Grand tour

I'm off on my travels again later today, this time on a grand tour taking in the length of Europe. After a brief visit into the University of Plymouth, to shake hands with my Vice Chancellor and collect my Teaching Fellowship award, it's a quick dash off to Bristol Airport to catch my afternoon flight to the land of the midnight sun. Yes, Helsinki (via Brussels) is my next port of call where I will be working for a few days at the invitation of the Finnish Research Academy. I will be working in a team of Education experts from Sweden, Denmark, the UK and Greece, to evaluate a number of recent large scale research proposals. I hope I can get some sleep during Finland's white nights.

On Sunday it's down to Frankfurt and a meeting with my old friend Sigi Jakob-Kuhn (follow her as @Networking_Lady on Twitter) in Wienheim, before moving onwards the next day to Heidelberg to attend the International Networking Conference and chair some of their sessions on e-learning. I will meet up with several old friends there too, including my colleagues from the Atlantis Project, Udo Bleimann, Tillmann Swinke, Ingo Stengel, and of course the University of Plymouth's very own Steven Furnell.

It's all change again on Wednesday 7th July when I fly from Frankfurt down to Barcelona to participate in another exciting event - the Personal Learning Environment Conference. A whole host of well known activists, (reading like a Who's Who PLE researcher list) will be speaking at this event including Graham Attwell, Alec Couros, Ismael Pena-Lopez, Dirk Stieglitz, Paulo Simoes, Ricardo Torres Kompen, Palitha Edirisingha, Cristina Costa, Wolfgang Rheinhart, Carmen Holotescu, Gabriela Grosseck, Sebastian Fiedler, Dave White, Jose Mota, Chahira Nouira, Su White, Manish Malik.... I could go on, but you can read the impressive list of speakers for yourself at the link below. There will be some alternative sessions including a speed-cafe style presentation set. We have been told we need to make our own personalised badges too, in keeping with the PLE flavour of the event. You should see my full colour @timbuckteeth badge - it's a corker!

The full programme for the @PLE_BCN event is here at this link. It's going to be a very busy, tiring but enjoyable 10 days for me on my grand tour.

Image source

Grand tour by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Digital tribes

Today I presented a keynote speech at the Engaging the Digital Generation Conference which was held at the Hendon campus of Middlesex University (Pictured: Steve Chilton, conference organiser and me enjoying a cup of tea before the conference starts). A video recording was made of the keynote which can be viewed here. It was great to meet up with the other two keynote speakers, Tara Brabazon (University of Brighton) and William Wong (Middlesex University) and spend a little time talking to them both. It was also nice to meet so many great folk from the staff at Middlesex too, and speak to a few of them about their ideas for e-learning. The hashtag for the event was #altcmu - search for all the tweets on Twitter. Below is the abstract for the conference and below that is the full slide set.

Digital Tribes and the Social Web: How Web 2.0 will Transform Learning in Higher Education

The Social Web is transforming the way students interact with others, and is challenging traditional pedagogies, values and practices. An analysis of students’ uses of social networking tools (e.g. Facebook, Myspace) and video/photo sharing sites (e.g. YouTube, Flickr) reveals the emergence of collective digital literacies. These include filtering content, new textual and visual literacies, managing multiple digital identities, representing self in cyberspace and engaging in new modes of interaction. In this presentation I will argue that identification through digitally mediated tools has become the new cultural capital – the set of invisible bonds that ties a community together. It is this ‘social glue’ – such mutual understandings and exchanges that occur on a daily basis within social media – that build the digital communities, and create new learning spaces, nurturing the habitus of a new ‘digital tribe’.

Emile Durkheim suggested that it is easier for tribal members to project their feelings of awe toward a totem than toward something that is as complex as the tribe itself. For digital tribes, their totem – the traditional rallying point for all tribal activity – is patently the Social Web. The digital spaces found within the Web are in themselves objects of intense interest and become meeting places for the tribe, but they also act as transmitters of units of cultural knowledge – memes. Max Weber once remarked that culture should be construed as a ‘web of significance’ spun by the individuals who constitute the culture. Significantly, the increasing role the World Wide Web plays in the shaping of modern tribal culture causes Weber’s notion to resonate. In this presentation I will argue that digital technologies and electronic networks provide fertile environments for the transmission of memes and that new literacies are needed to receive, interpret and comprehend them.

Such new literary practices of communication rely heavily on shared spaces, shared symbolism and the viral nature of the social web. I will explore how the new digital literacies impact upon teaching and learning in higher education, and discuss the implications of a growing gulf between traditional teaching and the expectations of the new tribe – the digital generation. I will pose the questions: What will be the new roles of academics in a world where the boundaries between novice and expert are blurring? and what new digital literacies will scholars need to harness the full potential of the social web?

Digital Tribes and the Social Web

View more presentations from Steve Wheeler.

Related posts:
The tribal web
En masse, online
Digital tribal identity
Virtual clans
Middlesex University Annual Learning and Teaching Conference Blog
Personal Learning and various literacies (Jan Moreland Blog)

Image source

Digital tribes by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Up Pompey (again)

I attended an excellent conference today at the University of Portsmouth, and it was the second time in as many months I have spoken there. There were 28 workshops and seminars in addition to my keynote speech. Just over 100 people attended from 3 of the faculties at the university, and there were several lively sessions to take part in. Martin Weller from the OU came in live via a webcast to talk about the intriguing topic of 'Academic output as collateral damage'. Also there from the OU was Tony Hirst, and it was a pleasure to meet him face to face for the first time, and talk about issues ranging from Google to assessment. His presentation was fittingly entitled: 'Making the most of Google'.

I also attended a session presented by Emma Duke Williams and her colleagues called 'Twispering in class' which explored the history, usefulness and application of Twitter as a tool for communication and reflection in formal learning contexts. Stewart Milton from Blue Orange Consulting gave an excellent, wideranging session on how to reach students through social media, which also covered the use of mobile handheld technologies. Both sessions drew quite a crowd, and provokes some good discussion. Manish Malik's session on 'Exam revision using Examopedia Wiki and Google Talk' was also well received, and prompted some quick fire questions from all those present.

I had the honour of kicking off the event with a 45 minute keynote that I entitled: 'Lifelong learning in a digital age: Inspiration and innovation through social media', in which I covered a lot of ground from disruptive technologies, through personal learning environments to the use of mobile phones in education, all of which seemed to be well received. All of the sessions were recorded through Camtasia and should be available for viewing soon on the conference website. Here is the link to my own keynote presentation on Camtasia with full audio. The slideset accompanying my keynote speech is below. Thanks to all those who organised such a great event, and also to all those who took part.

Lifelong learning in a digital age

View more presentations from Steve Wheeler.

Up Pompey (again) by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Giving it all away

How much do you freely share on the Web? If you are a user of any Web 2.0 tools, it's likely that you give away your stuff for free, and in doing so, you make a digital footprint for yourself. My digital footprint grows each time I post new content, whether it's on this blog, one of my Flickr accounts, or YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn or Slideshare. The killer apps for me though, have to be Delicious and Twitter - both give me the ability to make my content highly visible to anyone who might be interested.

Look, as altruistic as it may seem to give away all your content, ideas, lecture notes, videos, slides and even articles and books, for those who actually opt to do so, there are also excellent rewards. Give your content away, and you don't lose it - but you do get some great benefits. I have given away a lot of my content on the web - see for example my Slideshare collection of slideshows and published articles. My reward for doing this is multi-faceted. Not only do I get the pleasure of having thousands of interested people from all over the world viewing my slides, they may also favourite them, comment on them, or give me valuable constructive feedback which can I learn from. Some also embed my slideshows into their own websites and blogs, which disseminates my ideas even further afield. I couldn't pay for that kind of distribution. And as if that isn't enough reward, I sometimes get some really nice invitations to speak at events, or participate in really interesting projects, as a direct result of some content I have created on the web. Web 2.0 tools have that affordance - they make your content very visible to people who are interested.

Increasingly, due to the good offices of Creative Commons, much of the content on the web can be legally repurposed or appropriated for other use. I think this is a good thing. None of us want to waste time re-inventing the proverbial wheel, and we could bear in mind what Pablo Picasso once said: 'Good artists borrow, great artists steal'. So OK, 'steal' is an emotive word, which we probably don't want to associate with, but I get the sentiments behind the statement. A lot of art and music could be said to be 'derivative' - and there have been many court cases and fallings out over this grey area of creativity, but here's my point: I don't mind at all if other people borrow my content for their own purposes, as long as they attribute it to me and don't make any commercial profit at my expense. Many already have - some people have actually translated my content into other languages or used as a part of larger works. I'm an advocate not only of Open Educational Resources, but also the idea of Open Scholarship, which is where academics and scholars not only make their content available for free, they also open up themselves to constructive criticism from their peers. I hope we see more of this in the coming years and I am confident we shall.

Image source

Giving it all away by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Words and images

I had the pleasure yesterday afternoon to sit in a seminar presented by Gunther Kress. Known for his work not only in the theorisation of English language teaching, but also his study of communication through new media, Kress is an intriguing character. At 70 years old, he is still very sprightly and energetic, and is a prolific writer. He is author of a number of books including the Routledge volume Literacy in the New Media Age. He is also a self-confessed Marxist and his beliefs emerged strongly through several passages in his talk.

Professor Gunther Kress started his presentation by showing his audience some combinations of text and images, and made the point that new literacies are emerging as a result of the merging of modalities of communication. He showed that Japanese characters can express more than Western text, and that as a result, reduced text which is integrated into larger area images features in Japanese text books. He counselled that because children spend a lot of their time playing computer games that are influenced by Japanese culture, perhaps we ought to start paying closer attention to the potential effects of this kind of cultural influence on thinking. The spectre of Prensky's digital natives and immigrants theory emerged at one point, as teachers discussed the implications of media on children's learning. My view is that even though Marc Prensky has retracted some of his assertions (due largely to a distinct lack of evidence to support them) there is still a widespread belief among teachers that digital natives exist, and that they are restricted to younger generations. We discussed this with Professor Kress, whose view seemed to me to be a reworking of the Braverman Thesis on technological deskilling. Harry Braverman (another Marxist theorist) believed that technology was imposed upon the workers by the owners of the means of production so that in effect, a widespread deskilling would occur. Technology made workers redundant and saved the owners capital which they would then invest in more technology.

Kress took a similar stance with new media. He asserted that there is a social defragmentation happening as a result of social networking and online gaming, and that social skills are drastically declining. For me, this is a dangerous assumption. My observations are that younger users of digital media tend to communicate just as well through them as they would in face to face environments - they just adapt their social skills across different media and in effect, they become adept at communicating in multiple contexts. Kress also argued that the instant nature of social media (by this I assume he meant the synchronous nature of some tools) precludes young people from reflecting on what is learnt. Again, I contend that this is not necessarily the case, as they find new ways of reflecting through time away from the keyboard/handset, and not all social media are synchronous in nature.

Kress does have a point though when he claims that education institutions tend to adapt their processes to technology, and that this is a key reason why many schools lag behind. Social pace, he argued, does not proceed at the pace of technology, so there is always a gap within which people become marginalised and disenfranchised. His assertion that younger students desire real-time, mobile and multi-tasking activities instead of 'fine grained focus and accuracy' may also be wrong, but I believe he is correct in claiming that younger people engage more in processes (the how to) than in content (the what). This has echoes of connectivism theory, where who you know and the connections you make are more important than learning 'content'.

Image source

Words and images by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Show and TEL

I spent some time at the University of Plymouth's Technology Enhanced Learning Showcase today, which featured the best of a number of in-house led initiatives in e-learning. The event was the third Plymouth has held and was well attended by many academic and support staff. I went to a couple of sessions on podcasting and digital identity, which were short demonstrations of what lessons have been learnt so far during research and teaching fellowship activities. The digital identity session for example, covered not only how we represent ourselves in virtual environments, but also discussed acceptable use of personal content, protection of personal data and issues of privacy. We also talked about 'netiquette' - acceptable behaviour in online environments, and how people use Facebook and other social networking tools appropriately and innapropriately, and the implications.

These were by no means the only sessions on offer. There were also rolling presentations throughout the day on personal response systems (voting), computer aided assessment, plagiarism detection, Open Educational Resources, iTunesU, online submission systems, digital repositories, e-portfolios, learning through mobile devices, learning and communicating at a distance, and our own in-house development we call UpMedia. There is so much going on down here in Plymouth, it's difficult to keep up with it all, but try we must.

For a complete overview of all the learning technology and technology enhanced learning initiatives here in Plymouth, visit the TEL website. It's full of information, and also houses all of the learning technologists' blogs. You can also visit the MyBrand site for more on digital identity

Image source

Show and TEL by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Scaffolding or no scaffolding?

Regular readers of this blog will know that one of my hats has 'Editor' written all on it. I'm co-editor of the Routledge journal Interactive Learning Environments, which this year went to 4 issues a year and in 2011 will extend its reach to 5 issues a year. We have a large amount of submissions each year and are kept very busy as a team managing, reviewing and editing the journal. This means that only the best papers are published, and periodically I give readers a glimpse of some of them. Here's the abstract of a stand-out paper from the current issue, written by Connie Siew Ling Ng, Wing Sum Cheung and Khe Foon Hew, from the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. It is thought provoking at a number of levels, not least because it takes a position on scaffolding using web tools, and challenges us to think about learning through Problem Based Learning in a new way:

Solving ill-structured problems in asynchronous online discussions: built-in scaffolds vs. no scaffolds

Solving ill-structured problems is regarded as an important learning outcome in education as it allows learners to apply theories learnt into real practice. An asynchronous online discussion, with extended time for reflection, is an appropriate learning environment to engage learners in solving ill-structured problems. However, scaffolds may be needed to support learners in the online discussions. This study explores the effect of online scaffolds in supporting a group of graduate students' ill-structured problem-solving processes in asynchronous online discussions. The results of this study showed that the use of the online scaffolds did not lead to a significant difference in the number of ill-structured problem-solving processes. Further analysis revealed that wrong selection of message labels and under-usage of sentence openers affected the results of this study. Improvements for online scaffolds include having more precise message labels and sentence openers based on a Socratic questioning approach.

Reference: Ng, C., Cheung, W. S. and Hew, K. F. (2010) Solving ill-structured problems in asynchronous online discussions: Built-in scaffolds vs. no scaffolds. Interactive Learning Environments, 18 (2), 115-134.

Image source


Scaffolding or no scaffolding? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 International License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Collaborative and cooperative learning

I enjoyed presenting my workshop entitled 'Collaborative and Co-operative Learning: The How and the Why' at Olympia 2 in London on Tuesday. We stared a little earlier than scheduled, which was a relief to me, as I had a cab booked to dash me across London and out to Gatwick Airport for my flight to Valencia. I even had some time to talk to delegates as I was making my way from the workshop room to the lift. Here are the slides that accompanied the workshop. Some are repurposed from other slideshows, but I hope that none the less they will be of some use to a few people who read this blog.

Collaborative and Co-operative Learning: The How and the Why

View more presentations from Steve Wheeler.

My workshop was an invited session, and constructed with help from Don H. Taylor, the chair of the Learning Skills Group. My main mission was to spend 70 minutes getting the 85 or so delegates who opted for my workshop to think about competition, collaboration and co-operation and how each might contribute to the motivation of learners in predominantly corporate based training environments. I used the analogy of the London Marathon and showed several pictures representing each concept. In essence, I feel that collaboration is more about inter-dependency than co-operation, but that both forms of learning involve people working together to reach a common goal. There was some discussion around this theme, and then we moved on to examine Web 2.0 tools and participatory media in training. We tocuhed briefly on problem based learning and creativity, and my closing statement was - think outside the box!


Collaborative and Co-operative Learning by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 International License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Planes, people and places

I'm just back from the EDEN Conference, having spent just over 15 hours travelling, via 4 trains, a bus and a much delayed flight. The plane eventually arrived, but when we finally landed at London Gatwick, I had missed all of my connections, and I finally arrived home very late. Yet regardless of the travel difficulties, it will be the people I met that will reside in my memory the most.

I had a lot of fun at this year's EDEN Conference, and I would like to express my thanks to all those responsible for the organisation of the event. From the great idea of having the marquee outside the venue for lunch, drinks etc., to the inspired choice of the city of Valencia to hold the conference in, all ran smoothly and was enjoyed by all. Valencia is in some ways its own kind of Eden, with a city plan that is divided by a meandering inner city park that has replaced the course of an old river bed. You can walk for miles along this garden route and simply take in the beautiful scenary, the jacaranda trees in full bloom, and the orange groves heavy with their sweet fruit. The stunning Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias (City of the Arts and Sciences - pictured below) provides a futuristic spectacle both day and night and is well worth an hour or two of wandering around, just to appreciate the sense of scale and space, as well as the fine attention to detail the complex affords. And then of course, there is the old town to see with its many churches and museums and the soaring cathedral.

At the conference, I loved 'Mr Bean' (as usual, Martin Bean, Vice Chancellor of the UK Open University, was a great keynote speaker and raised some key issues for us to think about at the outset of the event) and I loved hearing George Siemens (pictured above) for the first time. I managed to talk to both of them during the conference and I am impressed the depth of knowledge each has, and their keen ability to convey their ideas succinctly and accessibly. I also enjoyed my brief sparring match with George over the title of 'e-learning' and whether it was still a valid and relevant term to use to describe what we do most of our working days. Michael Moore who was sat next to me was expertly dragged into the debate by the ever urbane Alan Tait, and the Twittersphere was also buzzing for a short while as many people not at the event also weighed in with their views. For me, the jury is still out on this issue, even though one of the final plenaries saw Jim Devine create something of a reworking of what the 'e' stands for in e-learning - echoing in many ways a keynote I gave several years ago at the University of Wales. I'm playing devil's advocate still - do we really need the 'e' in e-learning anymore, or does it still serve a purpose?

It was wonderful talking to so many smart people about their passion of advancing e-learning further. I had several prolonged discussions with new President of EDEN, Morten Flate Paulsen and other members of the executive committee, such as Denes Zarka and Ari-Matti Auvinen and touched base with other old friends including Nikitis Kastis, Montse Guittert, Albert Sangra, Niall Sclater, Thomas Fischer, Grainne Conole, Marci Powell, Thomas Kretchmer and Sally Reynolds. I also met several people face to face whom I had been linked previously online, including Alex Pickett, Deborah Allen, Sebastian Fiedler and Ricardo Torres Kompen. New friends were made, such as Peter Shea, Deborah Allen, Thomas Richter and Stephen Jenner, and many more whose names have slipped me, but will not doubt bump into again and have more interesting conversations with. Thank you all - you made my short stay in beautiful Valencia cerebral, enjoyable and memorable (Apologies if I have misspelt any of your names).

I can't wait for next year's EDEN conference in Dublin. I will for the first time be able to get a direct flight from my home town of Plymouth, and be there in just over an hour.


Planes, people and places by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 International License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Setting a President

So my good friend Morten Flate Paulsen has been duly elected the 100th president of EDEN (Surely some mistake here? - Ed) and takes over the office from Alan Tait with immediate effect. I'm sure Morten will do an excellent job, because coming from Viking stock, he will take no nonsense from anyone. Actually, joking aside, Morten is one of the nicest guys you could ever expect to meet, quietly spoken, but extremely intelligent, well qualified, hugely popular and a very good looking guy as well. OK, I'm creeping here, because I gather there are some Presidential bodygaurd jobs going and I love to wear the shades and hover my hand meaningfully over the inside pocket of my jacket, you know what I mean? (You'll be lucky - Ed).

I know Morten has some great ideas about how to advance the cause of EDEN, because I have been discussing them with him during the time we have been at the conference here in Valencia. He has already asked me for my views on how we can improve communication across the network of over 1200 members. I know he is keen on exploring for example, how the EDEN Network of Academics and Professionals (NAP) social networking tool on Elgg can be better used now that it has been launched. Alan Tait did a great job as the 99th President of EDEN (Look, stop this nonsense now - Ed) and we are all grateful to him for steering us this far, and for raising the international profile of EDEN. Now Morten has taken over, I am sure the forward momentum will continue, and I hope to be an outrider in his motercade - I have the shades, the earpiece and the dark suit ready to go (Right, that's it. He's not the President of the United States, Steve. So stop this right now, or I'm telling your Mum - Ed).

Image source


Setting a president by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 International License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Live blogging

We have had a very interesting Day 1 here at the 19th EDEN Conference. We have all had a lot of fun, enjoyed some interesting and thought provoking sessions, and a lot of time has been spent networking with new colleagues and old, throughout a day when the sun has shone, and new light has been thrown on our collective understanding of distance education and e-learning. EDEN is that kind of event, where anyone from any country, whether knowledgeable or novice, can get together and share ideas in a non-threatening and very relaxed manner. Today we did exactly that around white clad tables in the middle of a long marquee, just outside the conference venue. On the menu were many varieties of canapes, and finger buffet items, as well as the excellent Valencia paella, which is a rich golden colour and contains large prawns and/or chicken. I could really get used to this, you know...

Someone complained that when they got to the marquee, all the paella was gone. I know. I ate it. Not all of it you understand, but you know what they say - the early bird catches the worm (er, I'm not for one minute suggesting there may have been vermiform creatures in the paella - it's just a figure of speech). By the way, the image above is one taken of me while I was deeply absorbed in live blogging during one of the keynote speeches this morning. I had to sit near the front of the stage to recharge my laptop batteries at one point. Next to me is an Elluminate team member who is live streaming the event.

The day started off when I encountered one George Siemens following me up the pathway across the extremely large and extensive campus that is our host institution here in Valencia. He had spotted my EDEN Conference bag and asked if we knew the way to the venue. Follow me, I said and I'll take you there. Then we each realised who the other was. I enjoyed several conversations with him today. It was a priviledge to talk to George and to many other hugely knowledgeable and influential members of the worldwide e-learning community. I met Martin Bean (Vice Chancellor of the Open University), after Alan Tait had introduced us. He remembered me from a chance meeting we had at ALT-C in Manchester last year. He must meet hundreds of people, but Mr Bean (I'm sorry I can't resist) has that kind of mind - he remembers everyone.

I also met several old friends I had never met face to face before. I know them all from Twitter of course. Ricardo Torres Kompen (Spain) and Sebastien Fiedler (Germany) are just two. There are so many others just too numerous to mention here. We've had some engaging conversations today. There have been thought provoking presentations. There have been some Aha! moments of enlightenment. Marci Powell gave us one soundbite to remember when she said we should be preparing students for their future, not giving them our past. Another memorable quote was from Martin Bean who remarked that our collective challenge must be to now transform information into meaningful knowledge. He also argued that we do not have enough resources to construct enough school and university buildings to satisfy all the demands for education. Technology supported distance education he claimed, was the way forward. It was exactly what the audience of 400+ delegates had come to hear.

Then George Siemens took the stage and gave us a breakneck speed tour of his connectivist ideas and how we might transform education into something that would influence the lives of students positively. He made some bold but much needed statements about conventional course provision, and its failure to tap into the needs of a new generation of learners who are firmly located within a world of digital media. It's not about knowledge acquisition anymore, he said, it's now about making useful connections - and that is the future of education.

Tomorrow now beckons, with more keynote speeches, dozens of workshops, poster sessions and paper presentations. Day 2 will be capped off with the Conference Dinner, where we will no doubt once again each connect with new and interesting colleagues whom we may well forge long lasting working relationships with. Here's to networking!

Image credit: Eva Suba

Live blogging by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 International License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Many encounters

I had a very busy, and slightly bizarre day today filled with encounters. Started the morning off having breakfast with Informal Learning guru Jay Cross in the lounge of the K-West hotel, in Kensington, West London. On the way back to get my bags along the gloomy, strangely lit corridors of the hotel, I encountered one of the Jedward twins. Don't ask me which one it was, they both look and sound exactly the same to me. His big hair, glowing in the gloom like a strangely luminescent toilet brush, gave me a bit of a funny turn, I can tell you.

Made it across to Olympia 2 with Jay with the good offices of a friendly taxi driver, and met up with Donald H Taylor and his team. The one day Learning Skills Group conference (#lsg10uk) this year attracted 450 delegates, mainly from the corporate training sector. I bumped into several Twitter buddies face to face for the first time, including Karyn Romeis and Phil Green, and others I had met before including Barry Sampson and Jane Hart. I sadly missed Jay Cross's keynote, because I had to travel across town to Oxford Circus to meet up with Ali Hughes and Derek Wenmoth (Core Ed team) who wanted to discuss the content of my upcoming keynote in Christchurch for the uLearn Conference in October. I spent a very pleasant hour with them both in Caffe Nero, before we all had to depart for our next meetings.

Back again at Olympia, I enjoyed a pleasant buffet lunch and a chat with a number of delegates, before doing my own workshop session entitled: Collaborative and Co-operative Learning: The How and the Why, in which I covered a whole range of ideas with about 85 delegates on competition, collaboration and cooperation (I used the analogy of the London marathon for this), creativity, Web 2.0 tools (I demonstrated the wisdom of crowds, folksonomies and social tagging through a number of 'get out of your seat' activities which seemed to go down well) and problem based learning. As usual, there was not enough time toget through all the materials I had planned, and then it was a quick dash by taxi, across London and down to West Sussex, where I managed to get my Gatwick flight to Valencia.

On the plane I encountered my old friend Paul Clarke and his wife, who are also here in the Barcelo Hotel in Valencia for the EDEN Conference (the picture above is of the stunningly designed centre for arts and sciences complex, which is just across the road from the hotel). We arrived together (I have shared taxi cabs with Jay Cross and Paul Clarke on the same day and in two separate European cities - how about that?) and then in the hotel lobby as we were checking in, along came Michael Moore to greet us. I also bumped into Morten Flate Paulsen in a cafe this evening.

Tomorrow is the reception evening for the 3 day EDEN Conference which I will be reporting on in this blog. Stay tuned - or whatever they say, in this web enabled world...

Image source

Many encounters by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 International License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Hooked

The furore over the 'Net Generation' and the controversy surrounding Marc Prensky's Digital Natives theory prompted me to write a poem about gaming addiction that I actually performed at an ALT-C Conference. If for some perverse reason you ever want to repeat the performance, you need to dress up in a hoodie, and the crotch of your jeans needs to be hanging around your knees so that your boxer shorts are fully exposed (if you are indeed wearing any at all). You also need to strike a pose that is reminiscent of an old man suffering from constipation, and rap the words out loud and proud in a slightly nasal Estuary accent while flinging your hands around. Have fun. Er.... I know I did.

Hooked

I’m a digital immigrant, me
And the digital natives will be
Forever a stigma
Wrapped up in enigma
And shrouded in deep mystery

When he got his Nintendo DS
My son very quickly impressed
He linked with his buddies
And soon the young hoodies
Were wirelessly hooked (more or less)

Over time, his Nintendo obsession
Dragged us down to the depths of depression
Each attempt to suggest
A change or a rest
Was met with a wave of aggression

A Dad-imposed mandatory ban
Merely caused him to ‘go underground’
Soon we had to agree
The Nintendo would need to be
Surgically removed from his hand

I decided to check the Nintendo
And I slowly worked up to crescendo
Then it hooked me as well
And I soon looked like hell
I won’t even try to pretend-o

The brain training software was great
And I found myself staying up late
But I’ve now had my fill
And feel over the hill
With a brain age of 78

Image source

Hooked by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 International License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Catching the mood

The current issue (June) of The Psychologist features an interesting article on research into the affective affordances of social networks. Social networks in the widest sense have been around since the dawn of civilisation, but with the advent of online social networks such as Facebook, and the vast populations of users who participate in interaction worldwide, social networks now take on a whole new dimension, and there is plenty of potential for research into their effects.

The current article (Totterdell et al, 2009) speculates that online social networks may enable those who are connected together with very wide groups of 'friends' to transfer feelings across their networks. So, for example, if one member's close relative dies, and she shares that sad news to her social network, many of her Facebook friends might feel a personal sense of loss and may even join in the mourning, even though they may not have known the person who has died. According to the article, it's not just emotions (such as anger or fear) that could be propogated through social media, but also general moods (gloominess, calm) and more enduring states such as feelings of well-being and happiness can also be transmitted and caught by other members of a social group.

The authors further claim that the social ties don't even need to be very strong for this to occur. They cite a number of research studies including some in which feelings and emotions have been transferred between people through two identified psychological processes. The first is a cognitive inferential mechanism, where thinking and reflection is involved, and then there is something known as primitive emotional contagion - where subconsciously, we mimic the emotions and postures of those we are interacting with, especially if we wish to convey friendship. As I read this section, I thought of the 'postural echoing' I observe when I'm in the shopping mall, or waiting in the departure lounge. People sat or standing together tend to echo their partners postures, in an unconscious display of affinity (as in the pictures above).

If the speculation is correct, and we behave similarly in virtual worlds as we do in real life, online social networking is probably a great deal more powerful than many of us think - and can possibly transmit strong emotions and cause large movements of mood effects across populations. The more we are connected, the more we may be affected.

Reference: Totterdell, P., Niven, K. and Holman, D. (2010) Our Emotional Neighbourhoods. The Psychologist, 23 (6), 474-477.

Image source

Catching the mood by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 International License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Movements for change

The learning technology landscape is changing and many questions are being asked. Why should teachers give away their resources, and why should they share their hard work with other teachers? What is Creative Commons and how does it work? What is open scholarship and what does it have to offer me? Will the 'giants' in the publishing world take notice of the Open Educational Resource movement? How did Web 2.0 come about? How do movements for change emerge and gain impetus? Does change come best from a top-down or a bottom-up approach? And where can we find the useful open educational resources we need?

I gave my responses to these and many other questions during a 30 minute interview today with Alastair Creelman (Linneuniversitet, Sweden) on Adobe Connect. We discuss the future of organisations like Becta, and how universities like my own institution are planning for the future of education supported through new learning technologies, and open educational resources. We cover issues such as language, intellectual property and ownership in our half hour conversation. Even my teenage son puts in a cameo appearance! The link to the interview is here, and I would be interested in your comments on what was discussed. Alastair is doing an entire series of interviews with internatioanl experts in the area of open educational resources, and I think his interviews should be more widely publicised.

And my soundbite from the interview: 'Knowledge is like love. You give it away, but you still keep it...'

Image source

Movements for change by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 International License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Wild west show

I learn a lot from taking part in international projects, and I am currently involved in several which are occupying my mind. By far the largest project I was involved in though, was a $90 million Star Schools Project in South Dakota - the Digital Dakota Network - in 2001-2003. It all started when I was invited in July 2000, all expenses paid, to make a trip across the pond as a guest of the then Governor of South Dakota, the Hon. Bill Janklow. I arrived in the small sleepy, state capital of Pierre (pronounced peer) and booked into the local Ramada Hotel. Pierre sits straddling the Missouri river, and is therefore in two time zones. When the bars shut east of the river, you walk over the bridge and into a bar on the west of the river, and get an extra hours drinking in (if you like that sort of thing, that is).

I was driven by my hosts to the Capitol building and ushered into the Governor's conclave where I gave a speech to a gathering of around 100 guests, many of whom were either working in the government or were school superintendents. My talk, about the current state of distance education, was well received because the entire Star Schools Project the state was about to embark upon was premised on distance learning. Every school in the state (and their libraries, colleges and universities too) were being cabled up with broadband, and equipped with full motion video conferencing, digital satellite reception - the whole nine yards. I later met up again with Bill Janklow over breakfast in Washington D.C. in April 2001. He was just about to go off to the White House to meet up with President George 'Dubya' Bush, but said he needed a few minutes with me to talk over a proposition. He offered me a job as his 'Digital Network' Ambassador, along with a house, schooling for my 3 kids and a job for my wife, if I would up sticks for two years and join him. It was a tempting offer, but I had to refuse due to a number of intractible issues. We compromised, and I later joined his team as the part-time lead evaluator for the project. Over the next two years I jetted back and forth across the Atlantic, gathering data, meeting and working with my team of researchers (pictured above), conducting interviews, collating data and generally trying to make sense of all that we were learning about this vast, sweeping, state-wide project. At the time the Digital Dakota Network was the largest distance education project of its kind, and we had a great opportunuty to discover how learning would be affected by the new technology. However, it was often the anecdotes rather than the hard data that were the most illuminating...

I heard one story that I would like to share here. It says a lot about the human condition, and a lot more about the impact of teachers on the young mind. In fact it follows on from yesterday's blog post. Janklow was a clever guy, and to cut costs, he enlisted the help of a number of residents of the state penitentiary, who he sent out in supervised road gangs to wire up the schools across the state. In one school, one of the convicts, dressed in the obligatory orange overalls, was up a step ladder, running cables through the ceiling of a classroom. A young lad walked in, saw the prisoner, and asked him. 'Mister, what did you do to be sent to prison?' The convict looked down as the little boy and with a straight face said: 'I didn't listen to my teacher...'

Image source

Wild west show by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 International License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.