Using forums/blogs/wikis to facilitate learning: A summary

As usual for me, I'm breaking away from an existing train of thought in these posts for something different.

When you work with VLEs/LMSs you deal extensively with the text-based communication tools that exist in all systems.  The 3 biggies are the discussion/forum tool, the blog/journal tool and the wiki tool.  Explaining how each can be used to facilitate learning within learning activities is a key challenge for the Learning Technologist.  What's really important is that you articulate clearly the subtle differences between these tools and what their pedagogical affordances are. 

Here are my attempts to sum things up:

Discussion/forum tool

Use the asynchronous online discusssion tool for engaging students in a text-based dialogue:

• to facilitate a meaningful learning dialogue amongst students
• to develop students‘ written communication skills
• to allow time and space for tutors and students articulate clearly and thoughtfully when engaging in a dialogue
• to flexibly engage with students

Blog/journal tool

Use the blog/journal tool:

• to facilitate reflection amongst students
• to facilitate individual feedback from tutor to student through private journal/blog structures
• to develop students‘ written communication skills
• to allow time and space for students articulate clearly and thoughtfully when reflecting on their learning
• to flexibly engage with students

Wiki tool

Use the wiki tool for co-construct text:

• to facilitate collaboration amongst students the editing and refining of eachothers words within a group project context
• to facilitate co-operation amongst students through the allocation of tasks within a group project context
• to allow time and space for students articulate clearly and thoughtfully when writing on a particular topic

There's much more to it of course.  However, I'm trying to summarise here and give the key messages.  I welcome the views of others.

A VLE is like a gym membership - bought for show and used by a handful

Breaking off from my previous train of thought....

A VLE is like a gym membership - bought for show and only properly used by a handful of hardy souls.

For a few years now the Virtual Learning Environment is a must have for any self-respecting educational institution. For HEs, it's a behemoth of a walled garden where integration with registration and administrative systems takes more time and effort than the teaching and learning integration it's supposed to be about. The use is patchy at best. It's like a gym membership. Both are purchased with the best intentions. There is recognition that change is necessary for proper and fulfilling use. However, this recognition is tacit at best and romantic at worst. Realisation and readily to change the culture of your organisation or the way you live you life is often lacking. When the turmoil of such change comes into view the hard decisions are shied away from and the status quo continues with minor aberrations.

This metaphor just about works, but what's the point of it. It's useful to think about how HE is approaching the use of learning technologies. Where this metaphor is useful is that it highlights how institutions like to play up their use of technology without really understanding or intending to enact the changes necessary to realise what they say is happening or will happen.

Acquisition or Participation

Also published on the Educational Technology and Change Journal

When you think about the various options for using technology in teaching and learning there is a stark contrast between those that come from the Web 2.0 movement which are often free/easy to use; and those that come from the commercial software companies - expensive and often cumbersome. Overall, you can also draw a pedagogical dividing line between these two areas - acquisition or participation.

Acquisition is all about preserving what we have, transmitting the knowledge in the way we have done in formal education. I'm talking here about web conferencing system, Learner Management Systems (I mean the core products not the added on interactive stuff), Lecture capture systems. They are complex, bandwidth heavy and are usually accompanied by a manual or require expensive training and support.

Participation is about... well participation, collaboration, knowledge construction, all that stuff. The tools to achieve these are usually stand-alone, free, easy to use, graphically impressive, and have build in communities of support to draw on.

I wonder why this is. Perhaps it's because commercial companies know they can make money from building a product that fulfills what the customer wants rather than what some people think they should want; it might be that it's more natural to make a tool about communication and collaboration online than it is to build something that is all about preserving the face-to-face lecture, it's certainly easier.

Whatever the reason, it feels from where I'm sitting that acquisition stuff is made the priority. No matter what it costs we want technologies to preserve what we do already. Ok, there is all this collaborative stuff but we can think about later once I get my head around this LMS control panel!

I'm simplifying things of course. The divide isn't that stark and in reality you need a combination of both. What's interesting is that if ever we want evidence for the dominant pedagogical model we only need to look at how we are using technology. Despite all the affordances for collaboration and communication it's the transmission we want it for.

Communicate not Broadcast

This is going to be my new mantra. Following on from my previous post, this is my message to staff in my place of work - the Institute of Education, University of London. I want colleagues to see the VLE as a place to communicate and not broadcast. Or communicate as well as broadcast. If you don't like the communication tools within our VLE, I can help you look elsewhere. But all this follows from the principle of wanting to communicate with your students and not just disseminate information.

I think this applies across education, and indeed businesses. This may be different way of approaching things to my normal "use the learning tools as part of your learning design" but it amounts to the same thing and it might be more successful.

Anyway, now to practice what I preach.

Mapping Web 2.0 tools onto Higher Education

I wanted to post something that got back to the purpose of this blog - my learning experience. So I thought I'd reflect on what happened last week and how my thinking moved on. Here at the Institute of Education (an HE college in the UK) academic individuals are more inclined to seek my help than previously. Mostly this is to do with increasing financial pressures which mean that distance learning is a logical way to tap into overseas and long distance markets. I think this is true of HE everywhere. So what I need to do is make sure that what I say to them is at the right level and steer them in the right direction with the result being good quality use of learning technologies. If we end up offering something substandard then it's better not to do anything at all.

Broadly, I want to give educators the understand of the pedagogical values behind any particular tool and the skills to use it. My first thoughts were to present to colleagues my vision of Web 2.0 and hope they could interpret this and map onto their own learning design. I created a voicethread on the subject and a prezi which give some examples of tools that fits within these categories and could be of use within education. I thought that this could be my opening move which gives the big picture from which I could then focus on different areas.

However, in presenting this to be few people, it became clear that I needed to simplify things. I need to speak the language of an HE academic trying to grapple with learning technologies. To do this, I need to stop focusing so much on Web 2.0 and its ethos and get straight to the tools themselves, mapping their use onto the practical consideration of a typical educator in my context. To this end, I created this prezi. Essentially, my previous concept maps were too big with too much information so I've simplified this. Also, people no longer have to understand Web 2.0 and its ethos at the same time as seeing a number of tool names to which they are unfamiliar. Instead, they just see the tools and which activity of their learning design it fits in with. So now there is only one layer of newness instead of two. The next step will be to create a voicethread to get some audio onto this and to start showing people the tools.

You will notice from the prezi that each category includes the relevant blackboard tools. What I'm not doing is getting educators to shun our VLE. However, if there's an outside tool that does a job that the VLE doesn't, or does it much better - we should be tapping into that. I'm not sure that this a majority viewpoint but it's certainly mine.

Personal Cyberinfrastructure

I read the article A Personal Cyberinfrastructure with interest. Gardner Campbell pulls no punches when he advocates for personal cyberinfrastrucure. He says:

"Suppose that when students matriculate, they are assigned their own web servers — not 1GB folders in the institution's web space but honest-to-goodness virtualized web servers of the kind available for $7.99 a month from a variety of hosting services."

The reasoning is:

"In building that personal cyberinfrastructure, students not only would acquire crucial technical skills for their digital lives but also would engage in work that provides richly teachable moments ranging from multimodal writing to information science, knowledge management, bibliographic instruction, and social networking. Fascinating and important innovations would emerge as students are able to shape their own cognition, learning, expression, and reflection in a digital age, in a digital medium. Students would frame, curate, share, and direct their own "engagement streams" throughout the learning environment."

There's so much here it's difficult to digest it all. However, the principle seems sound. Give the student real ownership and there can be real manifestation of personalised learning - a subject I reflected on in Personal Learning Environments - Concept not Tool. This is the kind of personal choice I was talking about but with the stability that education institutions crave. He continues:

"This vision goes beyond the "personal learning environment" in that it asks students to think about the web at the level of the server, with the tools and affordances that such an environment prompts and provides... These personal cyberinfrastructures will be visible, fractal-like, in the institutional cyberinfrastructures, and the network effects that arise recursively within that relationship will allow new learning and new connections to emerge as a natural part of individual and collaborative efforts."

This post is more quotation than reflection from me but I wanted to capture the essence of his ideas. The obvious question to arise from this is - are we ready for such a scenario? Clearly, it's no and I shudder at the idea of trying to sell this to the UK higher education world. However, I stiill love to be involved in an example of this nonetheless.

I might as well finish with some for quotation from this article. This time concerning the current LMS/VLE world:

"Higher education, which should be in the business of thinking the unthinkable, stood in line and bought its own version of the digital facelift. At the turn of the century, higher education looked in the mirror and, seeing its portals, its easy-to-use LMSs, and its "digital campuses," admired itself as sleek, youthful, attractive. But the mirror lied."

I include this to illustrate a particular frustration of mine. We think we are fully Web 2.0ed up, we think we are fully e-learning compliant. The truth is we are not. It's open to debate whether we should be or not (I say "yes") but don't think you've captured and are practising what it's all about when all you are doing is using VLEs as file repositories with token discussion boards! The 'we' here is UK Higher Education by the way. But I think you could extend it all education with confidence.

Web 2.0 tools in VLEs - Just not that good

I found this great slideshow.

Thanks David Hopkins for your post - Presentation: Moodle; an alternative to Blackboard for Web 2.0. (not that it's likely he will see this). The learning point for me is the around the question of using free standing Web 2.0 tools or a VLE with its own tools that could be characterised as Web 2.0. The slideshow stated, quite rightly, that an integrated tool offers less quality in terms of features but offers greater control and less risk.

The first to say is that, almost entirely, there is no choice for most higher educational institutions. They get a VLE - control and integration is a given. It's viewed mostly from a content viewpoint. Tools, web 2.0 or whatever, come secondary. I think if the learning opportunities presented by the tools were the priority there would be more consideration paid to the choice being discussed.

Moving on from that slightly depressed footnote, back to the issues of pure Web 2.0 and those integrated in VLEs. Here's the tension: Web 2.0, by definition, has a spirit of openness and sharing. VLEs are about control and walling the learning behind closed doors. You can take the mechanics of a tool like blogging, but walling it in away from the blogosphere changes its essence. The social side chopped off at the edge of the institution. This is far more of a difference that just having a few less features in the VLE version. By taking the social almost organic nature away from the concept it becomes an altogether inferior representation.

And what about the risk. Risk is always the first thing people think of - often becoming the reason for not using something. These risks are always overstated. But what is the risk in this context? I think this is what the slideshow is referring to is the risk of things breaking down or disappearing. Yes, this is true. Websites can shut down and you have no control over how they develop. However, this is rarely down without warning and there are always equivalent tools to use. Also, in the Web 2.0 world websites die for a reason - mostly because they just aren't that good. Moving to different version is probably a better option anyway. Certainly what you don't get is 90s looking interfaces and navigation that some VLEs possess (BLACKBOARD!!!!). In any case, costly VLEs with costly hosting have been known to fail. One of the ones I work on took a week off at the start of term a couple of years ago.

For any educational institutions, there's also the issue of ownership. A VLE is owned and not simply customised. A manifestation of the controlled, walled physical environment. So when I introduce an educator to a Web 2.0 tool outside the VLE, I'm chipping away at this notion. Well, I tell myself that anyway!

Web 2.0 tools and techniques

View more presentations from Mark Drechsler.

Blackboard reinforcing the Status Quo

Originally published on the Educational Technology and Change Journal

I discovered the article Insidious pedagogy: how course management systems impact teaching by Lisa M. Lane thanks to the WISE Pedagogy blog. It's one of those gems that you find every so often. And I'm going to do my usual quotes with comments blog posts to make sure I get the full reflection and learning benefit from it. The subject area is the implied pedagogy of standard LMS'/VLEs.

"Course management systems (CMSs), used throughout colleges and universities for presenting online or technology-enhanced classes, are not pedagogically neutral shells for course content. They influence pedagogy by presenting default formats designed to guide the instructor toward creating a course in a certain way. This is particularly true of integrated systems (such as Blackboard/WebCT)... Blackboard "tends to encourage a linear pathway through the content", and its default is to support easy uploading and text entry to achieve that goal."

I've always approached this from the opposite angle and said that VLEs are designed for the current education market rather than to improve or change in any way. So it's file repositories and grading books all the way. Remember, unlike Web 2.0, many of these VLEs are commercial products and in business you give the customer what they want and the customer doesn't want their pedagogy challenged. You also have to remember that a lot of the collaborative tools have been added on as VLEs react to what going on out in the real world. But when they are addons they don't really impact on the intrinsic design or structure. They could redesign as new versions come out - but they don't. Certainly, each new version of blackboard is so simliar to the last that it's almost indistinguishable. Maybe the consistency is important to them but it's a real missed opportunity. By the way, I'm quoting Lisa's use of CMS but I use LMS/VLE. I steer clear of CMS because it can get mixed up with Content Management System.

"a CMS must be designed around a central pedagogy: consistency of interface relies on consistency of approach. It is only important to recognize that the interface of any software reflects its intent."

I'd not thought about it in these terms before. Although I agree with this, I'm not sure that blackboard is designed with any particular pedagogy in mind. I think it's more a case of designing around the prevailing perception of what teaching is. Moodle is deliberately different. The collobarative tools are much more prominent and the grading system is rubbish, probably deliberately so (only joking).

Lisa then characterises most educators as "web novices". She says:

"These users were trying to reduce their cognitive load by limiting their use of the software, while Web experts were able to keep their goal in mind easily while searching more deeply."

And:

"When faced with a different interface or online environment, novices are inclined to utilize only the aspects they understand from a non-Web context."

It's a double-whammy. First, you have a majority who's personal ICT skills don't allow them to easily explore and experiment with the full range of what a VLE has to offer. Second, you have a majority who are content, if not happy, with the prevailing pedagogy of current teaching. Thus, there is no desire or compulsion to embrace/explore/experiment with software that challenges this. I also feel the knowledge of pedagogy within education is pretty limited but I don't base this on any hard facts. Anyway, both these issues are massive barriers to the adoption and use of Web 2.0 type tools . If you've read this blog before you'll know how sad that makes me.

Some more attacks on the blackboard functionality:

"Most professors think in terms of the semester, and how their pedagogical goals can be achieved wtithin the context of time, rather than space... Blackboard's default organization accepts neither of these approaches in its initial interface."

You can, of course, change this which is what I often advise my academics to do. But why have it like this? What it does is validate and reinforce the notion that content, course news and grading is all the VLE is good for. It's not for teaching or learning, but to get things from. It's a passive rather than active relationship, Web 1.0 not Web 2.0.

She continues:

"There is more satisfaction in mastering a few elements than in experimenting. Instructors move very slowly into features of the CMS that support less-instructivist models, and experience with the CMS over time does not necessarily lead to more creative pedagogy, or even to more expanive use of system features."

So we have a situation where educators struggle to get to grips with what a VLE can do AND they don't really want to anyway. That's not good.

Question from John Traxler - 'Education - Fit for purpose?'

John Traxler commented on my post from last Saturday Review of Traxler’s ‘Students and Mobile Devices’ and stated that the following question was his overriding concern for the article:

My over-riding question... is something like 'do the social changes associated with universal connectedness and mobility mean major aspects of the education system are bust and not 'fit-for-purpose'? or will technical/tactical fixes (maybe 'mobile learning' is one of these) and compromises continue to see us thro?'

It took a while for me to get my head around what this is asking, but once I did I could see that it was worth reflecting on. In essence, what John is asking is:

Does the social media/Web 2.o mean that the education system isn't 'fit for purpose?' Or can we compromise the protect what we have?

The short answer is YES. And we will compromise but in my utopia we shouldn't.

The first thing to consider is what has Web 2.0 taught us about learning? Most importantly, it's taught us that humans are SOCIAL. We are social beings, we want to communicate, share and network with eachother. It this wasn't true facebook and twitter wouldn't have exploded or we wouldn't keep inventing new and better ways to communicate with eachother. So what does this have to do with learning and changes to our educational system? I guess this has to do with how important you think these things are to learning. For me, communicating, sharing and networking are a fundamental of it. What Web 2.0 does it give this 'social learning' a massive outlet. An outlet that grows and develops all the time. Why not utilise this? By the way, I've deliberately stayed away from talking about pedagogy here. Partly because I'm no expert on this and partly because I try to keep things non-academic on this blog.

So to put this issue simply, the education system isn't social enough and, by using the social media (amongst other things), we should make it more so. All this threatens is the didactic, transmissive model of teaching which for many IS teaching.

Other things Web 2.0 has taught us? There's the whole area of formal vs informal learning which I'm going to link here to the issue of why have a physical entity that is the school or university. These areas are both challenging the notion that you can compartmentalise learning. That you can give learning a elite status that can only be accessed through formal educational institutions when and where they deam to convey it. This is just rubbish. Learning happen all the time, or it can do if you believe and recognise this. Web 2.0 allows us to believe and recognise this. It's been called 'informal' learning which is useful when you want to distinguish it from 'formal' learning but really it's just learning. Of course, you can and do learn in the specialise learning environment, but there is an artificial exclusiveness about it which programmes us the wrong way.

The final area I'm going to raise is the issue of personal choice. Personal choice doesn't exist much in the learning journey through education at the moment. Well it can now! The main reason here is the access to information, access to others to learn from has exploded through Web 2.o - OER, OET, social networking, blogging, micro-blogging etc.

So what about the compromise. I said that we will compromise but shouldn't. Iit's probably better to say dilute instead of compromise. This is because currently any tool adopted gets diluted as we seek to fit it neatly into what we have. By diluting, we lose the essence. For example, sticking a blog tool in an LMS closes it in and thus loses it's social, open nature. This cuts it off from the blogosphere which is the lifeblood of any blog (in my view). So why the compromise? It's because education is run by the educational institutions for the educational institutions. New ideas and tools are fine as long as they don't threatens their existence. In these circumstances they will, of course, defend their patch. You have to think about it in terms of what's most important - if it's the educational institutions then you dilute anything new to fit in what you've got; if it's the learners or the learning there interests come first. The best learning experience is debatable but it would be an easier debate if you took out the inhibiting factors of the rights and interests of the educational institutions.

Interestingly, what links the 3 areas I raised above is CONTROL. Educational institutions will resist them because they cannot control them. In some ways, current education is about control.

Anyway, these are some thoughts on this question which you could probably write a book about. If you have any comments on this, I'd be interested to hear them because there are lots of angles you could come at it from.

EdTechRoundUp30 - Learning Points

I recently discovered the EdTechRoundUp podcast. I'm trying to make a conscious effort to introduce podcasts of this kind into my learning. I'm often too tired to read when commuting and listening to a podcast while resting my eyes could work well - now that I have my iphone (hooray).

I've only listened to one and it was good quality. The only issue I have when I listen to a discussion like this is that it can be frustrated when the point you would make doesn't get made. Anyway, here is my learning.

"Teachers think VLEs are clunky" was centrepoint of a fairly long discussion. I think the clunkiness perception comes from the glimpses your average educator has had of social software where drag and drop is common and intuitive is the norm. Broadly, I agree that the perception is there and also that this perception is correct. In 2009, they do feel clunky. But what does this really mean? The dictionary definition is:

1. clumsy or awkward
2. not stylish or attractive

It's difficult to know much of the clumsiness when compared to Web 2.0 tools or whether they are intrinsically clumsy or awkward. What is definitely true is that with a social networking site, like facebook or ning, there is less to learn and the usability is better. When it comes to attractiveness, I think a certain amount of this comes from social software looking more up to date. There is a fashion factor just as clothes go in and out of fashion. Overall, web 2.0 is all about the user getting involves easily. The usability has to be good for any tool to be viable. Just thinking about what it takes to upload and publish a file on moodle and I can think at least two points where it should be made easier.

But surely the answer is to make them less clunky! Well this is easier said than done as the clunkiness seems intrinsic to how they are built. There are two reasons for this:

1. Any tool (like a moodle quiz or a blackboard blog) has to have the same look and feel as the rest of the system. So whereas independent Web 2.0 survey or blog tool can concentrate on making it the best in terms of usability and attractiveness. Within a VLE, you are limited to the template of the bigger picture. A bigger picture which is much more difficult to change and is much slower to change. This is why a blackboard blog looks archaic compared to blogger.
2. Any online tool in education has the question of security to consider. Security protecting the children from the outside world; security protecting the outside world from the children; security protecting the privacy of the class; security protecting the intellectual property rights of the educator; data protection! This security add layers of clunkiness that other websites don't have to the same extent. This is one of the tensions education has with web 2.0. At its heart, web 2.0 is about openness. VLEs first and foremost are designed to protect (almost obsessively). This is why where VLEs have adopted a web 2.0 tool into its system it often doesn't feel quite right. So whatever tool we use, clunkiness is unavoidable to a certain extent as securities are put in place. Maybe we should try and bring this spirit of openness more into education! That's another can of worms.
   

The discussion went down the line of using other tools instead, e.g. facebook. Well yes, as long as we understand that usability is just one of the reasons for this. Overall, it should be done in the knowledge and understanding of what social networking has to offer over and above your average VLE. By the way, I would favour Ning over facebook as facebook for learning can bring up tricky issues. Something they discuss on this podcast and it's worth a listen.

I have slight concerns about using a social networking site as the house within which what currently happens on a VLE occurs. This is because, for most, the VLE is a file repository and an assignment dropbox. However, I would favour the shift because the social aspect of a Ning, for example, are so intuitive and attractive that it would encourage educators to explore their use in a more recpetive frame of mind.

Face-to-face to Online - A Process

I've been way behind on my blog reading but have been learning loads converting a face-to-face course into an online one. My key learning point from the last couple of week is not to underestimate the time and effort it takes to do this. Overall, it's very rewarding. This is especially true as the lecturer I am working with is receptive to the process and happy to learn about everything that's an offer. I thought I'd record here the process we have gone through so far:

- I learn about the course
- I demonstrate the organisation VLE we are supposed to be using
- We decide where to house the course - The VLE with Web 2.0 linked in where necessary
- We talk through the activities used on each face-to-face day. Each activity is unpicked and I suggest and demonstrate the options available online
- I set up the course online
- Timings are set and activities are edited

Actually, we haven't finished and the last 3 points are currently being worked up through several iterations. Much of the time is taken with distilling the activity to what's most important and addressing that above everything else. Another big issues is ensuring making it right timing-wise. At the heart of this issue is transferring the synchronous to asynchronous. It sounds straightforward to try and replicate any face-to-face discussion online in a forum of some sort. You could do the odd one synchronously but largely this will need to be asynchronous and with any asynchronous discussion you need to give it time to develop. I favour two weeks for any subject but one week often has to do. So, if you have 4 discussions during 1 face-to-face day and you want to keep all of these online, you will need 4 weeks at least. Hopefully, timeframes are not as pressing as time spent - which needs to be comparable with face-to-face. All this needs to be carefully thought through.

One of the other main things I am trying to do is mix things up and use a wide a range of Web 2.0 tools as possible. You shouldn't really do things for the sake of it so I'm trying to ensure suitability and appropriateness. However, there is an evangelical element to it. I want people to experience a new learning tool to show how good it is! Show how easy it is! It makes it harder to be tied to a less than impressive VLE but they are getting better as they cobble together some Web 2.0-like tools to keep up with the real world and I can link to outside tools easily.