Branching out

Gilly Salmon opened the EDEN Research Workshop in Budapest this morning with a keynote entitled 'The tree of Learning: Nurturing the Growth. In it she used her now very well known drawing of a tree with its branches bathed in 'Techno-shine', representative of her argument that all education, whatever it's hue, is now dependent upon and influenced by technology of some kind or another. I guess this is true for the Western industrialised nations of the world, but in Africa and parts of Asia, the shine has a little farther to go to reach their branches. But I digress slightly. Gilly traced the history of education from it's roots to it's new shoots - and in doing so reminded us all that although we have a rich history of pedagogy, some of the branches are falling away, and others are growing in surprising directions. Her metaphor extended to the evolutionary theory of Darwin, and a prediction that some of the unfit practices would not survive. But how to nurture the new growth necessary to keep education healthy? 'The longer you have been in education' she argued, 'the more difficult it will be to shift resources and energy into new ways of teaching and learning.'

There's nothing special about web based learning (and in particular distance and open learning) she argued. They're normal now and anyone who is in education, she said, must use technology. This of course opens up an entire area for discussion - what of the digital divides we still see in society? What about those who cannot or will not engage with new technology in education - will they simply fall away like dead branches on Gilly's proverbial tree of learning? Or will they need to be cut away? Her parting shot was interesting: Quoting John Richardson she pointed out that when it comes to the future, there are 3 types of people: there are those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened. I guess regardless of what happens though, the tree will continue to grow - it just depends on how fast, in what direction, and how much fertiliser is required.


Branching out by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Podcasts a wider net

A new publication was waiting patiently for me on my desk when I finally sloped back into work yesterday. It's a review copy of 'Podcasting for Learning in Universities', edited by Gilly Salmon and Palitha Edirisingha. I will be writing a review for the journal Interactive Learning Environments for this one in the next few weeks, but here are my first impressions:

This is a slim volume, with less than 230 pages, but it contains 17 fairly heavyweight chapters, focused on various attributes, applications and outcomes of the use of podcasting techniques in higher education, from academics in the UK and Australia. It's in essence a celebration of the IMPALA project (IMPALA - Informal Mobile Podcasting and Learning Adaptation). Contributers include the Gillster herself and Pal, and a galaxy of fairly well known names including Mark JW Lee, John Traxler, Simon Bates, and of course the host of researchers who count themselves members of the Beyond Distance Research Alliance.

One neat little touch in the book is where Gilly and Palitha along with Ming Nie provide a chapter (15) entitled 'Developing Pedagogical Podcasts' in which they provide an overarching critical review of the preceding chapters, and essentially put the cream on the cake of the IMPALA project. There are very useful 'how to' sections, and large tracts covering such topics as collaborative learning and reflective learning. Most of the content is case study based, but much is also expertly theorised.

At first glance, this looks like a welcome addition for many online educators, and I suspect that in due course, and with more considered glances it will be regarded as a seminal text for those interested in developing podcasting as a serious educational tool.

Young pretender?

There is more interest in my 5-stage wiki activities model (Left) - this time from Holland. A few days ago Wilfred Rubens (Utrecht) posted a brief commentary and now Paulo Moekotte (Enschede) has posted an image of the model alongside Gilly Salmon's 5-step e-moderation model. He argues that 'students would probably need some kind of e-moderating' (alongside the wiki activity). He doesn't feel that students get 'drawn in' to all collaborative learning activities on their own but often will require some kind of scaffolding. I tend to agree, but scaffolding can come from the built in features of the learning environment, which is where the wiki activities come in, and also in the form of encouragement from peers as well as tutors or 'e-moderators'. Anyway, this is the first time the two models have appeared alongside each other - is it sort of like the king and the young pretender? ....hmmm.

No, not really. For anyone who thinks they are rival models, they are not, and that's not what I intended. But there is probably some room for them to complement each other and I would be interested in hearing comments from anyone who has thoughts about it. In the meantime it looks as though I will need to do some more work to flesh out the model now that there is so much interest...

High level talks

I'm sat in an office on the top floor (18th) of the Attenborough Building, here in the heart of the University of Leicester. There are spectacular views over the city from up here, or there would be if I could see past the scaffolding and netting that is covering most of the building. Leicester is suffering from the same syndrome as many other universities throughout the UK at the moment. It seems that every university I visit is in the process of being rebuilt, refurbished or repurposed. The University of Plymouth is probably the university with the most building at the moment. Millions have been spent in the last 2 years to create buildings on the main campus so that we can 'pull our horns in' and close down all our external sites. Anyway, back to Leicester...

I'm here as guest speaker for the Beyond Distance Research Alliance - an influential group of academics and professionals from several UK universities who meet to discuss research around e-learning, distance education and learning technology - the group is led by Professor Gilly Salmon. She will be at the talk, as will Professor David Hawkridge, whose work I read during my teacher training days. In my seminar today I will be presenting some recent research I have been doing with my team on wikis as collaborative learning spaces. I've also promised to briefly discuss Second Life as a 3D wiki - but I won't give too much away, as I'm saving the best for Online Educa in Berlin next month. I don't think I have ever given a talk at so rarified an altitude, although my trip to the skyscarpers of Frankfurt a few days ago gave me some useful training...