Learning by making

The transmission model of learning is still dominant in education. Whether you are in a primary or secondary school classroom, or in a lecture hall or laboratory in a university, you will almost always see the teacher or lecturer directing proceedings, often from the front, usually 'instructing' their students in some way. You may also witness other, underlying pedagogical models playing out, usually where students are asked to do some group work or find out for themselves through individual project work. Whilst these approaches to learning are often more effective for personalised and collaborative learning, they tend to be kept to a minimum in most cases, because teachers like to maintain some level of control over their students, and finite time and resources constrain them. So passive reception often becomes the dominant mode of learning in traditional environments.

Back in the early 1990s, when I was involved in nurse education, I introduced a project where students were given an entire day to create a 5 minute video on a subject directly related to their course. In groups of threes and fours, the student nurses were sent out to conceive their video, script and storyboard it, decide on roles, procure their props, scout out shooting locations, record their video, and then edit it. Then, during the final hour of the day, each group introduced, showed and discussed their 5 minute video. Many of my colleagues were sceptical about the value of this kind of approach to learning. They argued that it was a waste of time when the nurses could be studying their text books, writing their essays, or practicing how to give injections into oranges. I countered that the students were, in fact, engaged in a very high level of cognitive activity where they were engaged in learning by making. It wasn't until a few years later when I discovered the work of Seymour Papert (now one of my Facebook friends!), that I was able to build a theoretical framework around the nurses video project. In his theory of constructionism, Papert argued that we build mental representations of what we learn, and that the situated nature of where we learn influences and strengthens that representation. In other words, we learn by doing and building within relevant environments, and that authentic tasks can be very powerful in support of that situated learning.

At the time I showed my colleagues that the nursing students were learning numerous skills that they would later be able to transfer across into their professional practice. To successfully complete their video project they needed to be able to solve problems, create content, construct artefacts, take decisions and make critical judgements, work together as a team, divide their labour and select appropriate tasks, manage their time, think creatively, negotiate difficult situations, consider ethical issues, work with finite resources, successfully bring a task to completion and reflect on their practice. How many of these skills could be modelled and situated within a classroom in such a short period of time?  The very act of constructing something tangible allows students to test out hypotheses, learn from each other and solve problems as they progress. Abstract ideas and concepts become concrete and are situated in real life contexts. These are essential skills for 21st Century working. It is for these reasons that making things is a central part of all my courses, and whether it is a video, podcast, blog or any other digital artefact, students gain ownership, and invest their energies and their ingenuity into making and presenting it. In so doing they are constructing their own versions of knowledge and developing the skills they will later need outside in the world of work.

Photo by Ah Zut


Learning by making by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

What is learning?

I was in a meeting with a prospective PhD candidate today and the conversation inevitably led to learning. He pointed out that in his lterature reviews he had uncovered a bewildering number of different, and often opposing learning theories. He was clearly impressed if not a little phased by the huge array of concepts and ideas that theorists had developed to try to explain what it means when we learn something. My response was that this was to be expected, because asking someone how they learn is similar to asking them what their favourite food is. But learning theories are variable in their significance, scope and validity. Some of the more revered theories such as social constructivism and cognitivism seem to enjoy a longevity which is evidenced in a large number of existing educational practices, including course design, learning activities, resource development, assessment and design of learning spaces. Yet in the digital age, it is probably in the area of tools selection and application that learning theories are at their most potent. Consider why the iPad and other touch screen tablet computers are becoming so popular in schools. Is this down solely to the intuitive nature of the tablet design, or do teachers see other more tacit pedagogical uses that are supported by the affordances of the tablet?

Our conceptions of learning are as individualised as our fingerprints. During a conference in Barcelona last week, I was asked what I did to make learning fun for my students. I responded by saying that I didn't always make learning fun, because sometimes learning needs to be painful. This response was met by frowns and smiles in equal distribution. Over 70 years ago, John Dewey argued that the 'educative process' consisted of 'severe discipline' to aid intellectual and moral development (Dewey, 1938). We may not be able to agree on a single definition of learning (a good thing) but we can probably all agree that learning can be as painful as it can be enjoyable, depending on the context.

A number of new 'theories' and emerging in the digital age, as people attempt to provide explanations for what is happening with learning. Some argue that learning is changing as a direct result of technology. Learners are indeed consuming, creating, organising and sharing a lot more content than they ever previously did. The exponential rise in user generated content on social media sites bears testament to this, and when these kind of activities spill over into the formal learning domain, previously well established learning theories are challenged. We now see the emergence of a number of new theories that attempt to explain learning in the 21st Century. These include heutagogy, paragogy, connectivism and rhizomatic learning. One of the characteristics of learning through digital media is the ability to crowd source content, ideas and artefacts, and to promote and participate in global discussions. That's why I want to ask the questions: What is learning? Does it differ from learning prior to the advent of global communications technology? Does learning now require new explanatory frameworks? Your comments on this blog are welcomed and discussion encouraged.

Reference

Dewey, J. (1938) Experience and education. New York: Kappa Delta Pi.

Image source


What is learning? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Who let the blogs out?

Who, who, who who? Yes. Exactly. I have unleashed my blog.

It was about time. For all these years I have been focusing mainly on content. It was substance over style. Focusing solely on content at the expense of context is a mistake. In my previous blog posts I discussed the age old debate about the tension between the two, but I have come to the conclusion that content and context are not a binary. They are dependent upon each other, and need to be balanced. So I have balanced the two here on this new look blog, I hope.

But context is still vitally important. In education, if all learners receive is content, content, content, then they will be... well, discontent. They will feel overwhelmed, hemmed in by the continuous onslaught. Students need to be given some time to reflect, digest, ask the 'what if?' type questions. They need context for the content they have been given. All too often in formalised education settings, there is no time built into the programme to do this, because curriculum comes first. But we need to challenge this. We need to start asking the questions that will cause our leaders to stop and rethink the constraints they are imposing upon the teaching profession. Teachers are doing their best, but with the best will in the world, how are they going to inspire young people to get excited about learning, if they have no time themselves to teach creatively? We need to ask what exactly are schools for? Why are there so many subjects covered in the curriculum? Why is so much time spent on testing, and so little spent on the development of critical skills, creativity, experimentation?

So I gave my blog a makeover a few days ago. I invoked one of the new templates that Blogger has just started to offer its users. You can see the difference it has made. I have unleashed my blog, and now it's free to make as much of an impression on my readers as they are to ask of it. I think it's a cleaner context, a more open and accessible format for the content to sit within. Many others have already agreed, and interestingly, my blog traffic has almost doubled. I'm not claiming that this solely because I have changed the context, the format of my blog. But it seems strange that in the last two days, all I have done is alter the look and feel of the wrapper, and have added no new content. Yet, in the last two days I have received over 10,000 views, up from the normal 2500-3000 views per day I would normally get during the week. For me, this is at least an indication of the power of context. It holds the content, and presents it in a manner that is more accessible, easy to explore and in a more dynamic way. Can we do the same with school content in the given constraints? Success will rely on the tenacity, determination and inventiveness of creative teachers, but as I have always said, teachers are the best society has to offer, and somehow we will find ways to do it. Doctors save lives, but teachers make lives. Let's unleash the content.

Image source


Who let the blogs out? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Across the Twitterverse

It's that time of the year when the edublog community honours its members with awards. The 2011 Edublog Awards have come around again with frightening speed, and once again this year I am both honoured and humbled to have been nominated in two categories - best individual blog and best individual tweeter (for my @timbuckteeth account). I'm very much aware that there are many, many active and creative edubloggers out there who could and should have been nominated and included in the list, but even without them, the list is still quite impressive. As I have previously said during past Edublog Awards, it really doesn't matter that much who wins in each of the categories, the real spirit of the Edublog Awards is about honouring those who have served another year by writing, blogging, tweeting and otherwise freely sharing their ideas and wisdom with their community through social media. I learn so much each year from these people, and my own professional and personal worlds would be poorer without my daily dose of news, views and commentaries throughout the Edublogsphere and across the Twitterverse. 


So congratulations to all those who made it to the final cut, and please - everyone, show your appreciation for your colleagues by voting for your favourites. And one final thing - you are allowed to vote in as many categories as you like, each and every day, right up to the deadline on December 13th.

Image courtesy of Edublog Awards


Across the Twitterverse by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Tools of the trade

I was quite impressed by Joyce Seitzinger's Professional Learning Environment (PLN) model that she presented at Deakin University in Melbourne this week. The first slide on the left shows a quadrant model in which she has used a work/office metaphor to define four discrete functions of a PLN. The first, the Staffroom is quite public, calling on high levels of communication and high profile, and involves the use of microblogging tools such as Twitter. This will work provided the user subscribes to a requisite number of other relevant user accounts, and can share their ideas and converse freely. It will fail if the user does not follow or is not followed by enough other subscribers to enable the benefits of the network effect.

Joyce calls the second quadrant the Filing Cabinet, because essentially, it is low profile and low in terms of the efforts put into communicating with others, and it provides a repository for the user (and their PLN) to store, categorise and possibly share content they think is important to them. Social tagging sites such as Diigo and Delicious can offer this kind of filing cabinet organisation, but so too can wikis and other collaborative tools, which would I imagine, raise the level of engagement and profiling of individuals who organised and shared their content in this manner.

The third quadrant is the Newspaper, which again Joyce sees as low profile and low in terms of communication. I assume that this is because most of the tools she identifies as falling into this category of PLN deployment is push technology (RSS feeds, Google Reader etc). I would imagine that if Joyce placed blogs into this category, (and in the model's present form I see no reason why they shouldn't be there), then a higher profile and higher level of engagement between user and PLN would ensue.

Yet she leaves blogs and other authoring tools to insert into the final quadrant, the Portfolio. This is the quadrant in which a lot of high profile activity is conducted, but I would argue that it is also high in engagement. The question still open to me is whether this model would change from it's current form to represent Personal Learning Networks. Or is there any real difference between these and Professional Learning Networks?

It is worth noting that only the first quadrant of this PLN model is actually performed synchronously, that is, in real time. That may give some a clue as to the latent potential of tools such as Twitter to connect people powerfully and instantly across the globe and to give all of us access to a worldwide network of experts and enthusiasts in any subject for which we have an interest. Everyone should have a PLN, because in today's connected world, without it you are not fully equipped as a professional.

Images courtesy of Joyce Seitzinger


Tools of the trade by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Digital footprints

Increasingly, as we ask our learners to engage with social media as a part of their study, we are also asking them to leave a trace of themselves on the Web. Whether it is writing a blog, posting a video on YouTube, working collaboratively on a wiki, or simply bookmarking a site on Diigo or Delicious, students are leaving their digital footprints - evidence of their presence - all over the internet. And there may be ethical issues attached. Digital footprints are persistent, with artefacts and traces remaining visible and searchable for many years. Should we therefore be more careful about what we ask students to do and where we ask them to go on the Web?

These questions were addressed by Dr Jenny Waycott, of the University of Melbourne, who was our final speaker today at the Inaugural Technology for Learning and Teaching Forum. Jenny talked not only of the benefits and potential of social media to enhance learning, but also gave a critical review of some of the issues and challenges. She asked her audience to consider not only the opportunities that are presented to transform learning, but also to think about how we might minimise the risks associated with learning while using the social web. She argued that although social media can change the way students communicate and share their work, there are hidden dangers and controversies we need to be ready to counter.

Dr Waycott told the story of one student who was also developing a fledgling music career. The student was careful that her digital footprint as a musician (which was already well established) was not contaminated by her presence on the web as a university student. She took great pains to separate out her two identities, and made sure that those who knew her as a student did not confuse her other online persona as a musician. The ethical implications of this for university staff are less than clear, but the student's wishes to keep her two digital identities separate need to be respected and treated with care.

Other students, she told us, were worried about copying on the web. Not plagiarism, she added, but other students copying their work and then claiming credit for it at the author's expense. What if another student learnt something new from the writer's work and then gained a higher grade than the originator of the ideas? What would be the ethical implications of this? She counselled that asking students to co-create or share their work on a wiki or other online social space could have detrimental effects on intellectual property if the guidelines are not clear. The jury is still out on these questions. What are your views?

Image by Wesley Fryer (remixed)


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

Writer's block?

Anyone who writes regularly will tell you this: There are times when you struggle to write something worthwhile ... or even anything at all. Call it writer's block, call it the white page syndrome (or white screen in the age of the word processor), call it whatever you wish - there are times when the words won't come, and there is very little you can do about it. At such times, I tend to either write rubbish and then ditch it (boy, you should read some of my rejects - you'd laugh yourself sick), or more likely, walk away from the page/screen and go and do something else instead.

Blog posting is a very immediate kind of writing, so you need to make sure you have done it correctly. Once you have clicked the Publish button, your ideas are out there for the whole world to read. It's publish and be damned. Lawrence Lessig said about blogging that it is 'the most important form of unchoreographed public discourse that we have.' Counter this with Katie Hafner's wry parodic comment 'never have so many people written so much to be read by so few' and you will see that there are ups and downs to blogging (the patron saint of ups and downs is St Francis of a Seesaw). No matter how good your blog post is, no matter how incisive, devastatingly witty or profound your points are, if there is no audience for your writing, you may as well be whistling in the wind. Just how you drive people to your blog though, is beyond the scope of this particular post (phew, escaped from that one).

So how do you start off writing a blog post, and avoid the writer's block syndrome? More importantly, how do you write something that is worthwhile writing? My advice is to just start writing. Write about something you know about, have an opinion on, or feel passionately about. You can also be controversial. Draw on evidence that supports your viewpoint, but also find those who argue against and include those too, for some balance. Use language that is accessible and easy to understand. But don't compromise on your own writing voice, which is often the one tool you can wield with devastating effect in any writing genre. Most importantly, try to engage your reader. Address them personally. That's something that makes you want to keep reading, isn't it?

There are all sorts of bells and whistles you can put into a blog post, but I have elaborated on several of my own ideas already so I won't bore you again. Ultimately, you should write blog posts because you want to share your ideas and receive comments and feedback from your readership. When done correctly, blogging is not just writing - it's a conversation. As always I welcome your comments on this post.


Image by Daniel Gies


Writer's block? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Breaking down fences

Seth Godin's blog is always good value, but his post today is quite profound. He writes about his avid reading of the entire collection of one library's science fiction stock during his high school days and concludes that "Expertise is a posture as much as it is a volume of knowledge". Expertise does not come easily. It takes hard work and a lot of tenacity to become expert at anything, whether it is sport, music, art or and other realm of knowledge or skill. Godin urges us to 'go deep' and to read everything we can on our chosen subject, and on the surface, this seems a no brainer. We read for a degree. Reading is what it takes to master a topic.

I tell all potential PhD candidates I meet the same thing. If they wish to complete a research degree, they must become an expert in a very narrow domain, and through their research they should contribute something unique to that field. In order to do that, they need to explore their field thoroughly. It means reading a lot. It means reflecting on your own practice, and thinking critically about your field. It means finding where the edge of that field is, and sometimes - if you're bold enough - even breaking a few fences down to venture beyond into uncharted territory.

It doesn't just apply to PhD candidates. Anyone who is a professional should try to be the best they can be. What about your own professional practice? How do you find the edge of your field of knowledge and expertise? What do you read and where do you find the edgy stuff?

Although journal articles and books are a great source of knowledge, many articles go quickly out of date, and were probably in most cases already out of date by the time they were published, due to ponderous editorial and review processes, and a general back-log of articles that wait in a queue to be published. It's the same for just about every closed pay-per-view journal. Open access journals are better - they are generally more up to date, and are of course free to read. Many can be found online and usually, as soon as an article is accepted, it is quickly published. Better still, if you wish to approach the very very edge of your field, search for blogs written by the leaders in the field. You can gain access to the latest thoughts and ideas posted onto the web direct from the mind of the author. You can't get much more immediate than that. You may receive more understanding and wisdom from a just-written-blog by a reputable researcher or leading thinker than you will ploughing through several dozen paper based journal articles. You need to find your own pathway. Any way you do it, go deep, search for the edge of your field and then break down a few fences.

Image by Lionel Grove


Breaking down fences by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Synching feelings

A lot of time has been spent studying the impact of user generated content. You know, all the stuff that gets posted up onto the web, and whether it is at all useful to us as teachers and educators. Some of the best content is often provided by amateurs - people who are not necessarily specialists or qualified in their field of interest, but who are never the less passionate about their subject. This is also the ethos of sites such as Wikipedia, which rely heavily on 'the people' and 'wisdom of crowds' to create and maintain the content held in its pages. Blogging has emerged in recent years as a strong contender for the number one spot as user generated content, driven as it is by people who are both passionate and knowledgeable.

But it's not plain sailing. Influential commentators such as Andrew Keen have sniped consistently against such amateur content, suggesting that it is not only dumbing down society, but also eroding the authority of professionals and scholars, and denigrating knowledge.

And yet where is the first place students will go when they want to glean some facts or information about a subject? A lot of academics and scolars scoff at Wikipedia and forbid their students to reference it in their assessed work. Even more anathema are the many thousands of specialist blogs that are written by avid fans of topics. I must agree that quality across such sites is variable, but I also point out to the critics that just like Wikipedia, there are real experts out there writing these blogs. What if these blogs did not exist? How much poorer would we be in terms of knowledge of the world? There is a criticism that blogs are not peer reviewed, contain mainly opinion and have no credibility when compared with peer reviewed journal articles. Let's examine each criticism in turn.

Journal articles are usually double reviewed by people who are deemed to be experts in their field. Once reviewed, articles are sent back to the author for correction and revision before they are accepted for publication. Such tasks are usually performed by editorial teams. Blogs are peer reviewed, not necessarily in a formal way, but certainly informally through reader comments. I certainly think long and hard about what I write on this blog, because with between 1000-2000 views per day, and a stream of comments coming in from those who either agree or disagree with my views, I sure feel as though I am being peer reviewed. The difference between journal articles and blogs is that blogs are peer reviewed within minutes of being posted. They can also be adjusted, revised and corrected quickly, and re-posted instantly on demand. There may be typos and spelling errors in blogs, but who can honestly tell me that they have never spotted an error in a peer reviewed journal article or book chapter?

Blogs contain a lot of opinion, whereas journal articles are usually based on empirical evidence and research. But what is research anyway? We can no longer argue that research is all about statistical analysis, because there are so many qualitative, narrative and experimental forms of methods available to us as researchers, so who is to say that blogging is not a valid means of research? But how often do we read and take in the editorials in popular newspapers, which are also opinion? I have even read peer reviewed journal articles that are openly 'fictionalised' in their methodology. Opinion is also an excellent trigger for discussion. How will we learn if we don't discuss ideas and negotiate meaning between us. How can we synchronise our activities if there is not a common understanding of what needs to be done? We don't have to agree - in fact it would be a boring, colourless world if we did - but we need to be able to understand each other to get on together.

Blogs are gaining credibility, particularly those that are being followed and read by many people, and those that attract awards and plaudits from peers. They have credibility in a different sense to peer reviewed journal articles. Blogs can become a rallying point - a tribal totem - around which people can come to terms with ideas, change their approach, exchange best practice, and generally engage with their community of practice. It is a lot more intimate than the community that gathers around a peer reviewed journal article. Journals perform a different function entirely, and are less immediate, more slow burning in their impact. Blogs tend to be transitory and ethereal in their presence. Although the archive of a blog is there for people to revisit if they wish, generally it is the article at the top of the stack that is most visible and therefore most visited.

You may already have noticed that blog addresses are beginning to appear in the reference lists of peer reviewed journal articles. This is a trend that I predict will increase as blogs begin to achieve a more respectable and accepted position in the academic world.

One final word: We need to remember that professionals built the Titanic, but an amateur built the Ark. It's not always about expertise - sometimes it's about passion.

Image source Wikimedia Commons


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

Web 3.0 and onwards

Web 3.0: The way forward?

View more presentations from Steve Wheeler.

Continuing my retrospective of the year, one of the surprising highlights for me was the aftermath of a presentation I gave at a school in Exeter, South West England, in July. I was invited by Vitalmeet to present my latest views on the future of the web in education, so I chose to talk about 'Web 3.0 - the way forward?' When I arrived, the room wasn't that ideal, and the projector was on its last legs. Only 15 people turned up, and that included the organisers. Not particularly auspicous. I gave my presentation, and no-one wished to asked any questions afterwards. I made for the door... then someone asked me if they could have my slides. I promised I would post them up on my Slideshare site so they could gain access.

To say I was amazed at the response is an understatement. My Web 3.0 slideshow received 8,000 views during its first week. Within the month, the count had risen to over 15,000 views - my original audience had multiplied a thousand times. Even more valuable for me, many people commented and shared their ideas to me, which led to to write further blog posts, and publish a second, related post entitled Web x.0 and beyond. It seemed that these ideas had resonated in the blogosphere. Tracking back I could see that many people had discovered the presentation and had deemed it worthy enough to embed within their own websites and blogs, and that many more had commented on Twitter and elsewhere. It had gone viral. This for me was just more proof that the social web is extremely powerful and tools such as Twitter, blogs and resource sharing sites are very effective event amplification tools. Here it is above, one more time, for anyone who missed it.

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

Parasites!

I have been receiving a lot of requests lately to publish blog posts from freelance writers. To begin with, I was curious, because it made a change from companies trying to get advertising space on my site. So I asked to see some of the 'guest posts' that were being offered. I was disappointed.

They weren't very good, they looked rather formulaic, and as I suspected, many of them were trying to plug some kind of product or service. Some of the more subtle ones merely eulogised over the product or service without endorsing it. It's apparent to me now that there are probably commercial companies lurking behind these wannabe 'guest bloggers', who are almost certainly as freelance as I am a Dutchman.

I can see it all now: These companies must pay top dollar for their 'social media marketing' executives to sit down for hours on end in front of a screen fastidiously trawling the web for blogs that attract more than a thousand hits each month. When they spot one, the office lights flash on and off and the warning klaxon sounds. Then all the company's designated 'guest bloggers' run around like maniacs flash targeting the blogger's e-mail inbox to try to convince him that their 'freelance' post should be hosted on his blog.

There's another name for these people - parasites (not to be confused with Parisiens, who are in fact residents of the capital of France). I name them parasites because they all want to cash in on the success of someone else's endeavours. They want a free ride on the back of the winning steed. They want to hijack popular blogs to get their message across to the largest audience they can, with the minimum effort.

I have a message for these parasites: Blog off! Don't try to cash in on the success of hardworking people. Go and get your own blog to play with. That way you will grasp just how difficult it is to build up a decent blog following through hard work and a lot of hours of thinking, researching and writing. I think guest blogging is a great idea, and if you can find someone you trust, who can write a great blog post or three while you're away sunning yourself on the Costa del Sol, then go for it. However, my advice for any decent blogger who receives an e-mail from one of the wannabe social media marketing guest blogger parasites, is this: Don't say no. Don't even respond. Just delete the e-mail. Then disinfect.

Image source


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

Digital literacy 7: Organising and sharing content

In yesterday's blogpost, I talked about why students should create their own content. The very act of creating content, whether it is a video, blogpost or podcast, is often with the intention that it will be shared in some way, usually on the web. Now we have the social web, there are more ways than ever to make your content available to a vast audience. But how do you share in such a way that makes it visible to the web? Answer - you organise it by 'tagging' it. You think of words that best describe your content, and then insert them into the appropriate box within the tool you are using.

Tagging content is a bit of an art. Choosing the correct descriptive words to tag your content with, can sometimes be a little hit and miss. But tag you must, if you want your content to be searchable. So this blogpost for example is tagged with a few key worlds such as 'digital literacy' and 'content creation' as well as more generic terms such as 'social web', 'blog', 'podcast' and 'video', because these terms have appeared in the text (see labels below). Because I have tagged this blogpost with those words, anyone who is interested in any of these areas, and who types those words into a search engine will, if they drill down far enough, be able to find this blog post. Tagging will also make finding content within a large list of bookmarks a lot easier. You can search for content in 'bundles' - this is useful if you only want to see the links in your list related to 'podcast' or 'audio', for example. Some tagging tools also offer tag clouds - clouds of labels that have larger or smaller font size depending on the amount of times they appear in your bookmark list.

But we can go further using tagging, so that content becomes a community artefact around which groups can discuss, interact and collaborate. Using a web service such as Delicious for example, will allow you not only to make your content more visible to those who are searching using key words, but it will also reveal to you (and to the other users) exactly who else may be interested in the same, or similar content. This is more than just bookmarking. It's social bookmarking - organising your content, and the content of others, into sets that are more useful and more socially coherent. The blue box at the end of each hyperlink displayed in my own Delicious account indicates the number of other people who have bookmarked the same link. If you click on that box, it will display them. Click on any user and you will see what other links that user has bookmarked. Some of these may have slipped past you, but you can now see them and also visit those sites and then bookmark them if you think they might be useful to you. You can also hold conversations with those others around you about the sites you find interesting- and perhaps learn even more about your mutual interests. This is the power of social bookmarking - just one of the many ways you can organise and share your content on the social web.

Image source

Organising and sharing content by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Digital literacy 6: Content creation

One of the most important digital literacies students require today is the ability to create appropriate, subject specific content. Content creation is an important feature in many personal learning environment (PLE) models, and together with organising and sharing, makes up the cardinal triumvirate of skills that provides learners with a clear advantage. If you subscribe to constructivist theories of learning, you will understand why the creation of content is important in any context. We learn by doing, and we more actively engage with learning when we create artefacts that can be shared within social contexts such as communities of practice. Artefacts are a material outworking of knowledge creation, and according to Vygotsky, they can be aids to solving problems that could not be solved as effectively in their absence. In turn, such artefacts can also influence the individuals who use them to draw attention to previously unknown activities and ways of conceptualising the world around us. When I write a blog post for example, I am creating new content as I write, and then in turn, that content may reveal to me something I may have missed if I had not written the post. The blog content allows me perhaps to view a problem from a different perspective. In essence, writing a blog enables me to know what I am thinking, in a concrete, persistent and searchable form.

There are many other ways to create content besides the blog of course. The use of wikis in group learning to promote collaboration and make a record of what has been learnt is becoming more popular in all sectors of education. Podcasts, normally in the form of the audio recording of an event, are also a means of projecting and sharing content to others so that they can listen at a time and in a place (usually on the move) of their choosing. Sharing of other forms of content such as images and videos can be easily achieved with the use of photo and video sharing services such as Flickr and Youtube. I often share my slideshows through this channel, and receive feedback and other data on their subsequent uses. However, for any of the above formats of user generated content to be fully usable, it first needs to be located. Without organisation and tagging (the use of key descriptive words) such content is not searchable. In my next blog post in this series on digital literacies, I will explore this facet of the social web in more detail. Tomorrow: Organising and sharing content.

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

Show your appreciation

This year's Edublog Awards are bigger and better than ever with over 400 nominations in 23 catagories. There are awards for best individual blogger, best individual tweeter, best new blog, best teacher blog, most influential blog post and even an award for the best use of a PLN (Personal Learning Network). I feel both honoured and humbled that this year my peers have once again decided to nominate me in the best individual blogger and best individual tweeter (as @timbuckteeth) categories. I don't really care who wins, it's just very pleasant to know that people appreciate what I'm doing in these spaces, and I'm sure most of the other nominees will feel the same.

Perhaps the most prestigious award, as always, is the Lifetime Achievement award. In this category, there are a number of luminaries, including some very good friends of mine such as Alec Couros, Alan Levine and Jane Hart. But I predict the winner of this category is going to be Sir Ken Robinson - his work, more than anyone else's this year, has influenced our thinking as educators, and he has been doing this successfully for a very long time now. If you are a regular blogger, tweeter, or social media enthusiast, you will be familiar with many, if not all of the nominees. Now it's time to vote. It's time to honour those who have contributed to our understanding and sharpened our practice in the use of tools for learning. I wish all those who have been nominated success - they are all winners for reaching the final stage. Let's all vote to tell them just how much we appreciate their contributions. Voting closes on 14th December.

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The truth about blogging

Anyone who blogs regularly will have discovered several truths. The first is that you are only as good as your last post. Many people struggle to maintain a regular blog that is consistently good, or at least meaningful. The blank page and writer's block are familar companions to all authors. But there is a contradiction here. Although you are only as good as your last blog, all your previously blogs are also out there, archived, published for people to read (and for you to revisit, if you wish). So be careful what you blog - the affordance of persistency is quite a powerful one, and can work either way.

The second truth is reflected in something that Shelly Blake-Plock (@teachpaperless) has expanded upon in his excellent post 'Why teachers should blog'. I quote: To blog is to teach yourself what you think. For me, this is reflexivity in action. Your work is placed right out there on the blogosphere, in a public agora for others to read, reflect on, and comment on. It's a shop window displaying your thoughts, opinions or arguments to anyone who happens to walk on by. Blogging in effect, can contribute to an endless cycle of learning through content creation, feedback, reflection and refinement of thinking. It is this kind of critical reflection cycle that can build excellent, creative, flexible and responsive educators. I have on several occasions written concerning the reasons I blog, but let me extend my argument further to all of my writing efforts, paper and online:

I write because in the act of writing, I am written. In Daniel Chandler's terms, it is about constructing meaning, discovering and drawing out your internal thoughts, and externalising them in prose. He says: "The experience of ‘discovery’ in writing may sometimes represent having found a way to make one’s ideas coherent." In effect, as I write, I create concrete meaning from my abstract thoughts. Also, because the blog is public, I write for an audience. My writing has become a social act. As I learn my thoughts, I share them with you.

A third truth, deriving from my previous statement, is this: Writing on blogs is dialogical, much more so that it ever could have been in paper format. In some journals there is occasionally a dialogue between two experts, who each write a treatise in response to the arguments of the other. This kind of dialogue is as far removed from the debate as it is possible to get without disengaging totally. Far more immediate is the dialogue that can transpire between two or more protagonists when they are simultaneously online, and using the basis of a blog post to argue. This kind of dialectical process most closely resembles the debate, and synthesis of ideas can occur more quickly for those who are engaged. Even the lurkers, those who participate peripherally or merely observe, can gain from the experience of reading the content of the comments boxes.

So there are many reasons to blog, and even more reasons to blog regularly, especially if you are in the business of education.

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The truth about blogging by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Web feats 3: Blogging

I continue my series on the tools I can't do without, and today, I want to talk about blogging, and the platform I use for Learning with 'e's: Blogger.

This is Blogger. What you are reading now is on a blog hosted by Blogger. It's probably one of the simplest 'free' tools you will find anywhere on the web for creating your own blog. I find blogging very valuable, because it allows me to post up my ideas, reflections, questions and fun content so that I can share it with the world. Having a blog is like owning your own publishing house or personal radio station. I have complete editorial control over my content, and once I have written and posted it, it's there for the entire world to look at, should they wish to. But I can also come back to it and add, delete or modify the content any time I want.

I first started blogging at the end of 2006, and have continued to do so regularly ever since. I have already posted up my reasons for blogging (Why do I bother?), and I have also given my opinions on what ingredients there should be in a good blog post. There has also been a lot written by others about the pedagogical and personal benefits of blogging, but I won't try to summarise it or repeat what has already been said. I will simply give my personal view, because that's what this blog is all about! Blogging has transformed my professional practice (teaching and researching) because it has enabled me to write down and present my ideas in a way which is coherent to my wider community of practice. OK, so I could publish in a peer reviewed journal and often do, but that takes time (read Publish and be jammed and you'll see what I mean). Blogging is different - it has immediacy - it's almost instantaneous, so I now use it as my preferred weapon of mass instruction. In doing so, I have had to articulate myself clearly, separate out fact from fiction, and have also needed to adopt a creative approach to the way I represent my ideas. Doing all of this has made me better at writing, better at speaking, and ultimately has given me a springboard from which I can launch into developing my ideas and theories further afield. I gain very valuable feedback from people who comment on my posts, and in doing so, I can reflect critically, strengthen my ideas further, modify and adapt them to make them more workable, and even gain some new insight as I blog. In the act of writing, it has been said, we are written. As I write, edit and then post my content on this blog, I make my ideas available to the world, and wait for the world to make its feedback available to me. It's a two way street that brings a lot of personal and professional benefits.

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Web feats 3: Blogging by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Keeping your head above water

June is going to be an exceptionally busy month for me, and what a contrast it will be to last year, when I was forced to put my feet up after abominable (sorry, abdominal) surgery. This June, instead of putting my feet up, I'm going to be trying to keep my head above water.... My first speaking engagement is at the Learning and Skills Group Conference at Olympia, in London. The invited workshop I'm presenting is titled: "Collaborative and Cooperative Learning - the how and the why" in which I will look at choosing online tools, creativity, the role of Web 2.0 and problem based learning approaches, and much more during the 70 minutes I have been allocated. As soon as this workshop is over, I dash off to Gatwick Airport, to catch my flight to Valencia, Spain.

I will be in Valencia to speak at this year's European Distance and E-Learning Network (EDEN) Conference, on the subject of "Learning Space Mashups". I'm going to be talking about my recent research into combining Web 2.0 tools such as wikis and blogs to promote reflective and collaborative learning, and will be outlining some of the difficulties and successes of these projects. EDEN is a great conference for networking and hearing about all the latest European transnational projects on e-learning, and I thoroughly recommend it to anyone in that field.

In the third week of June I have no less than 3 keynotes to present. My first takes place in relatively nearby Taunton, when I address the Association of Colleges Higher Education Managers event at Oake Manor on 22nd. Two days later on 24th I'm farther up the coast giving the opening keynote for the Learning and Teaching Conference at the University of Portsmouth. The title of my speech is: "Lifelong Learning in a Digital Age: Inspiration and Innovation through Social Media."

My final speaking engagement of the week is on 29th June, at the University of Middlesex, where I will be one of the keynotes at the Engaging the Digital Generation in Academic Literacy Conference. I blogged previously about this event where I'm speaking on the subject of "Digital Tribes and the Social Web: How Web 2.0 will Transform Learning in Higher Education." It's a quick dash back that evening to Plymouth, where the following morning, during the VC's Learning and Teaching Conference at the University of Plymouth, I will pick up my Teaching Fellowship Award. But... I can only stay until lunch, because then I'm dashing back off to Heathrow Airport to fly to Helsinki, where...... (but more about that later).

How did June get to be so busy? Well, don't look now, but July is even worse. I suppose I now have to earn my new title of Professor....

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Keeping your heads above water 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.

Bad behaviour

I have seen a lot of bad behaviour this week, and it's not been from our politicians. I was in Germany most of last week, working on a project in Erlangen, near to the Bavarian city of Nuremburg. While I was there I was taken by my hosts to sample the atmosphere (and the amber nectar) of the local Erlangen Beer Festival. It was quite a sight, with hundreds of metres of benches and trestle tables stretching out across a large hillside area, with live stages and all kinds of music from thrash metal to oompah bands, to satisfy the musical tastes of just about everyone. The beer flowed freely and was consumed from large steins. Most people enjoyed the event, but quite a few also overindulged to such an extent that they were eventually dancing on the tables in hordes. I guess that's what beer festivals are about. Before we knew it we were engulfed by the heaving mass and I managed to extricate myself. Now I know why it was called the Munich Putsch - people kept putsching and tschoving me, and schtepping on my feet. People began falling off the tables, and so did the steins, many breaking explosively beneath the stomping feet of the drunken ones. We got out of the way pretty quickly, and smiled at the antics, but I still managed to get stomped on a few times, and my jacket now smells strangely of a variety of Bavarian brews. I'm glad I didn't wear my new white Reeboks to the event - they would have been absolutely ruined. I know it can happen anywhere, not just in Germany, but it was kind of fun, end of story.

Er.... not quite. Yesterday, waiting for my train to Nuremburg, I encountered more drunken hordes at Erlangen Railway Station, all trying to get home after a full night out on the town. And this time it wasn't so funny. Some were so worse for wear they had to be helped along the platform. Others amused themselves by smashing full beer bottles, and the platform soon resembled a scene from the movie Die Hard. I can only guess they didn't think the beer was that good. The worst was to come though, when several drunken young guys turned on others in the throng and there ensued a thumping match and more breaking of glass. Several passengers, myself included, had to move sharply out of the way. The Station Master shouted across the he was raufing die Polizei, and they shouted back, please do, we'll fight them as well. Ach du lieber Gott. In the distance the sirens began to wail, and before long, half a dozen tooled up Polizei had descended to 'sort things out'. It was at that point my train arrived and I gratefully got the hell out of there.

The other bad behaviour of note this week was less violent, but is supposedly bad enough for Google to start shutting down blogs. BBC Click this week featured one notable incident where videoblogger had his account taken down because he had posted footage of the build up to the Jimmy Carr comedy show (audience arriving etc, but none of the actual show). The blog was spotted by the said comic's management team (who ironically seem to have no sense of humour) who then complained to Google. Google removed the entire account. The blogger then had to fight for several months to get his blog restored. Apparently he had fallen foul of Google's "3 strikes and your out" rule, having previously transgressed by inadvertently posting up copyrighted material on his YouTube account. The blogger makes the point that a) It's a draconian measure to take down an entire blog just for a few minor breaches, especially after he said he would delete the offending posts the moment he was informed he had potentially breached copyright, and b) Google doesn't really fully explain what is involved in this rule, so how can people comply if they don't know? I wonder what other bloggers out there think about this? Is the blogger just whinging, or had he got a point? Is the way Google manage this rule fair or are they being too heavy handed? And who is behaving badly here, the videoblogger.... or Google?

This work by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

CONCEDE Project

User generated content is everywhere. Students are using social networking sites to post up their content, including text, images and links they would like to keep and share. In more formalised education settings, there is a proliferation in the use of wikis and other collaborative shared spaces. Blogs are kept by teachers and students alike to document and publish their personal and professional reflections. Podcasts and other pushed services are on the increase, particularly for recorded lectures, useful for thise who either couldn't attend a lesson, or who would like revisit what was said during the session.

The Concede Project (CONtent Creation Excellence through Dialogue in Education) is an EFQUEL supported and ERASMUS funded Europe wide project that is investigating the uses of user generated content in higher education, and seeks to discover who creates and uses this content. We are also interested in how we can benchmark the quality of such content. To that end we are currently engaged in gathering data from an online survey. If you are working or studying in HE and use any form of Web 2.0 or social software services, please consider completing this survey. It's currently presented in English, Spanish and Hungarian and usually takes no more than 10 minutes to complete.

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This work by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

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.