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.

Create, connect, collaborate

With Pelecon (the 7th Plymouth Enhanced Learning Conference) only a few weeks away, preparations are almost complete. We are very excited about this year's event, with its lineup of world class speakers. As many readers will already know, we rebranded the event this year. With a new logo and website, we are sure Pelecon will retain its reputation as a friendly and stimulating event that showcases advances in technology enhanced learning. We believe Pelecon provides an excellent meeting place for those involved in promoting the use of learning technology across all sectors of education and training. Set in an idyllic part of the South West of England, we hope Pelecon is now established on the annual international conference schedule. There is still plenty of time to register for the event, and a chance to hear firsthand the thoughts of leading thinkers in the field including Keri Facer, Alec Couros, Jane Hart, Simon Finch, Leigh Graves Wolf, Helen Keegan and David Mitchell.

Pelecon has some secret weapons. Our social media team of Oliver Quinlan, Edd Bolton and Jason Truscott have been hard at work behind the scenes creating a host of social media platforms to promote the pre-conference discussions and raise awareness of the event.

We set up a Pelecon Twitter account which is a regular broadcast channel for all the latest news and views on the conference as we draw closer to the day. The account already has in excess of 200 followers, and is growing its reach daily.

Our Pelecon blog already hosts links to abstracts of all of the accepted papers for the conference this year, and an open invitation for anyone to post comments and questions to any of the speakers at the event. We want to encourage dialogue before the conference starts. The Pelecon blog will also feature regular posts from the team, including interviews with speakers, news and other updates as the conference progresses.

The Pelecon YouTube channel features videos of previous talks given by our invited conference speakers, and other associated content related to the event.

We have a Pelecon Lanyrd site where you can see all those attending, and where those who cannot attend can track the conference as it progresses.

The Pelecon Flickr site hosts images of previous conferences, and has a facility for delegates to add further content from their own personal photo collections related to the conference.

There is even a Pelecon official Facebook event page (but we won't talk too much about that...) and a LinkedIn page too!

The official hashtag for the conference is #pelc12 which is already being used in the run-up to the event. There are also session specific hashtags such as #TMpelecon which will be used during the Pelecon Teachmeet.

We think we have the social media angle well covered for the conference, but if you think we are missing a trick, I would like to hear from you.


Create, connect, collaborate by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Dropping the 'e'

Look above at the title of this blog. Yep... Learning with 'e's. The 'e' seems to be in front of just about everything now. Not just e-mail, but also e-commerce, e-tickets and of course e-learning. Someone pointed out to me recently that if vetrinary surgeons went 'e' then it would be my name backwards - e-vets. On it goes.

The 'e' used to stand for 'electronic', but now that such practices have been so deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness here in the Western Industrialised world, there is debate about whether the 'e' should be dropped. Well, if we drop the 'e' from e-learning, that signifies that all forms of learning are essentially the same, whether they are mediated through technology or not, and I suppose that is the main idea behind the argument to drop then 'e'. But the argument then moves to whether we should also drop the 'e' in e-mail. Is mail correspondence sufficiently coalesced that e-mail is now blended with traditional mail? Or are the two still distinctly different? I get as much junk mail as I do electronic spam.

So if we keep the 'e' in e-learning (which I suspect we will, because we are all used to it now) what should the 'e' represent, at least conceptually? Should it represent 'enhanced' learning perhaps? Or is there scope to see the 'e' as 'extended' learning? Some might see the 'e' in e-learning as representative of 'exotic' forms of learning if they are learning in technology poor environments. For the cynics perhaps, the 'e' in e-learning would probably stand for 'expensive', because whatever we do with e-learning, it doesn't come cheap in terms of equipment costs, and time spend developing, learning how to use it and replacing it when it goes wrong.

What are your views on the 'e' in e-learning? Should it be dropped, and if so, will it make a difference one way or another? If we keep it, should it still represent 'electronic'? Or should it really stand for something else, some other emerging properties of technology enhanced learning? I think you're itching to have your say in the comments box below...

Image source

Open for use?

Open for use?

View more presentations from Steve Wheeler.

Above are my slides for today's keynote at the EDEN Research Workshop here in Budapest. I'm talking about open educational resources and open scholarship (a form of open educational practice), as well as the power of social media to give every learner a voice. I want to challenge some of the deep seated ideas such as pay wall publishing and closed knowledge systems that are so redolent of the Ivory Tower reputation academia has nurtured over the past few centuries. Nuff said.

Open for use? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Fame again please

Well, they covered the story two weeks ago in one of the local rags. You know, local boy does good on the world stage. I am of course referring to the fellowship awarded to me by EDEN last month in Lisbon. So I get a call last night to say - do you know your picture is in the paper tonight? My first reaction was - you hum it, I'll play it.

But when I looked, there I was in full colour with a big headline in the Evening Herald. I didn't expect them to run the story again, but they have, this time with a photo. There is some journalese of course - 'Globetrotting academic', 'Lecturer nets fellowship', etc. Then there follows some editorial about what the jorunalist thinks e-learning is and how I can keep students away from lecturers through the use of technology. As if I would do such a thing... It's all the newspaper cliches I can't stand. But, I guess, all publicity is good publicity, at the end of the day, if you know what I mean.

Hot tools, hot topics

Entitled ‘Technological Culture: Web 2.0 tools and social media’, this was the last parallel paper session before the final plenary event at EDEN – day 3. The session should have been less well attended than previous ones, because traditionally most people begin to leave for the airport around this time. It’s difficult with last day sessions – often known as the ‘graveyard’ slot. Most of the presenters also had to dash away early to catch their flights. Yet there was a very healthy turnout, with an almost full room which is a testament to the fact that Web 2.0 is a red hot topic at this conference.

The first paper with the somewhat impenetrable title ‘Web 2.0 environment with workflow language’ – was presented Pritt Tammets from Tallinn University, Estonia. He talked about visual language and visual thinking which tap into the intuitive and emotional learning. Tammets’ aim was to develop a suite of visual language tools that could integrate into Web 2.0 applications such as wikis. This is a tool for designers, but became a little too complicated, he reported. Results were mixed and the system didn’t work for large scale delivery.

The second paper in the session was also focused on the use of wikis to support the learning of English as a foreign language. Igor Balaban (University of Zagreb, Croatia) borrowed Gilly Salmon’s ‘e-tivities’ concept to characterise student engagement with wiki tools. Wikis are good for interaction, collaboration and to share content with a wider audience he said, but in second language learning they are considered less useful. The EngWiki project aimed to discover how they could be optimised so his team developed a taxonomy of wiki activities (a bit of an anachronism perhaps when the chaotic and folksonomic nature of wikis is considered) to support the learning. Igor presented some very interesting wiki activities such as analogies, vocabulary trees, narratives and role playing. The results were very positive showing that students engaged more actively with the course. I will definitely be in touch to discuss their research.

The third paper, ‘A wiki as an intercultural learning environment’ was the result of collaborative research between Spanish and Australian universities. Presented by Guzman Mancho (Alcala University, Spain) the project highlighted problems with learning English through technology. Making two different semester structures coincide between the Spanish and Australian universities, assimilating the culture of the other university and overcoming lack of funding were all issues addressed. Collaborative editing was required so an ‘institution free’ wiki – MediaWiki – was selected. Students practiced collaborative writing in English which had very useful outcomes, with most producing useful content and completing the course successfully. However, there was lack of interaction between students, difficulty in assessing the degree of intercultural ties and many students lacked experience in wiki use.

The final paper, entitled ‘Disrupting the technological culture’, was presented by Stella Porto of the University of Maryland, USA. She focused on staff support (the majority are part-time professors) to train their online tutors. Social software tools are overwhelming in number and scope, but applications are becoming friendlier and can be used to build communities. Scalability was an issue – providing training and support for 2500 teaching staff was difficult. Many teachers had no technical background and some were technophobic (not recommended for online tutors). The university is now trying to bring the open social tools under their control (happening in many other universities probably because they are scared of being left behind in the technological flow) which challenges the question of ownership of content (e.g. e-portfolios) access to materials (e.g. e-portolios), and interoperability across platforms (e.g. e-portfolios!). When we are using social software, who needs protection?

Hot tools and hot topics, yes. But so many questions yet unanswered...

Sardines, Swordfish and Minnows

As usual the sun is shining brightly and the water is glistening here in Lisbon where we are holding the EDEN conference on elearning and distance education. It is day two of the conference and I am sat in the morning plenary session to listen to the four keynote speeches. More of this later....but first:

Last night several of us stayed out until the small hours to sample the atmosphere in the middle of the mayhem, mania and madness that is the Feast of San Antonio. Parades, concerts and general merry making in the streets of the city are the norm and no-one is allowed to be unhappy. We arrived via the metro, which was our first mistake, as the entire platform and the metro train itself were a seething mass of humanity. (Hand on your wallet, avoid the elbows, and try to keep standing upright – if you start falling over during the sudden stops, you are finished). I admit I felt a little like the proverbial Portuguese sardines, with far too many people crammed into too small a space, yet in a strange kind of way, it was fun.

We finally managed to reach the centre of old Lisbon and took the funicular up to the Bairro Alto, where all the best cafes and bars are situated. The aromas that assail the nostrils in the pleasantly warm evening air of Lisbon have to be experienced. Every step it seems brings new ones, charcoal burners, roasting meat, the scent of the flowers in the trees, and even some less savoury ones – all add to the ambience of this beautiful and captivating city. Walking through the back streets, you also see the less palatable character of Lisbon. I was approached by a rather unsavoury looking character who half whispered ‘Cocaine?’ ‘I’m sorry,’ I replied, ‘I don’t have any to sell you...’ He looked a little bemused to say the least.

The restaurant was excellent with a choice of several kinds of exotic sounding fish and meat dishes. I have now sampled swordfish, calamari and monkfish and am now looking forward to trying out some of the dishes I can’t even begin to pronounce. The service was excellent also, but the company at first was a little subdued, and for good reason. We had three Germans in our party you see, and we had just sat cringing in a riverside bar to witness their soccer team being defeated by the Croatian team, who until yesterday could best be described as ‘minnows’ in the Euro 2008 competition. My German buddies put on a brave face, and I tried to encourage them by saying that the Croatians had actually put the English team out of the qualifying round, so were probably stronger than we thought. At least the German team were actually playing I said. I don’t think it worked. They cheered up significantly when the wine arrived however, and a jolly good time was had by all.

Finally arriving back at my hotel at stupid o’clock, my pillow was a very welcome sight, I can tell you.

Blogging mad

We are blogging like mad things here at the EDEN conference in Lisbon. It's one of the best e-learning conferences in Europe, and we have around 550 delegates here from all over the world. It is certainly the place to catch up with all the bright minds in e-learning, as well as rubbing shoulders with some of the great and good. There are somewhere in the region of a dozen official EDEN bloggers who will document the proceedings online, and the first posts are already up on the official blog. So it's official then....

Any way, watch this space and we will keep you informed of the conference proceedings as they happen, with some nice pictures to capture the scenes and keep you entertained. Mirjam Hauck (Open University of the UK) has done a stirling job getting us all together, and keeping us in line. Must be like herding cats.

Above is a nice picture of us having a meal out last night in the Bairro Alto area in central Lisbon. Mirjam is on the right, and also pictured are some Dutch and German delegates. The picture was taken by a sudden waiter...

Trail blazers

The EDEN Conference in Lisbon this year runs like a Who’s Who in of Distance Education and so it should. EDEN is one of the largest of its kind and everyone seems to flock here each year to rub shoulders with the good and the great. OK, so I’m waxing a little lyrical, but last night I had conversations with some long serving distance educators and what many would consider pioneers in the field, and it is a little humbling to think how much they did to lay the foundations of what has become a huge global force in education.

Tony Bates is here, and tells me he celebrates 70 years on this planet next year. Michael Moore is here, taking a sabbatical in the UK this coming autumn, before his final year at Penn State. I met them both for the first time at a conference in Turkey in 1997, and didn’t know who either of them were. I do now. Got their books, collected the handshakes.

Desmond Keegan is on the list of delegates and so is Torstein Rekkedal, who picked up a Senior EDEN Fellow award at the reception event. Alan Tait presides over the EDEN family in his perpetually genial mode. I also met Lani Gunawardena for the first time, over from New Mexico to take part, and look forward to hearing her keynote address later this week. There are others here who would probably love to be mentioned in the same blog as these uber-professionals. But I won’t. There is a subtle shuffling for position from some of the younger pretenders, but the simple fact is, most of the above people were in distance education before it was called distance education, and most of them grappled with connecting remote learners when there was little to choose from but correspondence courses and audio conferencing.

With the advent of Web 2.0, mobile phones and wireless technologies, their theories and exploits may seem a little dusty and out of date. But make no mistake, without their dedication and prescience, we would not be in the healthy position we are in now with virtual universities, e-learning and any-time, any-where education. So raise a glass to the trail blazers of distance education. I’m glad I met them. Oh, and the picture above is one I took over the parapet at St George's Castle yesterday. It's a view across the north of the city. Wish you were here?

EDEN on the Tagus

This year's EDEN (European Distance and Elearning Network) conference looks like being a real blast. It will be in Lisbon, Portugal, in the middle of June. Last week, I was informed that my paper had been accepted (I will be talking about blogs, would you believe?) and so this week I booked my hotel. Today the message below was sent from EDEN to all delegates, and it looks very appetising...

"The Conference Dinner online booking will open on 13 May. You can reserve places for this special event by using the above booking link and completing the form. The dinner will be held on 13 June, Lisbon's celebratory day of St. Antonio, as well as the date when our host Universidade Aberta will be 20 years old. On this truly festive occasion, the magnificent Estufa Real Restaurant will offer a rich, typical dinner with Portuguese dishes, drinks and Fado music in the heart of the 18th century Ajuda Botanical Gardens, overlooking the Tagus river".

Hope to see as many of you as possible at EDEN this year. Comment in the box below if you are attending!

Dark clouds and peanut butter sandwiches

Well, it´s the final day of the ICL conference here in Villach, Austria. It´s clouding over again, and there is a rumour of rain. It pelted down last night, and I was glad that all the events, including the splendid conference dinner (sponsored by the Mayor of Villach, who failed to appear) were located in the same silubrious venue of the Congress Centre and Holiday Inn Complex. They certainly know how to treat you well here - the staff are superb, helpful and friendly, and the rooms are soooooo luxurious.

There are delegates from over 45 countries represented here, and many are milling around the wireless zone, or sitting tapping away at their laptops as I write this blog. Much of the conference content has been highly technical, which pleases the physicists and hard science bods who are much in evidence, but irrates the hell out of people like me. A lot of it goes over old ground I´m afraid to say. I have overheard comments such as ´where are the students in all this?´and ´what about the learning?´ I won´t bore you with some of the titles, as they certainly bore me.... and for me at least, dark clouds are gathering over the conference as it draws to a close. However, here are some of the more interesting titles which I have either sat in on, or plan to sit in on, during this final day: Towards an architecture of participation, The impact of graphics on wiki use, The human side of e-learning, and one to really get your teeth into ... Make a free wiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich!

Overall, as with many conferences of this nature, there seems to be a shortfall in quality and innovation within the presentations. I´m not disappointed though... I have made several new contacts with some excellent people. It´s been a great networking experience.

Finally, there is one particularly Teutonic title: ´Make engineering students collaborate!´ We leave tomorrow morning at the ungodly hour of 0600 to catch our train back down to Ljubjlana and thence outwards to Stansted via the big white and orange bird. More reflections later when I have had time to reflect...