Using social media for personal learning

Today I ran a short session where I shared how I use social media to enhance my learning. I've blogged previous about this topic in the post Social Media for YOUR learning but now I've refined my thinking and developed a better presentation about this I thought I'd share my thinking again.

I decided to represent my thinking in the below pearltree.  Pearltree is a website where you can create mindmap-type groups of bubbles which links to websites.  I've started using it as my main bookmarking site.  It took a bit of getting used to but its good if you want to group things and is certainly more visually appealing than a normal bookmarking service.

Making sense of how I use social media to aid my learning is a tricky business.   However, I have a sort of system and this what I wanted to share.  Although the process is iterative some types of activity do present themselves.  An important point is that different aspects of the same tool fit into the different categories I identify.

• Seeking and consuming knowledge - This is mainly my RSS reader and twitter.  I use google reader and have a carefully refine list of blogs and learning technologies news services which I subscribe to.  With twitter, I don't spend as much time as I could or should on this.  I'm following 170 or so people and it purely about learning technologies.  I have a seperate account for fun stuff as it's useful to differentiate between my learning and social life.  In the pearltree below I've also included google and linkedin as these are also important places I look for things.
• Aggregation - Very closely associated with seeking knowledge is the aggregation of knowledge.  You need to aggregate before you can consume in a discerning fashion.  RSS and the process of subscribing are fundamentally components of this.  Gradually twitter is muscling in on my time but I still love my google reader.  Also included below are evernote where the different folders I create and the notes I take are a form of aggregation for review later and diigo.  I use diigo because it allows for groups which, along with the normal tagging, allow me to easily find types of bookmarks.
• Website note-taking - I tend not to do this in its purest sense but it deserves its place as there are a host of services which can be utilised for this purpose.  Of the sites listed in this pearl below, my activity is mainy confined to evernote which I use to copy/paste the best bits, the golden nuggets of knowledge I find.  By creating a note for each set of such nuggets, I can include a weblink and tag for future reference.  The important point here is that you find time to review later - that's the learning.  I also ensure that when I bookmark in diigo I write a few words to remind myself what the site is about.  However, with bookmarking proper tagging are key.  Bounce and scrible are note-taking on the website tools.
• Knowledge sharing - This is an important part of the ethos of social media and web 2.0 - you share as well as consume, you give as well as receive.  My chief forum for this is twitter where I get benefit from articulating the key points in a tweet and from generating more contacts to follow and be followed.
• Brainstorming/sense-making - Here I've included a drawing tool and a couple of mindmapping tools.  I use mindmapping tools a lot to helping create relationship between concepts and play with my ideas.
• Text-based dialogue learning - This will be different for everyone.  My networks for this include a couple of learning technology groups and some linkedin groups, but I've also included my blog where dialogue can occur in the comments.
• Writtern reflection - This completes the circle.  It's what I'm doing now and it a vital component for my learning.  The fact that I've not done much blogging over the last few months isn't good and I know I learn less when do less blogging.  The process of articulating for an potential audience is right at the heart of learning.  By refining my words, I refine my learning.

I would be interested in hearing anyone's thoughts on my PLE and hearing about the tools you use.

Teaching without powerpoint - Using a website creation tool

There's lots to reflect on when you teach.  Rarely do we get a chance or have the inclination to do this fully.   For my role as a Learning Technologist in a Higher Education institution (Institute of Education, London, UK), I don't do a massive amount of teaching.  There is some but mostly the help and advice I provide is done informally in one-to-one meetings.  Anyway, I want to reflect on some teaching I did recently as I'm looking to improve and develop this particular session.

On Tues, 7th Feb, I ran a session called 21st century tools for teaching and learning.  I've blogged about the planning of this session before if you are interested -  http://tpreskett.blogspot.com/search/label/Web%202.0 .  There's much to reflect on, but I wanted first to think about how I structured and presented it.  The biggest challenge with this session is the amount of different websites I ask the participants to visit throughout the day.  There are lots of different types of tools to demonstrate and practice using.  To facilitate this process I have always create a website to act as the hub for the day.  In the past I've used a social networking facility like http://www.ning.com/ or http://www.grouply.com/.  However, this time I switched to a normal website creation tool.  The reason is that the social networking services are geared towards communication and don't present content particularly well.  As participants weren't really using the communication tools within the sites during the day (despite my encouragement) it seemed preferable to display the content as dynamically as I could using a tool more suited to this task.  I chose http://www.weebly.com/ mainly because I've used it before and it allows for embedded outside tools, videos, documents etc.  So I created a website with a different page for each type of tool I was teaching about:

• Backchannels
• Web 2.0 technologies in education
• Noticeboards
• Word clouds
• Drawing tools
• Mindmapping
• Collaborative bookmarking
• Tool exploration
• Multimedia Posters
• Digital Story-telling
• Choosing an online tool
• Creative Commons/Copyright
• Map Tools
• Timelines
• Game sites
• Quick Feedback tool
• Application first steps

Within each page I had a consistent structure of a short presentation, embedded or linked example and activities.  The activities were setup so that the participants could practice using the tool within a relevant context.  Unfortunately, I can't share this website with you.  It was paid for session so it seems silly to give away for free what others had to pay for.  However, I've duplicated the word cloud page and it's available here if you are interested in seeing how the pages were structured:  http://wordcloudtools.weebly.com/.

Overall, the system worked well.  Some reflections:

- Some of the ICT co-ordinators were interested in the tool I'd used to create the website. 
- I'm not sure the presentations I embedded onto each page were necessary.  It didn't feel quite right presenting from slides in this context and environment.  I would be better served simply talking about the subject matter from memory when I visited each page. 
- Having the weblinks on the relevant pages worked well and made the navigation and structure very clear for all. 
- The website serves as a resource after the session for participants.  They simply revisit the site to download anything relevant and revisit the tools I've highlighted.  They seemed to like that idea.
- I didn't give them much paper as everything was on the site.  Any presentations were added as files to download.
- The activities mostly worked well although I will reflect about specific tool-types in later posts.

Had I used a normal powerpoint I would be forever toggling between the internet and my slides it would have been chaotic.  I can recommend using a free website service like weebly to act as the hub of any workshop you do involving lots of internet based activities. 

Casual community building

Casual community building is something that I've encountered a lot over the years. Often people come to me wanting help in starting something online where a particular group of people can exchange views and share resources. Now this is a core activity of social media and one that can work well in a work related special interest group. However, mostly they end up being empty spaces of little or no activity, sometimes after great expense and frustration.

I've been reflecting on the issues behind this after reading Don't blame the technology on the excellent Learning Journey blog. The following extract rings true with me:

Sometimes I hear people saying: “I created a blog, but no one joined in”. Or “ I have just set up this network site…seemed to go well at first as some people joined, but now no one is doing anything in there”.

My first reaction is to ask, why did you set it up in the first place? What was the purpose? The answer usually is: for people to come together… to create the community! That’s fantastic…but then as we analyse the situation a bit further I am usually tempted to ask if they intend ‘to join the communal activity’ too or if their role was just to offer the space?!!! It always puzzles me!

What I still see most often is individuals creating a space in the hope it will just take off by itself – as if people would adhere to their brilliant ideas for no reason. The fact is that there isn’t lack of brilliant ideas in this world… we all think we have them! Creating spaces for people to congregate is definitely one of them…(we are always complaining about the lack of opportunity to network and share stuff, or that we don’t know what other people are doing and how much we would benefit from it… so it must be a terrific idea…!) but what makes brilliant ideas materialize in something really meaningful is the effort we ourselves put into it for it to develop and grow coherently.

The most important point here is the issue of devoting time yourself to the endeavour. It's something that nearly always isn't thought through or put into action and is the biggest single factor affecting community participation. Without a driving force, no social network or online community will take off. It doesn't matter how appropriate the space is to the needs of the group - it won't run by itself.

Unfortunately, I can predict all too easily whether such an online space will work or not and it's sad when people have spent time, effort and sometimes money setting something up only for it to fail. Even with this time and effort, there is no guarantee that a particular group of people will engage with it as there are a miraid of other factors to take into consideration. But it's safe to say without it there is no chance.

Choose your own path and collaborate!

I read Graham Atwell’s post Cartoon Planet – A Pedagogy of Change a few days ago. I set it aside to study later because I knew there was lots to reflect on. I’ve now found time to do this and there has been one major learning point. Prompted from the quotes below, I’ve been able to think through the two major themes of Web 2.0 learning – Personal Learning and Collaborative Learning in a more coherent way.

The below 4 quotes give insight on this:

“Whilst young learners in the 21st century are seen as being increasingly independent, simultaneously group skills are more important than ever before.”
“The ‘educational shift’, grounded on social and personalised pedagogies, as advocated by most of the literature, is still in progress (Williamson and Payto, 2009).”
“The construction of new knowledge through collaborative and cooperative activities, which are personally meaningful to the learners, are core to a pedagogy of change (Learning and Teaching Scotland, 2007).”
“Learning relies both on granting the individual an active voice and creating an environment for collective listening and mutual support (UNESCO, 2002).”

These quotes crystallises the issue for me. Everyone can pick and choose their collaborative path. Look at how social networking works, everyone chooses their friends on facebook, they each join the groups they want and communicate with each set of people separately. The choice is entirely theirs and everyone has different connections. Groups can be subject specific or a particular social context or grouping. I think network is a more helpful word here than community. But what’s most important is that the learner is creating their network for themselves.

Let’s think about education. Well, let’s face it, it’s not set up to cater for this type of freedom. Any group work is strictly controlled and limited, be it physical or virtual. With this control, you can compromise achieving what’s “personally meaningful to the learners”. This has the best chance of coming when you give a level of independence. The learner creates and chooses their own path. Downes’ and Siemens connectivism course delivery shows what can be done (it’s a pity I’ve pretty much dropped off this (next year maybe)). I think control is at the heart of what education is all about so this is tough nut to crack. But it’s worth recognising that by controlling how students learn, you can inhibit their ability to learn – both now and in the future.

This has ended somewhere different to where I expected. I had intended to highlight how important the personal and collaborative elements are to my ‘informal’ learning in the blogosphere. I have created my own bloglist which gets refined all the time; I study them, as well as the odd article; I do my job and learn things; I collaborate by talking to a couple of key colleagues; I collaborate in the comments of blogs; I reflect on all this and blog myself. The most important part of this for me is the reflection. Previously, I never found time to reflect and this is the missing elements for lots of people. The other things can happen naturally, if you are lucky, but standing back and reflecting often gets lost.

Social Media - Negativity

I am often surprised of the way some will talk about social media. Some of the comments quoted on Reflections on Students and Social Media: Consuming the Consumed seem to think of it as some sort of monster devouring and deviling everything in it's path. A force for evil destroying all that is natural and innocent. I'm exaggerating of course but I think this misses the point. People use social media because THEY WANT TO; because it's a good way of communicating. Clearly, a better and easier than that which existed before. If this wasn't the case, all the different social media environment that are part of everyday life for so many of us would have died before they started.

It's fair to point out that a lot of the comments on this blog post came as a response to a leading question - In what ways are we at a tipping point with social media? Who says we are? With the myriad of things that constitute social media more is bound to follow as we develop and innovate. Much of the sentiment of fear and annoyance over social media is about the time spent using it. Well this is time spent COMMUNICATING. This is time spent building networks, sharing ideas and creating. How can this be anything but good.

This is not meant as a attack on a blogger I respect and read regularly but an attack on the attacks that reign in on the force for good that is social media.

Faculty resistance to using IT tools in active learning instructional strategies

I've been reading through a behemoth of a discussion on the Ning network - Innovate-Ideagora called Addressing the problem of faculty resistance to using IT tools in active learning instructional strategies. There is so much of interest that I had to read it all. I wanted to record my main learning points here because I am positive there are many. The problem is that, as with any discussion, the discourse jumps around a lot and it's difficult to absorb properly as you move through the debate. However, I'm going to try and record the main issues here. When reading debates of this kindsd common issues crop up:

• Challenging the notion of the "lecture"
• Didactic vs collaborative pedagogies (in this discussion active learning is the key phrase)
• Higher education research priorities
• Assessment - and it's driving force dictating the teaching
• Process learning now becoming more important than fact-based learning

Interesting side issues here including the nature of blended learning and issues of cheating which was linked to the nature of assessment. Below are some additional thoughts.

A lot of the debate pitted the lecture against active learning strategies exemplified in the TEAL initiutive from the physics dept. of MIT. So the heart of the issue is the realisation that the most important thing we are doing is promote active learning through learning technologies - not just learning technologies. It's important that we understand that.

The discussion explored how a lot of learning technology use involved augmenting the lecture experience, reinforcing it in a way that didn't promote active learning - a reinforcement that added to the cost of the learning experience. Steve Eskow was prominent in challenging the notion of the lecture as all powerful and advocating alternatives to the face-to-face. I happen to agree with this. For most (nearly all) the traditional didactic lecture is so much the right way to educate that it isn't even worth debating. Currently, learning technologies have to fit in around these face-to-face events which are a pegs to hand our education onto. It's a fit that can work but often doesn't. However, this approach makes things more difficult than they need to be. Of course, face-to-face has value. But start off thinking of all your tools on an equal footing not with one on a higher plane.

The discussion described the performance involved in giving a lecture. I have a hunch that this is an important element for many educators. Why be receptive to different teaching methods if we like you already do? Put bluntly, some like the sound of their own voice too much. There, I said it. But how can you challenge that? Not easily for sure.

I've said in previous posts how important it is to educate the educators in learning technologies. One good idea from this discussion is to give them a reason to use it in their real lives, e.g. an aggregator for their news, and they will naturally start thinking about their teaching once this is embedded.