In reviewing my thesis, it strikes me that any aims of research I discuss should be those of the future, rather than past work. In looking backwards, we do get a better sense of where we can go, and it’s particularly important that research does move our understanding forward. The aims of my doctoral research were very specific and focussed on getting the PhD, but my aims now are more broad and encompass a range of technologies in learning and a specific focus on adult learning. There are still parts of the aim from my thesis that are applicable, so I’ll build on them to elaborate where I can go from here. Read more of Aiming Research Forward
Posts Tagged ‘flexible learning’
To structure or not
This wiki course always gets me thinking. We have such a diversity of students that some thrown themselves almost bodily into working on the wiki, while others seem to be much slower to take up the challenge. This makes it a challenge for us to shape tutorials in a manner that benefits all students. How much structure do we put into computer sessions?
Currently, about one third of the students have started editing and, going by the level of interaction from some of them, are well and truly on the way to knowing what to do (ie creators of their own learning materials). The rest of the students may need to be lead more gently into the frames needed to engage in this kind of generative learning environment.
So, we’ve been discussing the mode of the presentation of information in the first tutorial and subsequent tutorials. I think the first tutorial will be the most structured. Basic wiki editing, setting up userpages, becoming familiar with the interface.
Subsequent tutorials will be more open and I think we will let students direct the activities. As the tutorial pages will be wiki pages, they can (hopefully) help to direct the activities to those things that they believe they need in order to achieve the outcomes arising from the objectives of the course.
Cool, eh?
Tags: flexible learning, technology, wikis
Flexible learning with wikis
I have to say, it seems we have some very keen students this semester. We got their wiki logins set up by about 3:30, notified them by 3:45 and the first one had logged in by 3:55. Nearly 10 % of them have already logged in and it’s only 2 hours later. I must say, I’m impressed. It bodes well for an interactive, and productive learning environment.
It’s exciting starting with a blank slate and having to develop the whole thing. We decided that the skills and experience of getting something like this up and running is an important part of managing technology. So we aim to give students a taste of empty and the ability to shape the community. I’m hopeful that eventually we will have the minimalist structure well enough thought out, that it will work with any group.
By minimalist structure, I mean the basic shape of what they need to do, the outlines of what we expect for assessment and the basic structure of the organisation of information. That structure is simply three headings: Technical, Social applications, and Business applications. There is room to add other headings if students feel the need. But I think those three cover a gamut of sins and allow students to explore mobile technologies in a safe and supportive learning environment.
Perhaps I should be writing this up for a paper for a conference. Serious thought needs to be done!
Tags: flexible learning, technology, wikis
Web2.0 and Learning
I’ve often wondered what the buzz is with Web2.0 and learning. It’s not like it’s something so new as to be worthy of some of the overly hyped notions of what we do. Sure, Web2.0 signalled a shift to a read/write platform from the read-only web, but we had interactivity before that and we just have more now and a reduction in navigation (clicks). Less navigation can only be good for learning as it gets you to the necessary information quickly with less likelihood of wandering off to something else or forgetting what you were looking for[1].
Take the latest ‘upgrade’ to Blackboard[2]. I keep hearing our Educational Designers spouting off about how Blackboard is now Web2.0. As I have just started using a pilot implementation of it, I’m already thinking that it’s not that big of a change. Sure, the new ‘Grade Center’ is an improvement and it seems a bit more interactive. It does take a little longer to load, but you get all the students in one screen rather than 25 to a screen – a significant improvement when you have classes around the 300 mark. I’ll hold off on judgement about that, till later in the semester.
Our content collection seems a little better and it does have ‘permanent URLs’ which seem more usable, if you can take the time to navigate to them, particularly if you want to link the content collection into the folder structure (not a thing that the designers contemplated, apparently). When that is simplified, I think I’ll be almost convinced.
So parts of the ‘new’ system are more interactive, others seem to be stuck in the read-only web. What I would really like to see in a ‘learning management system’ is a single screen for seeing everything and being able to change permissions, availability etc in a single space. But even with the ‘upgrade’, I still have to modify individual pieces of content which seems to be only minimally interactive and hardly ‘web2.0′.
This may be a part of what leads people to the EduPunk or Meddler stance – the need for an encompassing view rather than a piecemeal view, of seeing the environment rather than the building blocks[3]. There has been a lot of development in interactivity for learning, but the organisation of that interactivity still seems very separate from organising the content. Perhaps that’s one reason why wikis are becoming popular.
- This is why I stopped using (b)Lotus, it always took so long to find things, that I often forgot what I was doing or got sidetracked trying to get it to do what I wanted, but I digress. [↩]
- apparently to version 8 but, in reality only a minor update – 7.3 – 7.4 but renumbered due to ‘business’ reasons [↩]
- forest as well as trees? [↩]
Tags: EduPunk, flexible learning, technology
Wiki Pedagogy in colour
So hot on the heals of the whole EduPunk rethunking, and to elaborate for our wiki paper, Luke suggested a diagram of what wiki pedagogy was in our course. So I’ve put together a first draft trying to demonstrate how things interconnect in our wiki teaching. There are a number of things that we do slightly differently from other work that I’ve seen.
I think the significant thing that we do differently is start with an empty wiki. Okay, it’s not completely empty, but we only have the core course information in the wiki at day one. We are developing a set of tutorials very similar to those found in WikiEducator, but modified for TikiWiki.
This means that students have to start the work. The idea is to get them thinking about how community development is facilitated by technology. They must not only create the course ‘text book’, but they create the community of students who develop this. I figure that this is an experience that is important — getting things off the ground without any assumption that things are already going, which I sense is a key thing for established LMS. Everything is already there for the beginning of semester and all the students have to do is absorb.
But not in this course. There is very little information about the content of the course. There is some structure, and we’re getting better at putting this in place to guide students, but there really isn’t much.
Wiki Pedagogy in Colour (Click for larger version)
The diagram shows some of the things that I think are important in the wiki course. The Pedagogy is based on ideas about community of practice ideas[1], bringing novices from the peripheries to the centre, providing some pathways for developing knowledge and for developing collaborative workstyles. There’s also a theme of ‘students as designers’[2]. This is in contrast with developing group work practices, because while they are all working together, they are all working separately, so they are really only responsible for their own output, but can build upon the work of others, comment, critique and interact, but not depend on others.
In the diagram, all the tools in the Wiki Learning environment (well, most of them) are listed. There are really two kinds of tools, which I’ve labeled knowledge production and collaborative. The knowledge production are generally where thoughts and learnings come together. These features generally allow the display of developing knowledge and includes images, pages and blogs. There is generally space to develop an idea in words and pictures. This is where we assess the more traditional demonstrations of knowledge.
Collaborative features are those that let students engage with one another. There are comments (and this should probably include the forums, but these tend not to get used too much), private messages (where students send a message to one or more — kind of like email in the wiki) and the shoutbox which is like a open messaging system where a single message can be sent to all participants. The students kind of like that because the shoutbox appears on every page, and quite often someone responds to them in the shoutbox. It’s like a multi-threaded public conversation in short bursts. Very twitterish, now that I think about it.
Essentially, students commence the course at the periphery and sometimes on the edges of the community. Most of them are not well established in the field as we are almost presenting a new area (mobile workforce technologies). We have IT students, marketing students, MBA students, We see many of them move into the community of practice through active engagement with knowledge formation processes. The CoP surrounds the wiki tools in the wiki learning environment. There is an embeddednes about the whole structure. Everything happens in the wiki (with the exception of providing students with their passwords which we do through the gradebook of Blackboard.)
All of these features allow students to actively reflect on the processes of knowledge development and construction and maintain their activities in a single space. It’s a whole environment wrapped up in free software. You can’t get much better than that.
- Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. [↩]
- Kimber, K and Wyatt-Smith, C, (2006). Using and creating knowledge with new technologies: a case for students-as-designers, Learning, Media and Technology, 31 (1): 19–34 [↩]
Tags: flexible learning, mwt, pages, wikis