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.

Wordcloud of my blog

I've updated the word cloud of this blog which you can see in the column on the right. It's interesting to see how things have changed over the last four months from:

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/3652594/My_blog

to

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/4135003/Learning_Tchnology_Learning_blog_-_Tom_Preskett

Although things are largely the same, the biggest word is now learning whereas previously it was tools.  There's also evidence of my reflections on activity templates and recent learning design teaching sessions I've been running.

One question I'm asking myself is:

Does this word cloud give a fair reflection of my role as an E-learning Manager?
(for the London Centre for Leadership in Learning (LCLL), Institute of Education (IOE)) 

The answer is probably not.  I reflect on what's interested me from what I've been reading and what's been challenging me and been valuable learning experiences in my job.  The mundane stuff doesn't get in there like the setting up of online course areas and the repeated process/navigation demonstrations.  E-learning/learning technology jobs are about maintaining and setting up structures and systems and negotiating opportunities and events where you can show that you can offer much more than this.  For me, I've done this by setting up sessions on Web 2.0 technologies and online learning design.  Showing people how to use a particular VLE tools is the halfway house between the two extremes.  It's ostensibly about process but you can shoehorn in pedagogy if you careful about it.

New Personal Knowledge Management

I've been reading a lot about Personal Knowledge Management and Personal Learning Environments recently and I've recently made some changes to my PKM which I thought I'd share in this space.

Previously, I learnt mostly from reading the blogs. I tagged them in google reader for reference and, every do often, I would blog myself here to reflect on what I was learning. This has worked fine but there are two things which I'm not happy about:

- I've found my blogging to be a little sporadic and random at times.
- Tagging doesn't often result in much reference afterwards

A few weeks ago I discovered the awesome highlighter. Immediately, I incorporated this into my daily practice. Now, as well as tagging in google reader, if I read something I like I use the awesome highlighter to highlight the best bits. Then, every few days, I revisit what I've highlighted and tweet the best bits. I can tag things as well which is useful. This is a whole extra layer of reviewing and sharing. A whole extra layer of learning which didn't previously exist. The final stage is the blogging. My plan is to blog about what I was tweeting now that I am doing this regularly. I feel that there will be value in looking at my twitter stream and reflect on themes or key tweets. As I haven't done this, I can't say for certain how valuable this will be. However, if I can do this regularly then my blogging will also become more regular.

What's been excellent so far has been the ability to mine the best bits of the blog posts I read. Usually, there is a sentence or a phrase that really sticks out. Now through highlighting and twitter I am able get right to these gems - regularly.

If you have been here before and find value in reading this blog, I would suggest you follow my twitter account - TomPreskett.

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.

eLearning Learning, Blogging and Reflection

I've joined the eLearningLearning stable run by Tony Karrer. Thanks again for the invite Tony!

I read his blog and was aware of the growing aggregation resource of Learning Technology opinion within eLearningLearning so it seems like a good idea to become part of it. I don't actual use the eLearningLearning site as my blog source (I have a carefully put together google reader list), but I can see the attraction of subscribing to this one feed to get the the best Learning Technology opinion. Having joined, it's been useful looking at the list of blogs featured because I've found some new good ones to read. Anyway, if you are reading this you probably know all about eLearningLearning because that's probably where you came from.

The question I am reflecting on now is whether having a greater potential readership will affect this valuable reflective tool I have. I'm pretty sure it won't. I always write as if I'm talking to someone so I'll just continue in that vein. What's important is that I don't lose focus of the essence of this blog. Something I outlined in my very first post:

My aim with this blog is to fill the sharing and reflecting side of my Personal Learning in my role as an e-learning professional.

Also, I am mindful of this passage from a later post - Blogs for education, blogs for yourself

My motivation for blogging is to capture my learning for myself. By making it public facing, I’m forced to be coherent, and it’s in that process where the learning happens. Quite often I end up in different places than I expected. So for me, if no one reads it, the blog is still valuable since it serves my purpose.

It's the reflection I want to keep hold of. I had an interesting discussion about this today. The person I was speaking to didn't find reflection easy. I think this is true of lots of people. But I think it's more to do with the process not being something we are used to. Reflection and the learning that results is a very personal thing. So often, education is about reaching a perscribed learning goal. A goal achieved through a perscribed learning path. And once they reach this goal is achieved why bother going any further. Why personalise your learner by reflecting on it with reference to everything else you know.

Thinking about my reflective time, I've only really been doing it for that last 6 months and that's because of this blog. Certainly, it was never a part of my education. This blog has exceeded my expectations. I wouldn't have thought having a virtual space for my learning would be so important, but it is. Maybe because it's so easy to make look professional, so easy to edit, so easy to link to. Whatever it is, it works for me. I can recommend it.