Open Educational Resources Conference organised in conjunction with the Commonwealth of Learning.

I'm looking forward to attending the conference, and visiting another African nation. I learn so much every time I venture out of my own country, and often use the things I see in my writing and presentations. My last trip overseas a few weeks ago was also to Africa, to the Gambia, on the West coast, where I saw a lot of stuff that really opened my eyes to the incredible poverty most of the world's population live in. If you ever get complacent about life, go to Africa. My thoughts about education and its purpose changed radically as a result of my one week's stay, as you can see if you read my post What Price Education?

Namibia is not such a poor country as the Gambia, but I anticipate that I will once again be challenged by the places I visit, and the sights I will see. I had never dreamt I would go to Namibia - it was just another place on the map. But the invitation came out of the blue last month and so I jumped at the chance. My talk, mainly courtesy of Ulf-Daniel Ehlers (and also with thanks to Carmen Holotescu) is based loosely around the question: 'What's so Good about Open Educational Resources?' In it I will try to outline some of the benefits I can see in its use for individual learners, teachers, institutions (schools, colleges, universities), professional networks, and communities of practice. I will be interested to hear the feedback from my audience when I present on Monday.

I will say more about my Namibian excursion when I return, hopefully in time to cast my vote in the UK General Election on Thursday.

(The picture above is one I took of an old fisherman, looking out over the sea in the Gambia).


Learning with 'e's by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

12 simple writing rules

This post is dedicated to all my students who are currently in the process of writing up their e-learning research assignments.

Writing is still a central component of academic success and always will be.

Yet many students still keep making the same simple errors - failing to proof read before they submit, typographical errors and grammatical errors could so easily be eliminated if only they took a little more time.

As usual, I have held several tutorials with each of my students, but there is no substitute for going back to look over the rules of the English language, getting grammar right, steering clear of repetition and avoiding all the avoidable little syntax errors you could of avoided.


1. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.
4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
5. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They are old hat)
6. Be more or less specific.
8. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.
9. Also, too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
10. No sentence fragments.
11. Don't use no double negatives.
12. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.

Good luck to them all. :-D

Original source of the above content on how to write good.
And here's some more of them rules

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Wise crowds (and stupid mobs)

I'm reading James Surowiecki's excellent book 'The Wisdom of Crowds' at the moment. I was particularly taken by his introduction in which he relates the story of Sir Francis Galton, and his discovery, against his own assumptions, that collective intelligence not only exists, it is generally correct in its judgements. Galton's experiment was based on a 'guess the weight of an ox' competition in which 800 people participated. His statistical analysis of the results showed that as a collective mean score, the people guessed accurately to within one pound of the actual weight. This discovery of the people's collective ability ('democracy' as he called it) to make decisions that are of the most benefit to the people, attracted me for a number of reasons. Firstly, Galton made his discovery in a farm show in Plymouth, England (my home town). Secondly, Galton was one of the UK's first psychologists (I trained as a psychologist too), and although I disagree profoundly with many of his ideas about intelligence, which led him to champion eugenics, I can't help but admire the way he trailblazed his ideas about human behaviour, forensic psychology and statistics long before other, more famous psychologists. Thirdly, his scientific integrity is inspirational. Against his own deep seated beliefs, and in opposition to his previous scientific studies, the results of his 'West of England' regional fare research showed that in fact, when a crowd is asked to make a decision, they usually get it right.

James Surowiecki goes on to argue that the principles behind this idea can explain everyday activities including the stock market, democratic voting processes, gambling and even the fact that when you go the a convenience store at 2 am for a carton of milk, there is one there waiting for you. The wisdom of crowds even explains the phenomenon of Web 2.0 and social networking tools, and specifically, as we have long understood, it defines why web services such as Wikipedia and Google Search have become so popular and accurate over the last few years. Surowiecki argues that in many cases, the judgements of larger diffuse crowds of people is actually more accurate than the decision making of smaller, more elite groups. I have clung to this ideal in the development of many of my recent teacher education programmes, into which I have incorporated collaborative and co-operative online tools such as wikis, so that students can create, share and negotiate their learning related content.

If you haven't read Surowiecki's book yet (it was first published in 2004), do try to get hold of it. You can purchase it quite cheaply on Amazon (another wisdom of crowds example) and I promise you, it is a very good read. It's also, dare I say it, an effective foil to Andrew Keen's book 'The Cult of the Amateur' which warns against the dangers of Wikipedia and similar web repositories, describes what I can loosely term as 'stupidity of mobs'. If anyone has read both books and cares to provide a valued judgement on them, the comments box below is ready for you...

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Learning with 'e's by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Swabbing the decks

I'm swabbing the decks me hearties! Yep - it's time to do some spring cleaning, so I just deleted my Friends Reunited account. Had to really, because firstly I have never really used it - it feels just a little old and outmoded now - and secondly, I kept receiving annoying little updates via e-mail. I wouldn't have minded so much if the FR message didn't persist in starting with 'Stephen...' Look, no-one except my mother and Graham Attwell (no they are not the same person) has called me 'Stephen' in a very long time. If they do I'll not answer. I'm Steve to my friends and colleagues (note the distinction) and Tim to those who are a little confused about my digital identity. Not Stephen. That's guaranteed to get my back up every time.

I got shot of my Friends Reunited account in the same way I did with Plurk, Bebo, Myspace and a whole host of other not so useful tools. Facebook survived by the skin of its teeth, mainly because at the time I was (just a little bit) obsessed with Farmville, and also because a lot of my friends still communicate with me on my Facebook wall. (It's also a sureptitious way to keep tabs on my two teenage daughters, but don't tell them - they don't read this blog, so I hope I'm relatively safe mentioning it here... maybe). Facebook has some uses, so I'm keeping it. However, Twitter and my blog are now my most important Web 2.0 tools. There are a few others - you can read here about my top ten web tools.

On reflection, the reason I have been shedding so many of the services I so naively blundered into during my early days using the social web, is because they become a little like old clothes. I'm told that if you don't wear a garment for 6 months, you are probably very unlikely ever to wear it again. It's the same with many web tools. Suddenly they aren't so useful anymore. You leave them derelict, and don't use them for a few months, and they become like old clothes. You forget your password and can't be asked to request a reminder. Unwanted, probably outgrown, and looking slightly worse for wear - these old spaces go past their sell by date. I give my old clothes away to charity shops, or dump them if they are beyond repair. A purge now and then of old web tools I no longer frequent feels like another part of my life laundry.

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'Swabbing the decks' by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

What's so innovative about ICT?

I was recently invited to write a post for the Dell Education blog. Below is my article, which first appeared on the Dell website on 22 April, 2010.

In my role as an academic researcher in learning, I am often asked the same question: What is so innovative about ICT in schools? I assume that people ask this question because they are so used to seeing computers they have forgotten what the world was like before they arrived. I usually respond by starting off with an examination of what ‘ICT’ actually means. ICT - Information and Communication Technology - is more than just computers. In education, it’s really better referred to as ‘learning technology’ and I made my views clear about this recently in a blog post entitled ‘Stop calling it ICT!’. Whatever we call it, it’s a term that embraces an entire spectrum of tools, including the Internet and World Wide Web, telecommunications, cameras and audio, mobile phones, computer games, and other interactive devices in the classroom, such as Interactive Whiteboards, turtles and pixies (small programmable floor robots) and voting systems. We limit our vision if we simply see learning technology as ‘computers’, but I concede that computers are often the gateway into many of the above tools.


So just what is so innovative about this spectrum of tools? There are three key points I want to make to answer this question, and they all relate to what I term ‘affordances’ – the attributes of the technology that we perceive are useful to us. I wrote about this recently in a post on my own personal blog which I called ‘Angels in the Architecture’.

The first innovative quality of learning technology is that it has a flexibility and provisionally that supports learning across the sectors, from reception classes through to higher education and lifelong learning. Remember the time when you had to retype something, or use Tippex, if you made a mistake? You probably won’t if you are under 35 years old. When word processors were first introduced into education, they were an absolute Godsend to many people, particularly students who were writing long essays or teachers who had to create a large amount of content. The provisionally of the computer, not only in terms of text manipulation, but also images, sounds and video, means that the computer and learning technology in general have become indispensable for most people who find themselves studying or teaching.

Secondly, learning technology can be a platform for creativity. Creativity is often overlooked in learning – especially if it’s not art or music. We need to acknowledge that creativity is an important aspect of learning across the curriculum. We need to think laterally when trying to solve some mathematics or science problems for example. When we write essays, read literature, or learn a new language, we need to call upon our imagination and creative skills to make sense of the learning resources. Learning technology supports, and often extends our creative skills, and can act as a ‘mindtool’ for us to develop our thinking skills too. We can store all our thoughts, useful collections of knowledge and questions in the memory of our device, and then leave it there until we next need it, thereby freeing up thinking space for the immediate problems at hand.

Thirdly, and probably most importantly, learning technology is very effective in connecting people together, and enabling them to share their ideas, resources and comments online. Social networking tools, blogs and wikis are just a few of the tools that are in common use in education, where students and teachers can create content, share, discuss, vote, and otherwise participate in a community that extends beyond the boundaries of the traditional classroom. We are only at the start of the innovation curve of learning technology. The provisionally and flexibility of the tool, its capability to harness and amplify creativity, and its ability to connect people together wherever and whenever they are in the world, will ensure that learning technologies will continue to be innovative in education.

There are many more things I could say about the innovative nature of the tools that we call ICT – the learning technologies – but space and time do not permit. In conclusion, I will give this word of advice to any teacher in any sector of education: Don’t be afraid to take some risks with technology – if you can think of an idea to use in your classroom, it is very likely that there is a learning technology tool out there that can help you realise it.


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Learning with 'e's by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Getting there ....by degrees

In December last year, the UK's very own Prince of Darkness, Lord Mandelson, declared that 2 year degrees would be the future of higher education. The Business Secretary ordered a 'shift away' from traditional three-year degrees, despite warnings that shorter degree programmes might dilute academic standards. His reasoning is that 2 year degrees would free up more spaces for undergraduate study across all disciplines, and ultimately, there would be less expenditure, and less student debt. All well and good. But to deliver the so called 'fast track' degrees, universities will need to work smarter than ever before, and will need to adopt better flexible learning methods. This is where learning technologies will come to the fore.

We are holding the first UK national conference here at the University of Plymouth, on June 18th (which just happens to be the anniversary of the infamous Battle of Waterloo - I don't know why I pointed that out - may be an omen) where keynote speeches, workshops and other activities will highlight what universities will need to do to ensure standards are maintained whilst adapting to fast track degree delivery. Among the speakers at this free event will be Professor John Traxler (Wolverhampton University) who will talk about: 'Mobile Learning vs Fast Learning: On the Same Track?' and Mark Stubbs (Head of Learning and Research technologies at Manchester Metropolitan University). It should be a great day - and if you are in the region and free on that day, you may want to attend. Remember - it's a free event. Go to the conference website to register.

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Seeing the future

It's a risky business, this 'seeing into the future' lark. If you get it wrong, you look like an idiot. In ancient times, a prophet's life depended on whether he got it right. In the old testament sories, being a 'false prophet' was actually a crime. Prophets who got it wrong were put to death. That's why the smart ones predicted stuff that would happen hundreds of years later. If it didn't happen, they were no longer around to get whacked.

Nowadays, many people consult clairevoyants and fairground crystal ball gazers who tell them what they want to hear. It's very much a psychological game in which the 'fortune teller' fishes away by questioning, and watches body language to see if they can gain a purchase on their client's life story. Many of us remain fascinated by the apparent ability to see into the future. A lot of people revere the likes of Edward Cayce and Michael Nostradamus for the long range forecasts they made that appear to be uncannily 'accurate'. But both, although seemingly accurate in some ways could also be said to be playing a similar game to the fortune tellers. The criticism is that their generalised statements could apply to any number of world events at any time.


Predicting the future of technology is just as risky, even though we can often detect trends. Several eminent scientists have got it very wrong when they have tried to predict technological trends. Thomas Edison for example, famously claimed that moving pictures would one day make books redundant. They patently hasn't happened, and even though devices such as Amazon's Kindle are making e-books available to us all, paper based books have not been supplanted. Another famous gaffe came from Thomas J. Watson (then the head of IBM) who in 1943 was alleged to have said that he saw a world market for about 5 computers. There was the U.S. Mayor in a wild west town who, when he saw Alexander Graham Bell's new invention - the telephone - demonstrated for the first time, declared bullishly 'One day every town in America will have a telephone!' He was right of course, but his prediction was also so far off that it's now laughable. Virtually every person in America has a telephone, and many carry them around in their pockets.


I was intrigued to read an article that was written back in 1900 in a magazine called 'Ladies Home Journal'. The article entitled What may happen in the next hundred years is both startingly accurate, and laughingly off-beam. It predicts for example that by the year 2000, cars will be cheaper than horses. It predicts that by 2000, coal will no longer be used in our houses to heat or cook with. It predicts that there will be aerial warships and forts on wheels. All of these are startlingly accurate if you look at the fact that the motor car has been the preferred mode of transport for families for decades, coal fires and cookers are no longer used in the majority of western homes (although some coal fired power stations remain, there are alternative methods in predominance) and wars have been fought since World War 1 using fighter planes and tanks.


By far the best predictions in the article though, are these: Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world (Internet?); Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance (Flickr?); And this one: Man will see around the world. The article says: 'American audiences in their theatres will view upon huge curtains before them the coronations of kings in Europe or the progress of battles in the Orient. The instrument bringing these distant scenes to the very doors of people will be connected with a giant telephone apparatus transmitting each incidental sound in its appropriate place.' That's the part that really grabs me. Satellite TV, large screen technology and worldwide television coverage are now taken for granted. In 1900 they were science fiction. If you ignore the archaic language, the article is actually a very accurate set of predictions about future technology. I think it would be difficult to do the same again though, standing in 2010. Technological progress is a lot faster now than it was in 1900, and even predicting what might happen 5 years down the line will be problematic. That's my prediction.


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'Seeing the future' by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Learning spaces and places

This entire series on technology affordances was started off by a remark I made during the 5th Plymouth e-Learning Conference, and my subsequent blogpost which I called 'Angels in the architecture'. I kicked off the series proper with a post called 'Can we afford to ignore student perceptions?' in which I highlighted the fact that affordances are emergent attributes of the design that are based on perceptions, and we must therefore be careful how we select technologies to support learning. Sometimes, if the design affordances do not match the needs of the learner, the result can be disasterous. More recently, in posts entitled 'Push or Pull' and 'Squeezing out the good stuff', I tried to outline some of the important affordances that have become evident when people use social media for learning.

In this part of the series I want to identify two more key sets of affordances that I believe will affect the success of technologies when they are applied to learning. The first I will call the 'synthesised space' affordances - the capability of the tool to create mixed media or blended spaces. I began to discuss this in a paper I published last year in Future Internet entitled Learning Space Mashups. What I was referring to was not a mashup in the strictest sense of the word, but rather a blending of reflective (blog) and collaborative (wiki) web tools to create a synthesised space where students could benefit from the best of both sets of affordances. There are many other web based tools available that can be combined and experimented with so that new spaces can be created. We just haven't got around to it yet, but the true mashups are a good start. Google Maps and similar mashup spaces are leading the way, and I believe we will see more tools combined in the future. Opening up API and allowing users to become developers is the main reason why some start ups such as Flickr and Delicious became so popular so quickly.


The second set of affordances I want to highlight we might call 'navigation' affordances. By navigation, I mean the visual cues that enable users to find their way around to learn spatially, both visually and in terms of hyperlinked pathways. If a web tool is badly designed, as is the case with some institutional VLEs, students become confused and disoriented. They know where they need to be and what they want to find, but can't easily find their way there. They then waste too much time trying to work out how to navigate themselves, or go off to try to find someone who can help them. If the 'browsability' element is lacking, or the tool has a poor capability to search for content, more problems are caused for learners. Broken links or links that are not adequately signposted/hihglighted are also annoying and are usually a problem caused by lack of maintenance, or simply poor design.


Navigation affordances are all about getting about - where the learners find themselves, and where they want to go to can be interrupted if the tool has not been designed effectively. The end result of any of the above problems, is that students spend more time thinking about how to navigating their way around in their study space than they do about the content and the learning. Opaque technologies need to become more transparent. Designing the correct features into the tool will enable the affordances of the tool to come to emerge.

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Learning spaces and places by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

PeLC's digital footprint

I'm sat here exactly one week after the 5th Plymouth e-Learning Conference - #PeLC10 - ended, and reflecting on another great event which everyone seemed to enjoy and learn from. As part of my reflection on the event I have been looking at the digital footprint the conference has left on the Web. There are blogposts, images, videos, and a huge Twitter stream searchable through the #pelc10 hashtag.

I'm sure there will be more accounts, images and videos posted (including the official videos of the two great keynote speeches by Josie Fraser (see the Video here) and Dave White (see the Video here) links of which will also appear soon on the conference website.

Here are just a few of the blogposts and other remnants of the event for you to revisit if you were there, or get a flavour of, if you were not able to attend this year...

Privacy has gone by James Clay

Don't feed the Pelicans by James Clay (includes a podcast and interviews)

Keep calm and carry on by James Clay (Podcast of debate)

Taking a step back by Fleur Corfield

Twitter is dead... Really? by David Hopkins

Learning without limits by Malinka Ivanova

PeLC10 e-learning debate by Bex Lewis

The view from our window by Our Lesson

5th Plymouth e-Learning Conference by Zak Mensah

Mypelc10 - Day 1 by Flea Palmer

Mypecl10 - Day 2 by Flea Palmer

5th Plymouth e-Learning Conference by Mark Pannell

Busy month ahead by Pat Parslow

Make sure you see the Pelican (Part 1) by Dan Roberts

Images of PeLC10 on Flickr by Dawn Wheeler

Community, privacy and identity by Steve Wheeler

Pushing all the right buttons by Steve Wheeler

Angels in the architecture by Steve Wheeler

There is also an aggregation of #pelc10 Delicious tags, Flickr images and Tweets here. And finally, here is an interesting statistical breakown of all the tweets that were tagged #pelc10 during the conference, courtesy of Andy Powell from Eduserv. It's a clever little application you can use to compare the #pelc10 statistics against those of other recent conference tags such as #jisc10 and #mootuk10. It is interesting reading indeed. If you know of any other pelc10 artefacts that are out there on the Web, please post a link in the comments box below.

PeLC10 final plenary session photo courtesy of Dawn Wheeler (from L to R: Steve Wheeler, Thomas Fischer, Josie Fraser, Dave White). The link to the uStream video of the final plenary session is here.

PeLC's digital footprint by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Push or pull

Whenever I am trying to explain the concept of affordances, I use the idea of a door handle like the one in this photo. I point out that for a right handed person, the door handle has an affordance for twisting clockwise and pushing (or pulling) - to open the door. The design features of the handle help the user to perceive what action can be made with the object.

Many technologies used for learning have several affordances. Some are more apparent than others, and this is sometimes the problem. Hartson tried to categorise between affordances in the context of interaction, identifying four types: Cognitive (thinking), physical, sensory and functional (Hartson, 2003). One of the overarching affordances of learning technologies though, particularly those that fall into the category of Web 2.0 tools, tends to cut across all of Hartson's categories - the social affordance of the tools.

Wikis for example, have a number of social affordances - users can perceive a co-operative affordance that enables them to create content that may not agree, but which can sit side by side to provide a balanced and measured take on a given subject. There is also a collaborative affordance where users can combine, interweave and mix their content to create a comprehensive account of the topic. I use both these approaches to encourage students to explore thoroughly the topics they need to learn about and published the results of my research in articles in two papers, The Good, the Bad and the Wiki, and Using Wikis to Promote Quality Learning (both full papers for download). By cooperating, and in some cases (more difficult) collaborating on the wiki, students can become more critical in the way they acquire knowledge and synthesise their ideas. The discursive affordance is probably the most powerful affordance of wikis. The perception that no knowledge or opinion is fixed or immutable is a powerful attribute of wikis. Negotiation of meaning and an ongoing dialogue between students yields a number of positive outcomes, not least that learners can all contribute to the ongoing generation of content, and that the wisdom of the crowd will ensure that in most cases, content will be reasonably accurate and can be reused and repurposed to good effect.

Social affordances are obviously important if we are in the business of promoting socially constructed learning in all its forms.

Reference

Hartson, H. R. (2003) Cognitive, physical, sensory and functional affordances in interaction design. Behaviour and Information Technology, 22 (5), 315-338.

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Push or pull by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Squeezing out the good stuff

Yesterday I wrote a post concerning the concept of affordances, and I promised a whole series examining the affordances of digital media - learning technologies. One of the best articles I have read on affordances in digital media has to be the one written by Matt Bower which looked at matching learning tasks to technologies. It's a sensible, no nonsense take on the spectrum of possible digital media affordances, and it provides some simple, clear models of how they relate to each other. Bower shows that affordances - i.e. the perceived attributes or features of the technology - determine the actions that can be performed by the user with that technology. He quotes Donald Norman to clarify this point:

"The term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could be possibly used. A chair affords ('is for') support and therefore affords sitting. A chair can also be carried" (Norman, 1988, p. 9).


One of the key affordances of digital media for me anyway, is its educational affordance. That is, all digital media have properties that allow them to be used to learn. That's important to acknowledge. Not all technologies used in education were designed for the purpose of learning. Podcasting for example, was originally designed so that people could listen to music downloaded from the Internet. Yet many schools, colleges and universities have been able to effectively harness podcasting so that its pedagogical value can be squeezed out. Although there was no special 'educational-ness' designed into podcasting, people have perceived its potential to support learning through downloaded audio files that can be sequenced and archived. And some educational podcasting projects have been very successful.


Another example is the mobile phone, which was first designed so that users could communicate at a distance and while on the move, without needing to use a fixed line telephone. Although we are seeing the demise of the telephone box on many street corners in the Western world as a result, and although we are often annoyed in public places by irritating little ring-tones, we are never-the-less able to learn on the move. We have done this by perceiving the affordance, and then creating learning objects that can be accessed through the mobile phone. These affordances go beyond its original design, tapping into the open potential of the web browser each mobile phone comes complete with.


Tomorrow I will explore another affordance of digital media, and try to make sense of it in the context of current e-learning practices.


References
Bower, M. (2008) Affordance analysis: Matching learning tasks with learning technologies. Educational Media International, 45 (1), 3-16.
Norman, D. A. (1988) The psychology of everyday things. New York: Basic Books.


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'Squeezing out the good stuff' by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Can we afford to ignore learner perceptions?

When the psychologist James J. Gibson first published his book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception in 1979, he was probably unaware of the far reaching consequences of his proposals. In the book Gibson proposed his top-down model of perception, and developed the idea of affordances which he had earlier proposed in an article in 1977 entitled 'Theory of Affordances'. The Wikipedia entry on affordances states:

He [Gibson] defined affordances as all "action possibilities" latent in the environment, objectively measurable and independent of the individual's ability to recognize them, but always in relation to the actor and therefore dependent on their capabilities. For instance, a set of steps which rises four feet high does not afford the act of climbing if the actor is a crawling infant. Gibson's is the prevalent definition in cognitive psychology.

There are clear implications for affordance theory in the design of digital learning environments, and as Donald Norman has argued, designers need to study people, 'to take their needs and interests into account.' Far too often, (and here I think in particular about the disasterous, constricting nature and abysmal navigation tools of some institutional Virtual Learning Environments - see my Two fingered salute post) the design of learning technologies and environments tend to reflect the needs and aspirations of the designers and the company they work for than the needs of the end user. I addressed some of the issues of design flexibility in Angels in the architecture on this blog a few days ago, and want to continue this trope for the next few blog posts. We cannot afford to ignore learner needs. We need to create learning enviroments (and tools) that reflect what they need. Therefore, we must research how students perceive their environments, and design accordingly. Over the next few days therefore, I'm going to examine some of the affordances of learning technologies and attempt to evaluate them from the perspective of the individual (but socially connected) learner.

References

Gibson, J.J. (1977) The Theory of Affordances (pp. 67-82). In R. Shaw & J. Bransford (Eds.) Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Gibson, J. J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Norman, D. (1998) The Design of Everyday Things. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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'Can we afford to ignore learner perceptions?' by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Mentoring on the move

Another of my newly published articles landed on my desk this morning. It's an article that has been a long time coming, and I have already presented the work from the study in papers at several conferences over the last couple of years. Along with my Faculty of Education colleague Wendy Lambert-Heggs, I was successful almost 3 years ago in securing £3,000 from the Peninsula Centre for Excellence in Teacher Training to develop and evaluate a new method of professional distance mentoring. We used a simple two-person blog set up and asked student teachers and their mentors to participate. We eavesdropped as they created their dialogue and then interviewed them afterwards. We saw some interesting results from the MentorBlog Project when we compared the distance student views to those of students doing traditional face-to-face mentoring. Although the article has just been published, it appears as a 2009 reference, because the U.S. based Quarterly Review of Distance Education journal is always 6 months behind its published listing (maybe something to do with time zones). Below is the abstract and reference:

Wheeler S and Lambert-Heggs W (2009) Connecting distance learners and their mentors using blogs: The MentorBlog Project. Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 10 (4), 323-331,

In this article we describe the MentorBlog project, which facilitated the mentoring of trainee teachers in the post-compulsory sector through the use of blogs. In an experimental design, the study compared their experiences with students who received tradtional mentoring. The article highlights the importance of mentoring in the teacher education process, and argues that blogging can be a useful and viable alternative when students are not able to meet face-to-face with their mentors on a regular basis. A number of key blogging affordances are identified, including reflexivity, persistence, and immediacy, which can either encourage or undermine successful mentorial dialogue. We also identify dissonance as a barrier to full dialogue in mentoring and show how it can be a problem due to the archiving features on most blogs. The article concludes with some recommendations for the future wider development of blogs as mentorial tools for distance learners, and proposes an extension of the project to include the use of mobile phones as a route to providing "any time, any place" mentor support for nomadic students.

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'Mentoring on the move' by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Angels in the architecture

There was an interesting question from the floor during the Plymouth e-Learning Conference 2010 final plenary session. I think it took all those of us on the panel by surprise, but it was nevertheless a question well worth asking. The question went something like this: Will the panel give us their views on whether the internet constrains or liberates spirituality?

The panel gave several different answers, because let's face it, this kind of question is best answered subjectively. Everyone has a personal view on faith and spirituality. I was last to answer, and was searching for a phrase to use. It came quickly to mind in the lyrics of a song by Paul Simon. In the song 'Call me Al' he sings:

He looks around around,
He sees angels in the architecture,
Spinning in infinity,
He says Amen and Hallelujah...

The term 'angels in the architecture' apparently derives from some architectural speak: "This maintains wiggle room as projects advance toward completion, often creating 'an angel in the architecture' to serve as a countermeasure for situations in which 'the devil is in the details.'" From this I was able to form another argument... Flexibility is the designer's best friend and Web 2.0 is surely a flexible, open architecture with a lot of latitude for self-expression and creativity.

I didn't quite know at first where I was going with my angels reference, and wasn't completely aware of the above source at the time, but it seemed appropriate as a response to a question on spirituality, and it crystallised as I spoke, so it must have been subliminal. The angels are not feathered beings of light in this context - they are the affordances of the technology - the interpretations of flexiblility imagined by the user. I developed by answer by quoting from Richard Clark, who argued that all technology is essentially neutral - 'mere vehicles' - in his own words, which simply deliver learning resources to the student, wherever they are. I agree with Clark that all technologies are mere tools, which can be wielded for positively or negatively - that is, for 'good or evil'. My answer to the plenary question was therefore that any person can harness any technology for good or bad, and that includes either the promotion of good spiritually and the building of faith, or as a destructive force to undermine spirituality. A lot of content on the web does appear to be particularly soul-less, and this can be harmful to one's spirit. The angels in the architecture for me are the perceptual expectations each users approaches the tool with. These affordances are the attributes of the tool the user thinks s/he can use for his own purposes. Affordances are an important concept to grasp if we are to better understand how our students use tools such as social networks, blogs and wikis to connect, create and learn. The architecture of Web 2.0 tools is open, the devil's in the detail, but the angels are still flying around...

Image source by Thomas Hawk

Photos of the Conference can be found here and here is James Clay's podcast Don't Feed the Pelicans



'Angels in the architecture' by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Pushing the buttons

The 5th Plymouth e-Learning Conference has drawn to a close, and it's time to reflect on what I think has been another great conference success. So many new friends have been made and so much discussed over the two days it is difficult to know where to start. I have been following the very busy Twitter stream of the event, and have been impressed by the amount of traffic, and the varied commentaries flowing out of, and back into the conference venue. This conference really was participatory I think, not only because of Twitter and the blog posts that have resulted, but also because of other technology support such as the streaming video we used to cover both keynotes, and several of the breakout sessions and discussions. BECTA even picked up on #pelc10 and called it the hashtag of the day.




Dave White's keynote this morning pressed so many buttons, it's hard to summarise what was said and discussed. I will leave it to the video capture (we will post both Dave's and Josie Fraser's keynotes as soon as we can to the conference website and link to them via this blog). There have been some great images posted from the event too, which will help us all to recall a memorable gathering of learning technologists, teachers and academics in the months to come. I will ensure that the official photographs from our two photographers will also be posted up and shared through the conference website soon.


We enjoyed an excellent and hard-fought debate today in the Jill Craigie Cinema (yes, a real Cinema on campus) where Tara Alexander, Dave White and I argued the toss over Prensky's Digital Natives/Immigrants theory, against Dave's Residents and Visitors model. Many of the audience engaged with us in a very useful exploration of the ideas, and we all went away with more questions than answers, which was exactly the required outcome. I was also very proude of all my own students who presented their research in four separate papers at the conference. They were met with glowing praise, great questions, and useful feedback from delegates.


Next year we are doing it all again, and the publicity is already there, on the back of the abstract book. The date for the 6th Plymouth e-Learning Conference is 7-8 April, 2011. We hope you will be able to join us as we continue this increasingly popular and exciting conference series. I'm off now to put my feet up for a few days... Thanks to everyone who took part!


Image source (courtesy of Daniel Kennedy)



'Pushing the buttons' Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Community, privacy and identity

Day one of the 5th Plymouth e-Learning Conference was very successful, and as usual, a very very long day. Our keynote speaker Josie Fraser did not disappoint with an eloquent account of communities, privacy and identity on the web. Josie talked about a number of potent issues around engagement with social media, and cited a number of key contributions to our understanding from the likes of danah boyd, Scott Wilson and Nicola Whitton. The ensuing question time lasted a full 30 minutes, during which we explored these issues thoroughly. Time does not permit me here to go into details, but a fuller report will follow, and there are of course, other, much more erudite commentators than me blogging as we speak. I will try to find their links and join them to this post.

Numbers of attendance at this year's event are slightly down on last year, with around 140 delegates present. Highlights so far have included two visits to the Vision Immersion Theatre, and excellent sessions, from amongst others, Simon Finch (Northern Grid for Learning), Dan Roberts (Saltash.net) and Tony McNeill (Kingston University). It's unfair perhaps to single these out, because the standard of papers and presentations at this year's event have been particularly good, but for me, trying to get around to all the papers, these three stood out as exceptional in both content and impact. More on this also when I have more time...

Today, Day 2, is dawning bright and clear, and the weather will hold. We are all looking forward to our second keynote speech, from Dave White, and various discussions and papers from delegates. We will close off today with a streamed plenary session where Josie Fraser, Dave White, Thomas Fischer (Erlangen-Nuremburg University, Germany) and I will tackle questions from all-comers. Should be fun.

Simulacra and stimulating conversation

I enjoyed some really interesting and stimulating informal conversations tonight in a variety of watering holes around the Plymouth Barbican area. It was a pre-conference Tweetup, and several old friends and new were there, holding forth on their views about just about everything under the sun. Tomorrow, we all meet more formally for the 5th Plymouth e-Learning Conference, but tonight it was a chance to let our hair down a little.

Quote of the evening must go to Simon Finch (@simfin) who said something along the lines of: 'On Twitter people I don't know let me know about stuff that really interests me. On Facebook people I do know tell me stuff I don't want to know about'. OK, it was a signature piece of hilarious wordplay from Simon, and it made us all laugh out loud. But it also shows up what some people see as a contrast between the frivolous nature of Facebook, and the way Twitter is becoming a serious professional networking tool.

There were other conversations about our personal experiences with institutional VLEs. Cath Ellis (cathellis13), James Clay and I all related our views and others joined in the conversation. We also reminisced over the early days of educational computing and whether there should be an 'e' in front of e-learning. One of the most interesting conversations for me though was later on, in the oldest pub in Plymouth - the Minerva Inn, which dates back to 16th Century times.

I was sat with Mark Power, James Clay and Rob Stillwell (@theboywhodrums) and we were discussing user generated content. We discussed how surreal it was that we could meet up face to face for the first time after tweeting to each other for long, and actually know so much about each other. An phenomenon that still needs some exploration perhaps.

Someone remarked how a lot of video clips on YouTube didn't look very user generated these days. I shared my theory that many of the well known clips, such as Charlie bit me and the Star Wars Kid appeared quite polished and produced, because perhaps they had become so iconic and archetypal and etched in our minds that we have forgotten the first time we actually saw them. They are also so emulated and repurposed that they tend to become parodies of themselves. Rob and I talked about Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, which seems to frame this idea, and the notion that people tend to over-analyse content too - with the interesting result that much content tends to mean more to the viewer than to its original creator. I told the story of my art college days, when I became disallusioned with my tutors' negative comments about my work. I eventually took to throwing paint at a large canvas just to make a point. It was absolute trash but the fools liked it and even displayed it as an 'innovative piece' on the college gallery wall. I guess they must have been into Kitsch or some such art appreciation. I walked out of the college the same week and never returned. Does our interpretation of a digital artefact become more than what was actually intended by its creator? Perhaps this is an effect we should consider a little more when we come to evaluate the relevance, reliability and puspose of user generated content:

'The simulacrum is never what hides the truth - it is the truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacru is true.'

Image source

Social enzymes

Learning has rarely been a solo activity. I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I have learnt something significant without the help or influence of others (and counting on my fingers wasn't learnt without help, believe me). No, we are not isolated learners, but learn our most important lessons whilst in conversation with others. Conversation is of course often technologically mediated in this digital age. You and I no longer need to occupy the same location to converse. We can use text, audio or video in a number of modes and through a mind dazzling range of technologies. And there is a record - an archive - of our conversation if we want one.

This is how the current tools and services found on the Web are being used in so many new ways to connect, share and converse. Wikis, blogs, podcasts, social bookmarking, RSS feeds, microblogs, social networking... all are very powerful tools for people to use to make connections with each other... and to learn.

Formal learning is not the only type of learning possible, you see. More often, we are learning informally, while playing a massively multi-player online role playing game for example, or listening to a podcast about a news item. You are learning something new now by reading this blog post, and I learnt something new while I was writing it. We are aware of each other. When we search for an item on the web and get sidetracked down one or more other routes because they look more interesting... we are informally learning something new. When we eavesdrop on Twitter conversations, and simply 'lurk', we are learning informally. When we watch a YouTube video because several thousand people have already given it 5 stars .... we are learning informally. You may see this as serendipity - a kind of happy accident - and you may be right. Informal learning, more often than not, is unplanned. But that does not make it less worthwhile than formalised methods of learning.

The rhizomatic nature of Web 2.0 is making it easier for all of us to connect together, and to learn informally within a socially rich environment which is strewn liberally with the digital footprints of those who have gone before us. We are in effect, constructing our own informal learning pathways simply by following what others have done before - and here is the neatest trick. When we take what others have created (thanks to creative commons and a loosening of the grip or ownership and copyright) and we repurpose them for our own use, our own informal learning... we are creating new footprints for the next informal learner to follow. And on it goes. Informal learning and Web 2.0 need each other. They have synergy and we should not forget the social dimensions each relies upon for their success.

Andy Clark provides a very evocative metaphor when he talks about snail trails in his book 'Natural Born Cyborgs'. Clark shows that snails and slugs lay down slime trails that are rich in enzymes as they seek food sources. The second gastropod that follows the trail expends less energy and enzymes to reach the food, and so on until by the time the tenth snail slides down the pathway, the journey is almost effortless. In the same way, as we travel down digital pathways we leave a trail - perhaps a social bookmark, a Delicious tag, a Stumbled Upon note - which points the way for others to find your nugget of information. WE are in Michael Wesch's terms 'teaching the machine'. But we are also teaching each other. The more we lay down these pathways, the more we are building the community of practice that is Web 2.0.
Right. That's this blog post finished. I'm off now to lay down some social enzymes.

This article was first posted 11 January 2009

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'Social enzymes' by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Why Twitter is so powerful

There are two types of people in the world. Those who get Twitter and those who don't.

OK, I'm joking, but Twitter does seem to divide people. What can you say that's worthwhile in 140 characters? some people ask. Others claim that much of the Twitterverse is vacuous rubbish that isn't worth reading.

Well, anyone who uses Twitter on a regular basis will tell you that the power of the tool is not so much in its content, but in its ability to connect you to other people. The same applies of course to any other social networking tool, but unlike Facebook for example, Twitter contains very few distractions. It's stripped down and very simple. There are no frivolous food fights, 'poking' or third party games such as Farmville contained within its wrapper. Twitter quite simply connects you with people who are interesting, informative or humorous.

And here's the real power: The more you connect on Twitter, the more connections you get. For me, the value of Twitter is in tapping into its social critical mass. I think that most people who try Twitter and fail to see its value don't give it enough time. If they persisted and put some time into developing their contacts and connections on Twitter, they may discover that it pays them back for the time they have invested. To do this they can use lists, following those who are good value and produce useful content, while at the same time tweeting content that others may find useful.

No, Twitter is not so much about the information and useful links you can gain access to. Twitter is powerful because it allows people to share their emotions - you can gain a window on their everyday experiences, and that often helps you in your own daily struggles. I am often encouraged by people who share snapshots of what is happening in their lives right now. It's an important dimension - I have made many friends on Twitter whom I have later met and strengthened my friendships with. Self disclosure is a risky thing, but others often reciprocate. It can all be summed up by a quote from one of my favourite authors:

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You too? I thought I was the only one." - C. S. Lewis

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'Why Twitter is so powerful' by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Txt in the city

I'm giving a keynote at an event being held at the University of Bath on May 19. It will be nice to go back to the city of Bath again so soon after my last keynote there on November 11. I enjoyed meeting the HEA podcasting special interest group and was well looked after. This conference will be the sixth in the series entitled 'Let's talk about txt', and apparently over 60 people have already signed up for the one day event. I wrote my title and abstract yesterday and sent it in to the organisers, Txttools. I hope it hits the mark:

Everything you always wanted to know about Txt but were afraid to ask

In this keynote presentation I will trace the history of written communication, and the emergence of communication technologies that have been used to convey our words. Taking a journey from cave wall paintings through the Gutenberg Printing Press to current handheld devices, I will argue that language is the first and most powerful human technology, and that all other technologies are merely extensions - vehicles to convey meaning from person to person.

In consideration of this position, txting can be seen as an evolving facet of interpersonal communication, and in its various forms (e.g. vernacular orthography, squeeze text, homophones, acronyms, respellings and rebuses) it has become the technological equivalent of spoken slang, and can therefore include or exclude. Through an examination of technology enhanced learning contexts and exploration of some examples of txt pedagogy, I will argue that if used appropriately, txt has powerful educational potential. Txt can motivate students to learn, and encourage creativity, and must therefore assume an ever increasing importance across all sectors of education.