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.

Reusable cooking objects

Recently a lot of emphasis has been placed on sustainability. Sustainable this, sustainable that. Here at the University of Plymouth we had a CETL - a Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning - dedicated to Sustainable Futures. We have also seen a movement toward 'reusable learning objects' (For many teachers, sustainable education might simply be about actually keeping students interested for a full hour). I guess it's not simply about being 'green' or environmentally conscious. It's also about minimising effort of the creation of learning resources, and adapting existing content into new contexts or for new groups of learners. It's about sharing. It's about common sense. I just don't know why we had to invent a name for it.

I was fascinated last year, while walking around the huge sprawling open market of Serekunda in the Gambia, to see a huge 'cottage industry' dedicated to recycling old aluminium, tin and other metals into really useful objects. The picture above shows some of the products of this labour - salvaged aluminium from old cars, refrigerators, cola cans and other household goods that have lost their inherent value. We walked into one of the market stalls, and out through the back into a yard which resembled Dante's inferno. Everywhere we looked there were smelting furnaces, and all around in the smoke, people were melting down metal and remoulding it into useful cooking utensils. The picture below shows a guy fabricating a cooking pot. Got me thinking about education.

How much content do we actually waste, and how often do we 'reinvent the wheel'? I remember a few years ago having 14 cohorts of students, all studying the same content. I simply set up a wiki and populated it with a set of learning activities. I then replicated the wiki 13 times more and let it loose. The result was that the students were each contained in their own little groups, studying the same materials but enjoying small group conversations that were unique and relevant to their own cohort. It didn't take long to do once the first wiki had been established, and in a sense, I re-used the same content over a dozen times. It should only be a small step from there to reusing other people's content. But it's actually a huge step, because many teachers want to protect their own intellectual property and are not willing to share their ideas or content with others. The Creative Commons movement is going some way to challenging this mindset, and we are also seeing the rise of open scholarship, where teachers and academics are willing not only share their content, but also to open themselves up to constructive criticism from their peers on the web. I share all my slideshows and papers on Slideshare for free, and only ask for acknowledgement. (Go on, click on the link and help yourself. You know you want to).

After witnessing the collective actions and sharing culture that exist among the poor people of the Gambia and realising that they are compelled to take this approach simply to survive, I am even more determined to share my own content and encourage others to do the same. Seeing how the people of Gambia use everything and throw nothing away makes me very conscious about our own wasteful consumer society and how selfish I can be with my own 'property'. Reusable learning objects....It makes a lot of sense to me now.


Click here for more pictures of Gambia.


Reusable cooking objects by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Creative destruction

Anyone who has tried the Towers of Hanoi puzzle will know that it looks simple, but can be extremely complex to complete within the minimum number of moves. It drives some people mad. You can try it online here, but which ever way you do the puzzle it takes time and patience. It's not so much the amount of moves needed to complete the puzzle. It is the counter-intuition that often baffles. To complete the Towers of Hanoi problem, you must first build and then destroy what you have built to reach your target.

Using wikis for collaborative writing is a little like solving the Towers of Hanoi puzzle. When two or more people work on the same wiki page, there is often a lot of deletion, modification and overwriting - a kind of destructive creativity - that goes on as the content is refined and polished. From my recent research I found that many students don't like the idea of their content being deleted or modified. They feel a sense of ownership for what they have created. Some of them want sole credit. Or it is simply too strange for them to accept. And yet wikis, as community spaces, are by their nature, a 'free for all'. The polishing and refining process is something that students do all the time when they are completing an essay. So why do they falter when faced with community editing? Perhaps they feel they have lost some control. Or perhaps it seems illogical to delete content to make it better. Similarly to the Towers of Hanoi, content management on a wiki can appear to be counter intuitive - but to create, sometimes you must first destroy. To build you may need to dismantle first.


Image source by Kenjiys


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

Light the blue touch paper...

Should teachers try to create order from chaos? Or should we try to achieve the opposite - turning order into chaos? Let me explain. The human mind naturally and subconsciously seeks order, pattern, closure - the Gestalt psychology experiments of Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Kohler from the previous century has established that. We are oh so comfortable with order and predictability. We know what is coming next, we can control it, and it doesn't tax our minds that much. But for today's schools and universities, where we should be trying to 'draw out from within', surely order and predictability run counter to creative learning and self-driven critical enquiry. Shouldn't we be taking learners outside their comfort zones? For far too long, schools have been providing learners with definitive answers to sterile questions, and there is usually only one answer. Yet we can do so much more by encouraging students to question for themselves. We would see a great deal more evidence of critical thinking if we taught students to question more and answer less. One of my colleagues once said that he preferred to send his students out of the classroom confused. That way, they would be more likely to resolve their own cognitive dissonance by going off and doing some personal research to see if they could resolve their own confusion.

So should be try to achieve chaos from order? Should we attempt to subvert the ordered, linear curricula that we are commanded and expected to deliver? Should teachers try to create uncertain, and dare I say it - dangerous - environments within which students can question and argue? Do we need anarchy in the school system? Sugata Mitra, who is famous for his Hole in the Wall experiments, believes in what he calls minimally invasive education, where students can use tools to find out for themselves. He argues that all the answers are already there on the web for learners to discover for themselves. The new roles of teachers are to ask timely and relevant questions - searching ones that will stretch students and cause them to research for themselves. For a long time problem based learning has been a mainstay of the training of medical students. Present the students with a problem, and they will need to find a solution to resolve the dissonance. Along with many others, I have taken this a step farther by presenting my students with ill-structured problems. These are problems that have very few parameters and very little information. Students are forced to 'fill in the gaps' usually drawing on previous knowledge, before they can find their own personal solutions to the problem. Moreover, there are many possible solutions to ill-structured problems.

Such problem based learning takes a little time, and with the addition of a shared discussion space, develops over time, but the understanding of the topic is ultimately far deeper than if students were served up the answers on a plate. Maurice Holt provides an excellent argument for 'slower education' in his blog post Fresh Thinking about Schooling, and I quote:

"Since education is essentially about equipping our children with the ability to act responsibly in a complex society, the idea of a Slow School follows very readily from the metaphor of Slow. It brings to mind an institution where students have time to discuss, argue, and reflect upon knowledge and ideas, and so come to understand themselves and the culture they will inherit."

Much of the power of setting ill-structured problems for students is that they can post their solutions (and the reasoning behind them) onto shared online spaces such as wikis, where they will then have the task to defend their solution against criticism from the rest of the group. Students also have licence to attack the solutions of their peers. Learners need to think on their feet against all comers, and of course they learn by synthesising the best elements from other people's solutions. So, light the blue touch paper, stand back, and let the chaos commence....

Image source by Christopher Hubenthal


Light the blue touch paper... 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.

Image source


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

Wikis in eLearning 2.0

The latest issue of the journal Interactive Learning Environments is a special issue entitled: Towards eLearning 2.0 University, and is guest edited by Adriana Berlanga, Francisco Garcia Penalvo and Peter Sloep. When I first saw this proposal I was immediately enthusiastic and it didn't take long for Joe Psotka (my co-editor) and I, to commission it. Now the three have brought the issue to fruition, and an excellent one it is, exactly as I anticipated. The seven papers and editorial focus on how Web 2.0 social media can, and are being used to enhance, extend and enrich learning in higher education. It's dedicated to the question of how universities are integrating social media into academic practice, with the aim to foster eLearning 2.0 - where the student is placed at the centre of a more social, personal and flexible learning process. I'm impressed by the scope and scale of the projects in this issue.

The first paper, by Lim et al, focuses on new digital literacies and asks whether social practices are lagging behind expectations. There follows an erudite explanation of socio-techno-spatial relationships, where learners shift their dependence away from their tutors to their peers, and where teachers in turn have to learn new pedagogical practices to keep up with the changes taking place.

Another stand out paper in the issue is an exploration by Karasavvides of the use of wikis in higher education, and the attendant barriers and difficulties that need to be overcome for full acceptance and embedding into the learning process. The author identifies seven types of problems from a recent wiki study, including time management, student resistance, plagiarism and lack of collaboration.

Similar findings are presented by Huang and Nakazawa in their paper entitled: An empirical analysis on how learners interact in wiki in a graduate level online course. The study investigated how learners initiate and manage learning activities in wiki environments, and predictably, discovered a significant qualitative difference between learner-learner and learner-tutor interactions. Students clearly interacted more with their peers, leading to speculation on what role tutors should adopt in such learning environments. Students also encountered the problem of losing momentum because they could perceive no actual ending point to their assignment. The authors call for further research to be conducted into that quality of interaction within wiki type learning environments.

More from this issue tomorrow.


Wikis in eLearning 2.0 by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

New wine in old bottles

I'm speaking at ALT-C this week in a symposium called 'New Bottles, Old Wine?' which will take the form of a debate over the ethics of research and intervention in Web 2.0 environments. I'm going to argue that it is in fact new wine in old bottles we need to concern ourselves with. Let me explain...

I'm going to argue that using, and researching the use of Web 2.0 tools is a difficult prospect to try to work through with many grey areas. There are a number of reasons. I'm going to raise a few issues: For example, users do not always behave consistently in different contexts. Students change their identities as they move from site to site, and the student behave differently depending on the communities within which they are members. Facebookers for example, generally use their real names and images. Flickrites on the other hand are often anonymised, using psuedonyms and images to represent themselves. It is often the same person, but they represent themselves differently. Is being a member of so many virtual clans confusing? Do they perceive themselves as acting differently in different environments, or simply complying with different digital sub-cultures? Such shifting digital identities can be subtle, but with the result that researchers have a problem trying ascertain whether students are presenting themselves truthfully online.

Another issue is whether participants modify their behaviour when they know they are being watched. In conventional research environments, we know this happens. Do such demand characteristics alter the results of Web 2.0 studies? That behaviour has a persistence in online environments. It's not as though the research has observed it once and then it's gone. It's there, archived for all to see and keep coming back to. Do we need a new set of methods to cut through these issues, or is it new wine in old bottles?

Another ethical issue is where students who are creating their own content may wish to keep that content to themselves. When placed within a shared, collaborative environment, such as a wiki, some students may not wish to have their work subsumed into a larger corpus of work. I have published several of my own papers on this topic. Students in my sample groups reported that they wanted to be awarded credit for the work they had done. They argued that they didn't want their work deleted, diluted, extended or otherwise modified by other students. Is it therefore fair to ask them to participate in any study involving openly editable websites, where collaboration was mandatory? Do researchers offer participants in such scenarios the right to withdraw without penalty?

Another ethical problem arises when researchers 'eavesdrop' on Web 2.0 users. In such situations, should researchers have total access to all a user's content? Should they see all a student's Facebook photos for example? Or have access to all their discussion posts, private messages etc? If they don't have access, can a full picture of life online be obtained? When students sign up for this kind of research, are they fully apprised about what they are letting themselves in for? A comment from a recent conference in Spain was about a camera that had been set up to capture and live stream a keynote speech. The camera was open for a long time before the speech began, picking up off the cuff remarks, and broadcasting on the web as the speaker set up his slides. One viewer remarked that they felt a little like a 'voyeur'. How does this kind of event amplification reconcile itself with ethical research? Upon whom is the onus for the maintenance of correct ethical behaviour in such cases? And if it's not research, is it still covered by ethical protocols?

Finally, I want to raise the issue of Twitter as a conference amplification tool and back channel. The tweckling or harsh tagging of keynote speakers has been discussed previously by a number of commentators. My blogpost Weapons of Mass Detraction cited some notable cases where the wisdom of crowds can very quickly descend to the stupidity of mobs, if a few harsh remarks are allowed to take hold. Before they know it, conference organisers have a car crash keynote on their hands. Again, are there any ethical guidelines for this kind of eventuality? It's a new problem, so again, I ask - is it new wine in old bottles? Do the new environments require new guidance, or are the old protocols sufficient?


New wine in old bottles by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Web 2.0 based e-learning

I'm in the business of teacher education, and I am interested in using the latest technologies to support their learning. A few years ago, I began to use wikis as embedded module tools to encourage and support collaborative learning. Generally it was a success, but the approach also raised some interesting pedagogical questions and posed some operational challenges for my students and I. So I wrote about it. Several articles on my use of wikis have been published over the last 2 years, most recently in journals and book chapters. The final article in the series was published yesterday in a new volume edited by Mark W. Lee and Catherine McLoughlin. The book is entitled: Web 2.0 Based E-Learning, is about various Web 2.0 contexts in tertiary education, and is published by IGI Global, so it will be expensive. But if you can beg, steal (try not to) or borrow a copy, you will find chapters by not only me, but also from several old friends of mine, including Tony Bates, Thomas Ryberg, Denise Whitelock, Gráinne Conole, Henk Eijkman and Palitha Edirisingha.

Below is the abstract of my chapter, which has the title: Using Wikis in Teacher Education: Student-Generated Content as Support in Professional Learning

This chapter reports on the use of online open content software as a learning resource for students enrolled in an initial teacher-training program at a British university. It features a study undertaken to support the development of professional practice in teacher education for undergraduate and postgraduate students using wikis. The 14 cohorts of student teachers in the program (n = 237) approached the activities in blended format, using a wiki as both a repository to store and retrieve their work, and as a discussion space where they could engage in dialogue with their peers and tutors outside of the classroom. Those who responded to the online questionnaire reported on their perceptions of the wiki as a learning environment. The main findings of the study are that students generated a large amount of content in a short space of time using the wiki and enjoyed its collaboration and communication tools, but resented the added time burden of having to complete minimum core tasks online. Students also found initial use of the wiki problematic due to lack of familiarity with the tools and the concept of group editing. The introduction of a series of wiki activities provided useful scaffolding for structured support in professional learning.

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Web 2.0 based e-learning by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Going geographical

I remember a quote from Ed Horowitz: 'if you are not on the Internet, you are history'. I had an answer: 'If you are on the Internet, you are geography.' I was playing with words, but a message emerged from it - we can connect with others from all over the world using social media, and if you build it, they will come. The number of visits to this blog has risen dramatically over the last year or so. The month of July saw more than 10,000 visits. See what I mean? I've gone geographical.

Now it all comes home to roost. On September 2, I will be keynoting the Innovative Learning Spaces session track for the Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference in London. I'm very pleased to have been invited, because although I am not a geographer, geography was always one of my favourite topics in school, and is a social science to which I have great affinity. I keep dozens of back copies of the National Geographic journal at home and I'm an avid viewer of the National Geographic channel. I used to love reading about intrepid explorers of the likes of David Livingstone, Mungo Park and Robert Falcon Scott. I'm grateful then to Professor Derek France (Chester University) for inviting me to speak at such a prestigious event and excited to be able to attend. Here are the title and abstract of my presentation:

New Spaces, New Pedagogies: Harnessing the Power of Social Media in Education

A rapid emergence of social media – the so called ‘Web 2.0’ – has opened up new opportunities for participatory learning in all sectors of education. Students now have the capability to create and share their own content through blogs, wikis, video- and photo-sharing services such as YouTube and Flickr. They can easily connect into and maintain contact with multiple communities of interest, gaining access to experts using social networking tools such as Myspace and Facebook. They can organise their own resources through free and easy to use tagging and social filtering tools. In this presentation I will argue that this rapid rise of user generated content is blurring boundaries between novice and expert, and challenging the traditional notions of knowledge, ownership, privacy and identity. In tandem with this, the proliferation of personal devices such as iPods and smart mobile phones is enabling students to move beyond the boundaries of the classroom into ‘any time, any place’ learning. In the light of these developments I shall explore new teacher roles, examine new learner expectations and explore some of the new learning territories that are emerging beyond the walls of the institution. I will offer some examples of how Web 2.0 tools have already been harnessed to support professional mentoring and to promote deeper engagement in learning through collaboration and reflection. I will discuss the concept of the personal learning environment and its potential to enrich student experiences. I shall speculate on the potential impact of emerging technologies such as augmented reality and touch screens and their potential in shaping the future of education.

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Going geographical 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.

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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Wise crowds (and stupid mobs)

I'm reading James Surowiecki's excellent book 'The Wisdom of Crowds' at the moment. I was particularly taken by his introduction in which he relates the story of Sir Francis Galton, and his discovery, against his own assumptions, that collective intelligence not only exists, it is generally correct in its judgements. Galton's experiment was based on a 'guess the weight of an ox' competition in which 800 people participated. His statistical analysis of the results showed that as a collective mean score, the people guessed accurately to within one pound of the actual weight. This discovery of the people's collective ability ('democracy' as he called it) to make decisions that are of the most benefit to the people, attracted me for a number of reasons. Firstly, Galton made his discovery in a farm show in Plymouth, England (my home town). Secondly, Galton was one of the UK's first psychologists (I trained as a psychologist too), and although I disagree profoundly with many of his ideas about intelligence, which led him to champion eugenics, I can't help but admire the way he trailblazed his ideas about human behaviour, forensic psychology and statistics long before other, more famous psychologists. Thirdly, his scientific integrity is inspirational. Against his own deep seated beliefs, and in opposition to his previous scientific studies, the results of his 'West of England' regional fare research showed that in fact, when a crowd is asked to make a decision, they usually get it right.

James Surowiecki goes on to argue that the principles behind this idea can explain everyday activities including the stock market, democratic voting processes, gambling and even the fact that when you go the a convenience store at 2 am for a carton of milk, there is one there waiting for you. The wisdom of crowds even explains the phenomenon of Web 2.0 and social networking tools, and specifically, as we have long understood, it defines why web services such as Wikipedia and Google Search have become so popular and accurate over the last few years. Surowiecki argues that in many cases, the judgements of larger diffuse crowds of people is actually more accurate than the decision making of smaller, more elite groups. I have clung to this ideal in the development of many of my recent teacher education programmes, into which I have incorporated collaborative and co-operative online tools such as wikis, so that students can create, share and negotiate their learning related content.

If you haven't read Surowiecki's book yet (it was first published in 2004), do try to get hold of it. You can purchase it quite cheaply on Amazon (another wisdom of crowds example) and I promise you, it is a very good read. It's also, dare I say it, an effective foil to Andrew Keen's book 'The Cult of the Amateur' which warns against the dangers of Wikipedia and similar web repositories, describes what I can loosely term as 'stupidity of mobs'. If anyone has read both books and cares to provide a valued judgement on them, the comments box below is ready for you...

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Learning with 'e's 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.

Social enzymes

Learning has rarely been a solo activity. I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I have learnt something significant without the help or influence of others (and counting on my fingers wasn't learnt without help, believe me). No, we are not isolated learners, but learn our most important lessons whilst in conversation with others. Conversation is of course often technologically mediated in this digital age. You and I no longer need to occupy the same location to converse. We can use text, audio or video in a number of modes and through a mind dazzling range of technologies. And there is a record - an archive - of our conversation if we want one.

This is how the current tools and services found on the Web are being used in so many new ways to connect, share and converse. Wikis, blogs, podcasts, social bookmarking, RSS feeds, microblogs, social networking... all are very powerful tools for people to use to make connections with each other... and to learn.

Formal learning is not the only type of learning possible, you see. More often, we are learning informally, while playing a massively multi-player online role playing game for example, or listening to a podcast about a news item. You are learning something new now by reading this blog post, and I learnt something new while I was writing it. We are aware of each other. When we search for an item on the web and get sidetracked down one or more other routes because they look more interesting... we are informally learning something new. When we eavesdrop on Twitter conversations, and simply 'lurk', we are learning informally. When we watch a YouTube video because several thousand people have already given it 5 stars .... we are learning informally. You may see this as serendipity - a kind of happy accident - and you may be right. Informal learning, more often than not, is unplanned. But that does not make it less worthwhile than formalised methods of learning.

The rhizomatic nature of Web 2.0 is making it easier for all of us to connect together, and to learn informally within a socially rich environment which is strewn liberally with the digital footprints of those who have gone before us. We are in effect, constructing our own informal learning pathways simply by following what others have done before - and here is the neatest trick. When we take what others have created (thanks to creative commons and a loosening of the grip or ownership and copyright) and we repurpose them for our own use, our own informal learning... we are creating new footprints for the next informal learner to follow. And on it goes. Informal learning and Web 2.0 need each other. They have synergy and we should not forget the social dimensions each relies upon for their success.

Andy Clark provides a very evocative metaphor when he talks about snail trails in his book 'Natural Born Cyborgs'. Clark shows that snails and slugs lay down slime trails that are rich in enzymes as they seek food sources. The second gastropod that follows the trail expends less energy and enzymes to reach the food, and so on until by the time the tenth snail slides down the pathway, the journey is almost effortless. In the same way, as we travel down digital pathways we leave a trail - perhaps a social bookmark, a Delicious tag, a Stumbled Upon note - which points the way for others to find your nugget of information. WE are in Michael Wesch's terms 'teaching the machine'. But we are also teaching each other. The more we lay down these pathways, the more we are building the community of practice that is Web 2.0.
Right. That's this blog post finished. I'm off now to lay down some social enzymes.

This article was first posted 11 January 2009

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'Social enzymes' by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Up Pompey

When I was a lot younger I was a guitarist in a rock band. We were touring in 1982, and one of our bookings took us to play in the main hall of Portsmouth Polytechnic. It was a time of great celebration in Portsmouth (known by sailors as Pompey), because the Falklands War had just ended, and all the naval warships were returning home. After the gig, the band went down onto the seafront for something to eat before the long trek home, and I decided I would try a doner kebab for the first time. So there we were sitting in the back of our Transit Van, perched on the speakers and amplifiers, chomping away in the dark. I wasn't aware that there were any rules to eating doner kebabs, so I just chewed away at the pitta bread. Suddenly I was aware of a burning sensation. In the dark, I found a pile of steaming hot meat, coleslaw and chilli sauce in my lap. I had eaten away the underside of the pitta bread, and it had all dropped out.

Look, it's no laughing matter. It could have been fatal - the lethally hot chilli sauce could have eaten right through the denim of my jeans and caused untold damage to my future prospects. Driving home from Portsmouth to Plymouth covered in grease and chilli sauce was extremely uncomfortable. Time has moved on. Portsmouth Polytechnic is now the University of Portsmouth, and I still play the guitar, but I now try to steer clear of eating doner kebabs, particularly in the dark in the back of a transit van.

I'm back in Portsmouth this week as an invited speaker at the university. I will be hooking up with old pals Emma Duke-Williams (world famous in Portsmouth for her portrait of me as 'multi-me') and Manish Malik (with whom I have just written a paper on Cloud Learning Environments). Remember 'Wisdom of Clouds'? - Manish wrote that as a guest blogpost. I will be speaking on the topic of 'Learning 2.0: Web 2.0 Tools in Education', which will essentially take the form of a workshop and seminar. The session will take place on Wednesday 31st between 15.00-16.30. There will be some games and exercises for people to do, and some questions and answers time too. I hope to explore some of the possibilities and potential of tools such as blogs, wikis, microblogs and aggregators, and will also explore mashups, social tagging, and concepts such as 'wisdom of crowds' and folksonomies. I'm going to try to place all of this in the context of higher education, student engagement and communities of practice. It will be a tall order, I'm sure, but I'm confident it will be OK. After all, I have survived a direct hit from a doner kebab, and that's serious stuff.

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In theory...

Intuitive teachers generally have a reasonable understanding of the processes of learning and how humans acquire knowledge and skills. Any teacher training course worth its salt has a significant element of learning theory within its programme. Teachers who seek excellence should aspire to understanding how learning experiences can be optimised to promote good learning outcomes. There are many who are expert in learning and teaching though, who have scant appreciation that in technology mediated learning environments, things can be very different. A lot of teachers do have a working knowledge of how electronic media can be used to support learning, but how many know when to use them and how to optimise their effects?

There are many established theories and models we could use to explain learning and a few specialised theories about how learning can be enhanced and extended through electronic media. But many are theories that were relevant to education in the last century. Time has moved us on. We need to go further than a mere exploration of established learning theories if we want to gain a better understanding of learning within various e-learning contexts. We need to get our hands dirty at the interface of e-learning to begin to understand some of the complexities. In online learning modes for example, some of the rules of traditional learning no longer apply, or are changed or extended. Some new phenomena will be encountered, which can cause teachers to throw their hands up in confusion, force them to modify their expectations and opinions of how students learn within electronic environments, or cause students to behave in ways that would not be possible or even acceptable in traditional settings. George Siemens and Stephen Downes present us with connectivism - in their own words, a 'theory for the digital age'. It's not what you know, Siemens argues, but who you know that's important. Others like Scott Wilson say that Personal Learning Environments are a counter proposition to the institutional content management system (VLE), while still others are theorising about what PLEs can possibly look like (me included). Then there are those such as Marc Prensky, Dave White and Mark Bullen who lock horns and argue whether today's learners are respectively, digital natives and immigrants, residents and visitors, or none of the above. I could go on.... there's a lot of new theory about and we need all of it.

My own teaching experience has led me to theorise why certain things happen. I have seen several things happen that are departures from traditional learning behaviours. Students who previously collaborated willingly on a single piece of work for example, may decide to be more protective of their ideas and work when it's placed in a shared online space such as a wiki. Some students lose all their inhibitions when they post content onto Facebook or Myspace. People who are quite vocal in traditional classroom situations may suddenly have a crisis of confidence in an online setting. Drop-out rates for distance education programmes are as high as 50% in some universities. And yet the literature suggests that there are no significant differences between traditional and online forms of learning. e-Pedagogy is not an easy field to understand, but it is on the increase, and we need new theories to help us understand.

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Lurking and loafing

Yesterday in Hitch-hiking across cyberspace I started discussing some issues around student engagement in collaborative online learning environments such as wikis and discussion groups. Today I want to explore some of the reasons why we believe some students don't pull their weight.

The reasons why people freeload were investigated in a series of experiments by Latane, Williams and Harkins (1979) who described the effects of what they termed 'social loafing'. Social loafing is recognised by many as the reverse of the old maxim 'many hands make light work'. In effect they suggest that the more people there are within a group, the less effort each will put into performing a given task. In one experiment participants were asked to clap their hands as if in applause. In another experiment, participants were required to cheer as loudly as they could. In each experiment observations were made on individual participants, pairs, groups of four, and groups of six. The observed effort in all cases dropped significantly as the size of the groups were increased. Latane et al surmised that each individual participant assumed that their own efforts would be less identifiable the larger the group they were in. Could a similar effect be observed in online discussion or wiki groups? And might there be an optimum number of students?

Online learners who 'lurk' during a discussion event, whether synchronous or asynchronous, could be said to be loafing. As with freeloading, lurking is frowned upon by students and instructors alike, and tends to be actively discouraged. Lurking is a term used to describe those students who access a discussion group or chat-room, but don't actively engage in the discussion. They are similar to the silent student who sits in the corner of the traditional classroom, observing but not contributing, or the participants in Latane et al's experiments who produced less effort as the group size grew. Often there are no complaints about such behaviour in conventional social settings so it is interesting to discover that there should be objections in online settings.

But putting to one side the moral and ethical objections to freeloading, we can raise an important question over the learning pay-off for both the contributors and the lurkers and freeloaders. Some discussion group members tend to 'stay quiet' and lurk, primarily because they are fearful of being criticised for what they have written (Pearson, 2000), whilst others may simply lurk because reflection is their learning style, and they would probably also stay quiet in a conventional classroom. For those who do participate, feelings of anonymity may encourage greater participation, and create more equal opportunities for contributions, with no interruptions from the more vocal members of the group (Pearson, 2000).

It is far from inevitable that larger groups will cause social loafing, say Harkins and Petty (1982). Through their studies they identified two methods to reduce the tendency to disengage, or put in less effort. The first method Harkins and Petty suggested was to increase the difficulty level of tasks and thereby make the task more challenging. Secondly, a differentiation of tasks within the group can improve individual performance. Asking each group member to perform a slightly different task will increase their perceptions of being 'back in the spotlight' and cause them to increase effort. These findings have obvious application to the e-learning context, where students can each be given a separate topic to comment upon, or different roles, such as a rotation of the responsibility to moderate a discussion forum, as well as an increasing cognitive element to gradually raise the level of difficulty in the discussion or online tasks.

Related posts

Why aren't they doing anything? (Dean Groom)

References

Harkins, S. G. and Petty, R. E. (1982) Effects of task difficulty and task uniqueness on social loafing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 43, 1214-1229.
Latane, B., Williams, K. and Harkins, S. G. (1979) Many hands make light the work: The causes and consequences of social loafing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 37, 822-832.
Pearson, J. (2000) Lurking, Anonymity and Participation in Computer Conferencing. In D. M. Watson and T. Downes (Eds.) Communications and Networking in Education: Learning in a Networked Society. London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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Hitch-Hiking across cyberspace

“This is your Captain speaking so stop what you're doing and pay attention. First of all I see from our instruments that we have a couple of hitchhikers aboard. Hello whoever you are. I just want to make it totally clear that you are not at all welcome. I worked hard to get where I am today and I didn't become captain of a Vogon constructor ship simply so I could turn it into a taxi service for a load of degenerate freeloaders. I have sent out a search party, and as soon as they find you I will put you off the ship. If you're very lucky I might read you some of my poetry first. ”

Douglas Adams: The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

I love Hitch-Hikers Guide, because it speaks to me on so many levels. I used the Vogon Captain monologue because it reminds me of some of the behaviours I see online when students work collaboratively. Or .... when they don't, and simply live off the back of other people's hard work. It is not hard to understand the reasons why some students get really hacked off when they work hard to contribute meaningful and considered contributions to a wiki or online discussion group only for others who haven't contributed to also take credit. That's sometimes the problem with group based collaborative work.

In some user groups and online circles, this practice is called 'freeloading' or free riding - essentially hitching a lift at the expense of others. In paper form, using someone else's ideas without their permission or without acknowledgement of the source is referred to as plagiarism. It's a practice that in education world we call 'academic dishonesty.' It's is generally frowned upon in academic circles and can be punished severely. Plagiarism is fairly clear cut, but freeloading on someone else's ideas in the virtual or online world is more difficult to detect. It's not quite the same as plagiarism, because students are not actually copying the work of others, they are taking the credit for it. Freeloading in a collaborative group is often hard to deal with, and although tools such as wikis have tracking devices to show who contributed what and when, many tutors do not have the time to go into these records to check.

Often though, the tutor doesn't need to do anything, particularly when the group decides to police itself. When the members of a group detect that someone is not 'pulling their own weight', they soon tend to get a little resentful. The same applies to virtual learning groups. The wiki is a great tool, but it has a lot to answer for. I have seen students fall out big-time over issues that involve ownership, lack of contributions or disagreements about who wrote what. It has even been known for some students to be ejected from a course for persistent episodes of freeloading (not by me I hasten to add - I tend to read them my poetry instead), in much the same spirit as the Vogon Constructor Ship Captain intended to be the fate of the two stowaways in the Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy. I want to continue along this road in tomorrow's post, talking about some of the psychological principles - the reasons some students try to hitch-hike across cyberspace.

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Very social software

A veritable feast of articles on social media is appearing in the academic press at the moment.

Two articles that have caught my eye deal with social software in education, and both have landed on my desk in the last few weeks.

If you're interested in the impact blogs, wikis and social networking can have on the social and cultural dimensions of education, then take a read of them. Below are the abstracts, references and links to both full papers.

Social Software: new opportunities for challenging social inequalities in learning? by Gwyneth Hughes

Enthusiasts for new social software do not always acknowledge that belonging to e-learning communities depends upon complex and often unresolved identity issues for learners. Drawing on the author's previous research on belonging in social learning, the paper presents a theory of identity congruence in social learning and brings to the foreground the importance of identities which arise from expressions of gender, class, ethnicity, age, etc. in the social, operational and, in particular, the knowledge-building aspects of learning. These three dimensions of identity congruence are used to evaluate the potential of new social software. While social software might encourage some learners to engage in social and operational identity work, there are disadvantages for others, and learner-generated knowledge and e-assessment practices can be divisive. Inclusive e-learning depends upon pedagogies and assessments which enable learners to shift and transform identities, and not solely on widening the range of technologies available. Such caution should underpin future research.

Keywords: social software; Web 2.0; inclusive; inequality; belonging; identity.

Reference: Hughes, G. (2009) Social software: new opportunities for challenging social inequalities in learning? Learning, Media and Technology, 34 (4), 291-306.

Culture, learning styles and Web 2.0, by Bolanle A. Olaniran

This article explores Web 2.0 in interactive learning environments. Specifically, the article examines Web 2.0 as an interactive learning platform that holds potential, but is also limited by learning styles and cultural value preferences. The article explores the issue of control from both teacher and learner perspectives, and in particular the cultural challenges that impact learner control. From the control perspective, the issue of access to Web 2.0 technologies from both cost affordability and government censorship is also addressed. Finally, the article concludes with implications and recommendations for Web 2.0 learning environments.

Keywords: Web 2.0; interactive learning; cultural preferences; learning styles; learner control.

Reference: Olaniran, B. A. (2009) Cuture, learning styles and Web 2.0, Interactive Learning Environments, 17 (4), 261-272.

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Never mind the quality, feel the width

Is Wikipedia dying a slow death? Will the one-stop shop for students soon draw its final breath?

These are the questions posed by the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones in his blog post 'Wikipedia on the wane?' His post was fomented by a recent report from a Spanish academic who claims that editors are leaving the online wiki based encyclopedia faster than new ones are joining. The study estimates that Wikipedia has lost 49,000 editors in just a few months. That's rather careless of them - just where did all those editors go? What are they doing now? And where were they the last time we saw them? They certainly aren't editing Wikipedia's pages anymore says the report. And it seems that the crisis has been caused by heavy handed tactics and beaurocracy which is offputting to those who wish to create new pages or make changes to existing entries. Love or hate Wikipedia, you have to admit it is a real phenomenon, with just about every subject under the sun covered, and high rankings for all pages in search engines. If you want depth of information, go to Encyclopaedia Brittanica. If you want breadth and width of topic coverage, it's Wikipedia you need. They are both fairly accurate, but when an error was detected in the past, Wikipedians moved in quickly to rectify it. But will that continue, or will the website fall into neglect and disrepair?

The report, which also features in the Wall Street Journal, shows that enthusiasm (which let's face it, was the reason for Wikipedia's early success) seems to be falling away. Cellan-Jones suggests that without the 'worker bees' nurturing the pages of Wikipedia, and dedicated armies of enthusiastic and knowledgeable editors maintaining the fine balance between opinion and fact, the online encyclopedia may fall into disrepute. It would be ironic indeed if this was the case, now that Wikipedia seems to be gaining respect with its recently introduced new quality measures.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel - visitors to Wikipedia are on the increase, and it looks as though the rumours of its demise are premature. The solution has to be that more users need to become contributors - which was after all, the original ethos of the wiki, wasn't it?

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