Parabolic learning

Reflection and Amplification

Now that I have some time, I can sit down and reflect on an extraordinary two hour session with my BA Education Studies students this morning. They are only a small group of a dozen students, but over the last few months, my elearning module group has created a very large amount of content, including blogs, wiki pages and videos. The group wiki is here if anyone wishes to view some of their content. We have previously explored a number of learning theories, new learning technologies, concepts around crowdsourcing, wisdom of crowds, folksonomies and user generated content, Web 2.0, mobile learning and a whole host of other themes during the course.

Today was different, because normally I prepare thoroughly for the sessions. Today, I took the risk of going  into the room with just a germ of an idea to see how it would develop. That germ of an idea evolved over the course of the two hour session into something beyond anything I could ever have planned. It proves to me that sometimes spontaneity can pay dividends. The incorporation of a number of social media tools into the mix proved to be an amazing platform from which the students and I could reflect on the process of learning, and amplify our ideas to each other and the world.

I started the session with the aim of encouraging the group to learn deeply and critically about a particular topic - MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses). I asked them to prepare for a debate next week, and put up the slide: 'This house believes that MOOCs will signal the demise of campus based higher education'.  I then divided the students randomly into two teams, one arguing for the motion, and the other arguing against. I asked the members of the two teams to research their arguments, with supporting evidence, and blog their ideas in preparation for next week's debate.

As a doorknob strategy, I asked two students to act as content curators. Their task would be to create a new wiki page, and begin to populate it with resources related to MOOCs. This would act as baseline reference materials for the two sides to incorporate into their arguments, but it would also mean that the two students would need to investigate both sides of the argument and post content related to the discourse around MOOCs.

I then tweeted (and encouraged the students to do the same) a few messages to the online educator community to ask them their views on the question of whether MOOCs would eventually replace traditional forms of education. This kind of crowdsourcing activity is always a risk and quite unpredictable, because you never know who will respond (if anyone) or what they will say. I added the hashtag #moocplym for good measure so we could track the conversation across the community. Next, I projected Twitterfall and VisibleTweets live backchannel feeds of responses on the large screen at the front of the classroom. Another task then came the way of the curator team. Their next challenge was to create an archive of all the tweets, blogs, and other content related to the hashtag #moocplym and maintain a chronological record throughout the week using Storify or some similar curation tool.

Over the coming week, the two teams (with the curation team in attendance) will therefore explore the history, culture, technology and pedagogy of MOOCs, a topic they are not particularly familiar with. They will critically analyse the discourse surrounding MOOCs, create and share content on their learning, and reflect on it. Their ideas, and their associated content will be presented and amplified through the social media channels, and the ultimate act will be the debate, followed by a discussion of the entire process from start to finish. There will be a lot to talk about if it all goes according to schedule. Oh, and why did I title this post parabolic learning? Because a parabolic reflector collects energy, focuses and transforms it, and then reflects it back with greater intensity. That's exactly what I want my students to do.

First image source
Second image by Steve Wheeler


Parabolic learning: reflection and amplification by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The great collective

When there is live TV coverage of an event do you watch the entire broadcast or just the highlights? The answer of course will depend on a number of factors, including how interested you are in the event, and how much time you have available to you. It's exactly the same with content on the web. Earlier this month I wrote about the 'tsunami of content' online that threatens to swamp us all. Just about everyone using the web today is creating content on a daily basis. How do we find the gold dust content amidst all the dross and trivia that exists on the internet?

Search engines have their place, and of course, we tend to use them a lot. Some of the more intelligent search engines are morphing into answer engines, computing your question against highly structured data (see for example Wolfram Alpha), and providing focused information. Often, for busy professionals, even this is not enough. Then there is problem of how to organise your content when you actually find it. Many are using tools such as Delicious.com or Diigo.com to tag, store and share their favourite content. These tools are also excellent and well used, but are they enough to cope with the vast quantity of content we want to keep? Wouldn't it be nice to have up to date, regular content, all presented in one place?

Enter the digital curation tools. There is a very special breed of web users out there that we call 'the curators.' In a sense, curators are a little like their counterparts in museums, because they tend to trade in very specialised, focused content. Anyone can be a digital curator. As a part of the great collective, curators choose a topic they are interested in, and then search and display dynamic content related to this topic, using one or more digital curation tools. They are collectors of the virtual and ephemeral and they have some great tools. Scoop.it is a very useful and attractive curation tool, enabling summaries and snapshots of related content from blogs, media sharing sites and other social media to be displayed, usually in two columns. Check out my own Scoop.it site Future School. Storify is another style of curation tool, enabling the curator to search for specific content from social media sites that can be sequenced into a blog style story. The curator can add their own text, and embed the final product into their blog. This short video explains how it's done. A third curation tool is Pearltrees, which works as a kind of connective network of content, which can be shared, repurposed and linked in a number of ways across social media platforms. The Pearltrees Teams group function also enables users to collaborate to create shared curated collections of content. Here's the video demonstrating how Pearltrees works. All three tools allow conversations and further sharing, and all three are very attractive as a means of making sense of the vast amount of content there is on the web. There are of course many other tools being developed that can also perform similar tasks of consolidating and accumulating content, and offering it in a digest form to busy professionals. The great collective it seems, are becoming the great collectors.

Image by Dieter Drescher


The great collective by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.