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.

21st Century Tools for Teaching and Learning: rules for practical/hands on teaching

This post continues reflection on the learning design process I am currently engaged in for a session I run a couple of times a year and am running again on 7th Feb: 21st century tools for teaching and learning.  In a previous post on my blog, A learning design process using social media: Brainstorming and Aggregating, I wrote about using a noticeboard tool and a bookmarking tool to help in the design process.  I created a noticeboard representation of the existing session to help me reflect on where I was at and where I need to revisit the learning design:

21CT 01/12

(I'd advise you to right-click and open the above in a new tab/window)

Looking at this allowed me to see that there isn't enough practical components.  I wanted more and, following a scoping exercise, I added a few bits:

21CLearning Session: 07/02/12

(I'd advise you to right-click and open the above in a new tab/window)
Teaching internet-based tools for teaching and learning in a practical way requires careful thought. 

Here are some golden rules I follow:

• Simple or no account creation - you can’t have participants spending 5 minutes creating an account. Email validation is a big no-no too. There is fine for real life personal use but if you want participants to try things out, it needs to seem easy. Always make the point that there are many examples of any tool type.  Of course, it needs to be free, see Choosing social media/web 2.0 tools for use in teaching and learning for more on this.
• Good usability - I try to teach tool types not specific websites.  Therefore, I try and show a few different examples.  For them to practice I choose the one with the best usability, the one with the lowest learning threshold so they can have a go as quickly as possible.  Once you've done this you can share the pros and cons of the different services you have identified.
• Learn the processes inside out - This is a logical point but an important one (as are the others really).  Teach them the basic usability by doing it yourself and float and help whilst they play with it.  It's vital that each click is explained, mistrust of new online tools is quick to take hold so it needs to appear as easy as you can make it.  With their personal ICT skills you will get to know who to concentrate on, but in the beginning don't assume anything.  This is biggest problem people have with any hands on session involving computing.
• Give them an authentic task - I've struggled with this in the past.  The more you know about their context the better but there is a usually a generic type of activity you can think of so that they start inputting into a particular tool in an authentic way.  One way of doing this is by requesting participants bring content to the session.  However you do it, it's important to try and get participants to think about its use in their teaching context.  The best way to do this is with them performing an authentic task using the tool.

A learning design process using social media: Brainstorming and Aggregating

Here are some reflections on using an online noticeboard tool and a collaborative bookmarking tool as part of a learning design process.

21st century tools for teaching and learning is the title of session I run a couple of times a year and I'm running it again on 7th Feb.  Its a workshop where teachers in London can come and learn about a various of internet-based tools which they use in their teaching.  What I'm doing is aggregating what's out there, making sense of it and then articulating what I've learnt for those in schools.  If you are reading this post then you are probably minded to go out and find these things for yourself.  However, this session is aimed at the majority of educators who do not have the time or the inclination to do this.  I last ran it in May, 2011 and reflected on it here.  Its really interesting to reread past reflections on teaching so that I can remind myself what worked well and how it felt about it.

My long term plan for this session is to break it up into1 hour long chunks and offer them after work so that there are easier and more managable for busy professionals to get to.  Anyway, that's for another time because this post is about the learning design process currently underway for the session.  For a session like this it's imperative that you keep learning in a fast changing world.  I'm not looking for cutting edge software instances of tool types that are quick and easy to use with clearly identifiable applications in education.

For the second time, I'm lucky to have Isobel Bowditch help me with the session.  Firstly, we decided to examine what we've got and brainstorm ideas for the different tool type we wanted to cover and roughly how we are going to cover them.  Looking at the previous session programme, we had some practical elements where we get participants to practice using an instance of a tool type.  The others bit are demo or me talking.  There is 4:30 hours to fill.  I wanted to visually represent what we have so that we can make sense of it and easily play around the various components.  I chose one of the noticeboard tools - http://www.linoit.com/ and added a stickie for each element.  (Previously I've used http://www.wallwisher.com/  but I've found it to be unreliable on occasion.  The hard part is judging the timing and I've estimated 15mins for practical and 5 or 10 mins for demo/presentation elements.  We started by representing the existing programme. 

21CT 01/12

Then, there was a scoping exercise.

For this we used various sites/documents which list or describe different tool types. This is pretty unscientific process which I described in the post Choosing social media/web 2.0 tools for use in teaching and learning.  So that Isobel and I could aggregate what we found, I decided to use a collaborative bookmarking service. This way we could both add things as we found them and then review together. I used http://www.diigo.com/. My preferred bookmarking service has swung back and forth from http://www.delicious.com/ to http://www.diigo.com/ a couple of times. The current delicious is good because of its simplicity. Its a pure bookmarking tool and adding something is very easy. Diigo's usability isn't great but it does groups which is what you need for this sort of exercise. So I created this group:

http://groups.diigo.com/group/web20_learning

And we started adding things and putting our comments on their suitability for our session. This meant that when we got together for another brainstorming session we could review the diigo group, visit and discuss the different tools and edit the linoit noticeboard.  This is the finished product.  I've used yellow for practical bits and blue for demo/presentation bits.
 

21CLearning Session: 07/02/12

The next stage is to start fleshing out the design of the session.  Some of the tools that make the final cut need to studied so that we can teach others about them.  Also, in some instances we've identified that we want to do a practical bit on a particular tool type but have yet to identify the most suitable instance of that tool to use.

Using linoit and diigo combined with face-to-face meetings we moved smoothly through the brainstorming portion of the learning design process in an organised and efficient way.  I can recommend both.   

Social media for YOUR learning

Happy new year.

We are learning all the time. Structuring and directing this learning doesn’t need to be confined to courses and formal education. For an individual learner it is possible to construct your own personal learning environment utlitising different online tools for different purposes. It’s always been possible but social media tools make it far, far easier than previously possible. I’ve conceptualised some of the possibilities in this mindmap:

I’ve divided it into two categories: Personal Learning and Collaborative Learning. However, because social media is inherently social there are opportunities for communication and collaboration throughout. It’s important to think about the type of learning activity a particular tool ‘affords’. I find affordance a useful concept when thinking about technology and learning. It basically means what a tool lends itself towards doing. Mindjumpers is all about articulating for companies what each social media tool affords for them in terms of marketing; for me, its learning. So, in the above mindmap, I don’t just say blogging, I say written reflection; because this is the part of the learning process that this social media tool affords.

I could sum up the personal learning side of the mindmap by saying:

You can use different social media tools to seek out knowledge/content, aggregate it so that you can store it/find it later in an organised fashion, reflect on this knowledge perhaps using visualisation tools and articulate it in writing.

This post continues thinking from http://tpreskett.blogspot.com/2011/10/in-post-social-media-supporting-teacher.html

Choosing social media/web 2.0 tools for use in teaching and learning

Originally published on ETC Journal.

Connecting formal education to social media/web 2.0 tools is a relatively new area. Educational institutions hope that by purchasing a virtual learning environment (VLE) all of their learning technology needs will be met. However, the world moves fast, and some educators find that our suite of communication and collaboration tools doesn’t cater to our teaching and learning needs as well as they might. Interestingly, VLEs are usually more suited to managing rather than learning (but that’s for another day). So there is an argument for looking outside of the VLE to expand and enhance our options for engaging students in learning activities using technology.

When it comes to thinking about social media or web 2.0 tools, we are looking at tapping into the affordances such tools have towards communication and collaboration. There’s a creative process involved in this, and it takes time, space and a certain amount of risk. However, it’s worth exploring if you want to keep developing as an educator and are always looking to improve the learner experience.

Usually the stimulus for such a process comes from seeing or hearing about a particular tools used in a particular context. In these instances, the process is focused and relatively easy. However, what if you want to explore for yourself what’s out there and make informed decisions on what tool to use?

Firstly, it’s useful to have in mind a set of criteria like the Sloan Consortium’s:

• Access
• Usability
• Privacy & Intellectual Property
• Workload & Time Management
• Fun Factor

Visit the weblink above for details on this.

What I’ll do in this post is reflect on the stages I go through when scoping our internet-based tool for teaching and learning. I’ve split it into different stages of the process:

What type of tool?

If you have no idea what’s available then you’ll probably need to talk to someone in the know. This will give you a starting point. From here, it’s about finding what this tool does and how that can be applied to learning. So for a mindmap, it’s about creating mindmaps for brainstorming, visualisation, reflection. You’ll notice that it’s not one simple concept here and it rarely is. What’s important is that you know what you want to use it for, choose a tool which is suited to this task and can articulate this clearly to the learners. Confusion can occur with tools that could conceivable perform a large variety of functions. Any collaborative document tool like google docs could be used for a multitude of learning activities. As long as you are clear about how you want the learners to engage in a tool and why, you’ll be OK. Just make sure you are not shoe-horning an activity into a tool that isn’t well suited to it. This process is about finding the best fit. For example, I could conceivably use a group blog for an asynchronous discussion. However, for this learning activity, I might be better off using a message board, a discussion forum embedded within a VLE or social network.

Scoping out tools?

The next step is to choose the particular instance of the chosen tool. For this, you need to scope out the available tools. This is something I do a lot. It isn’t an exact science, and you have to be aware that there will always be good ones you’ll miss. In fact, the hard part is finding the time every few month to find new instances that spring up. Also, in the fickly web 2.0 world, tools come and go so you need to check for disappearances — you usually get warning on this.

I like to start with sites that already scope out tools for educational use — Free Technology for Teachers and Richard Byrne’s Favorite Tech Resources for Teachers. There’s also Robin Good’s Best Online Collaboration Tools 2011, but there’s a lot of rubbish there, and it can be difficult to load up and navigate. What I want to avoid is googling. Although it’s not to be ruled out, you want to start from an informed place rather than a random one.

So what should you be looking for?

Cost: The first thing I look for is cost. Commercial products are a no-no for me. I want to recommend free tools where I can. Sometimes minimal cost tools are OK, but anything more than a few pounds/dollars is ruled out. When it comes to internet-based tools for use in teaching and learning, starting off by paying lots of money isn’t necessary. You can often tell by the look and feel of a commercial website. They will have pricing or product as one of their main pages and will often be aimed at businesses. Most tools will have different levels based on cost. If the lowest level is a free version, then it’s worth investigating. This is especially true if there’s a free upgrade for education. Free tools aren’t necessarily amateur looking, but there will be more variety in their layout.

Trying it out: The next thing is to try it out. Good tools will allow you to try it out quickly and easily. Ideally, there will be a video explaining and showing the features on the front page. Watch this first. This way you can decide quickly whether to dismiss it or not. It’s vital that you record the process you go through when you first start testing something. Answer for yourself questions like:

• How intuitive is it?
• How many stages are there?
• How easy are key functions?
• Does it do what I want it to?
• Is the language and terminology they use right for my context?
• How much learning would it take for learners to work it out?
• How does it look, and is this what I had in mind?

The hard part of this is judging whether your learners will have the same experience as you did when trying the tool. My advice would be: Don’t assume anything. A simple process that you were able to move through easily can derail an entire course if taken for granted. I know, I’ve seen it. I’m blessed with an inability to pick things up quickly. This gives me little scope for assuming too much. Providing a three minute screencast can go a long way. The quick learner can simply skip this.

Usually by playing around for a few minutes you get a feel for whether this could work for you. If you are scoping a few services, make a note of them (better still bookmark them) and move on. It’s common to not find anything you really want so you use the best you can find.

It’s worth mentioning the importance of account creation. You should always bear in mind that you want to keep additional logins for your students to a minimium. In this regard, tools embedded within the VLE will always win. However, you’ll be looking outside the VLE for tools that have no internal equivalent. Some tools can be used without creating an account, but most will require it. I’m talking here about communication/collaboration tools that require students to become actively engaged. If the tools are educationally inclined, they may allow the educator to create accounts for a group of students (e.g., Diigo).

For content creation tools like Prezi, only you will have to create an account and simply share/embed the results. You can usually get away with asking students to create one or two accounts on particular tools if the reasons and the benefits are clear. Anything more than that isn’t advisable. In general, account creation is getting easier with possible links to existing accounts you might have (like google). Be careful about linking with social networking accounts like facebook. I advise against it. It blurs the boundaries between the professional and the social. When it comes to using a social network service as the hub of activity, I prefer to go down the Ning or Grouply route rather than Facebook.

A process that needs investigating is the interaction between two instances of the same tool if this is what you want to realise in practice. Most of the time you can test this out yourself on the same machine, but you might need to use different machines or even involve another person. I am often employing different email accounts so that I can create different accounts on the same tool. I have one or two emails that only really get used for this purpose.

If you get to the stage where you think you’ve found something to use, you’ll need to try it out for real, hopefully with a friendly test audience. How it interacts with your VLE needs careful thought. A lot depends on how much you use your institution’s online environment currently and what its capabilities are. It might be as simple as providing a weblink with words around it. If you’re lucky, you can embed it somewhat. What’s important here is to think through what process/navigational support you need to provide. For a tool type that is new, you’ll need to clearly describe how you expect the learner will engage with the tool, with the other learners and to what end. So it’s more than explaining where to click. It’s about purpose and learning outcomes.

I hope this rambling rundown gives some insight into the process of scoping out and choosing an internet-based tool for teaching and learning. As always, I find it personally useful to articulate my thoughts in this way

Social Media: Personal Learning: Practical guidance on how to do this - Planning/Brainstorming a session idea

In the post Social Media Supporting teacher CPD - 2 I talked about an idea for a session designed to give educators practical guidance on how to use social media for their learning. It would sit alongside 21st century tools for teaching and learning which I run about internet-based tools for use in teaching and learning. The rationale is that if educators start using social media for themselves and find value in this process they will naturally start thinking about how to use it within their teaching. It's a logical train of thought. It's difficult for educators to use tools in their teaching which have no relation to everyday practice. Part of this is to do with the dominance of sterile VLE features which look like they belong in 1995. But it's more about the concept of communicating in a fashion alien to them.

I've fleshed this out a bit more in the above mindmap and divided it into personal and collaborative. The key with this type of session is making sense of these tools, stating clearly what they offer in their context and talking about it in types of activity rather than tool names. The aim is to reach those who don't have a clue, don't know where to start. The great mass of educators who are left behind and annoyed that no one is telling how to make sense of it all in easy to understand terms. Papers like tweeting for teachers won't have an impact without sustained initiatives of this type. I guess I'm trying to fill this gap albeit in a very small way.
Under personal I've got:

Aggregation
• Knowledge seeking - micro-blog searching, browsing, slideshare - this is about the process of finding relevant information. Once you have your twitter people nicely followed and RSS feeds set up, it's just a matter of tweaking. However, if you start from scratch it's difficult to know where to start. I'll have to think about how best to advice on this because learning technology information flies out and grabs you. Other subject matter might well be different. There'll be information here on browsing too.
• Knowledge storing - rss, twitter, social bookmarking - about storing the stuff you find by twitter following, rss and bookmarking. I could also talk about cloud storage here but this might not fit very well.

Sense-making/learning
• Note taking and highlighting - the various social media options for this activity which many would do by pen or word processing. So this would include tools like evernote, bounce, diigo, also I'll need to check out stand alone highligher tools. I used to use awesome highlighter but I'm sure there are better examples. I'm looking at website notetaking and dedicated notes tools like evernote which I use and like.
• Brainstorming - This one's easy - mindmapping tools principally but I could also do drawing tools and things like thoughtbox and other task management tools.
• Written Reflection - The culmination of everything for me is to blog and reflect.

I could take participants on a journey by creating an account in google and then proceed to create and practice using areas for all the aggregation and sense making areas. It might be that a half day session on the personal side of things would be enough for one learning experience.

However, if I wanted to go further and teach about collaborative learning in relationship to educator peer communication/collaboration, I would cover:

• Synchronous Discussion: chat tools like titanpad or sync.in
• Aynchronous Discussion: I'm not clear yet how this could run. I want to teach educators that, by engaging in discussion with peers they can learn lots. So it's about finding peer networks and having those discussions. More thinking to be done here on how best to teach this.
• Collaborative document/text creation: Wikis and tools like google docs. Combination tools like google hangout need to be investigated.
• Sharing: Sharing is one of those activities which don't seem valuable until you do it. So talking about the sharing ethos via twitter/slideshare/blogging with focus on twitter.
• Group creation: Covering the ability to create private social network for groups using tools like google sites, ning, grouply etc.

That's enough detail for talking about it to my colleagues (and specifically my boss). I would only need to prepare properly if it were to run. No doubt I'll reflect on it here if that's occurs.

Social Media Supporting teacher CPD - 3

More on Tweeting for Teachers although it's more using it as a launchpad for my own reflections.

National and local policymakers should:

1.  publish guidelines and support for teachers and leaders to help them use social 
media in schools;
There are various social media strategies out there.  The emphasis should be on the potential for teaching and learning.  Most guidelines I've seen are about control and read like rules and regulations which put teachers off and fit with the "danger" ethos as its mantra.  It's true that to write informed guidelines about potential for the various types of tools but it doesn't have to be detailed just give encouragement and a green light to this area.  I drafted some guidelines myself which hopefully will be used by my institution in the future.  I share them here for anyone to look at.

2. consider how they will begin to unfilter social media sites for use in schools;
Consider!  Just do it.  It highlights a contradiction in the way we educate.  In formal education it's necessary to control communication - quiet in class, no chatting, pay attention.  Social media is extra communication channels.  So we control it.  The problem is we need to use them for teaching and learning.  Banning social media is like banning talking in schools.  Sure you have to control inappropriate use but we cut off all that learning potential by banning it.

3.  recognise and celebrate self-directed professional learning by teachers using 
online tools, and the role of social media in this learning;
Building a culture where this is valued is important.  There are lots out there but they are isolated and poorly known in the mainstream.

4. create a common online space where the whole education community can find each other;
This is a bit vague and I have visions of a controlled, unwielding space with poor usability if something is done at a national level.  In the case study about Edubuzz, I was hoping for some information about how to do this for myself because it's this kind of purposeful initiative that I could see working for groups of schools.


5. ensure that all Initial Teacher Training courses demonstrate a strong focus on the use of social media tools for ongoing professional development.
Yes, make this law.  Can't see this happening any time soon.

Social Media Supporting teacher CPD - 2

This post continues discussing the newly released report Tweeting for teachers.  They list 5 recommendations for school leaders and 5 for policy makers.  My first thought is how many school leaders will read this?  Probably very few unless they have a strategy for promoting it beyond a website.  I'll discuss each recommendation which you can read about on p30-33:


1.  School leaders should learn about and engage with the social platforms that their teachers, parents and pupils are using every day;
Yes, indeed.  The idea that springs into my mind is that what we need to do is get teachers in general using social media for themselves.  By using it for themselves ideas will spark about how they can use it in their teaching.  Trying to teach using something alien to the rest of their lives isn't easy but this is what we are often asking them to do.  Social media are ways of communicating, they are new communication channels.  Ways of communicating SHOULD be of interest to us in education.
The logical next step for me is to try and conceive of a training event which caters for this need.  This could be a sister session to my 21st century tools for teaching and learning session and would concentrate on how educators can use social media for themselves, in their own learning.  This would also fit nicely with the sentiment of this report.
As a bullet point to this recommendation, there is the old chestnut of justifying them using these tools themselves to understand the kids' world.  I remember saying this to National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH) participants 10 years ago.  It's true enough but many argue against it.  Practicing what you preach applies and it all comes down to a human beings unwillingness to learn after a certain age.  It's incredible how many resist it.

2. School leaders should use a social media tool as part of their communications with the school
community;
This would be a good way of establishing it's validity.  The problem is that the only relationship much of social media has with formal education is to be banned, it's associated with negative things.
  You have to stick your head above the paraphet to alter this.

3. validate and support their staff in using social media tools for ongoing professional development;
This is a positive strategic move which also give the mode validity for learning.  This could start with one tool that some people have good experiences and understanding of within the school or institution.

4. turn online activity into offline actions, in order to harness the benefits of face-to-face interaction alongside those of online interaction;
This is about using technology within the classroom.  Tablets will impact on this in the future.  However, this is whole new area in itself.  In the classroom or for homework there is scope for both but shouldn't be blurred together as both need carefully planned learning design.

5. implement robust systems for evaluating the impact of CPD on teacher effectiveness and student outcomes
No comment on this one.

The next post will consider the recommendations for policy makers.

Social media supporting teachers CPD

A fews days ago I went to an interesting event promoting a new report published by the Pearson Centre for Policy and Learning here in London.  It is called:  Tweeting for teachers; how can social media support teacher professional development?  I'm going to use it to reflect on the social media and education.

I'm going to give detailed analysis of the parts that interested me to help me reflect and articulate my thinking.

Overall, it's a useful and worthwhile read but it promises more than it delivers.  The overall message is noble and it could act as a inspirational call-to-arms for educators to start investigating social media. I saw some of this at the event and I hope the message can reach out there.  The recommendations are sounds although a little obvious.  There are also some interesting case studies about initiatives I wasn't aware of.  There is a deliberate link to teachers' CPD which is good and the review of research is interesting.  However, there's a distinct lack of 'how to'.  More on this later.

Firstly, the event I attended was well organised and free.  Their #tweetingforteachers worked well as they had dedicated people looking after it.  I ended up participating quite a lot as things occurred to me.  The usefulness of micro-blogging to facilitate communicate in events cannot be disputed.  It's a pity they didn't have the stream setup on the screen but there was a fair bit of interaction.  It helped that I got a good 3G connection.  Interestingly, most delegates didn't participate in this showing how far we have to go.

Next, the title - tweeting for teachers.  I don't like this.  It's catchy yes but it's a marketing phrase which is misleading as the overall scope of the report is social media. It's true that lots of the examples were about twitter but if the report wants to be about social media in general then it's not an appropriate title.  Tweeting for teacher is a great title if you were to extrapolate the bits about twitter and add practical guidance on the processes involved in twitter.

Overall, it's a report that can only scratch the surface of this subject.  Social media is a huge, huge area.  In a 36 page report it's not going to happen.  Also, the contexts with which it can be used a numerous.  The case studies consist of 3 people that blog and tweet for their own learning, a local authority blogging facility that worked well, a video competition, #ukedchat and Teachmeet.  Of these, #ukedchat and Teachmeet are the most inspirational.  They are both established synchronous events which can be engaged in.  The others are interesting but they would benefit from guidance on how to act if you're inspired to setup something similar.  Also, where are the dynamic image creation and sharing tools, the video creation, use of audio, mindmapping tools, social bookmarking, multimedia posters, social networking/group sites etc.  I worry about teachers will read this report and think that the case studies cover everything that's possible.

Finally for this post - categorisation.  with some about self-directed learning and personal learning networks and others about sharing, reflective learning and still others about synchronous event, the report is crying out for careful categorisation so that content is made "meaningful to teachers and manageable within the context of teaching practice."(p20 of this report).

This is the massive gap we have in education with learning technologies.  We have to make things easier for our teachers and academics.  We need to show them how and in their context.  Something like http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/ and http://www.freetech4teachers.com/ are more useful in this regard.  There is a wealth of policy advice and a wealth of how to use tools advice but it's the middle ground of putting it in our context which is lacking.  I believe that largely teachers can do this for themselves but only if we promote and facilitate it.

In my next post, I'll reflect on the key recommendations from this report.

Social Media doesn't threaten literacy!

Also published on the Educational Technology and Change Journal

You can read a lot about the threat of new media to literacy and the printed word. Harold Jarche blog post Literacies is an example. Often there is a link made between an ability to engage in deep and meaningful understanding and learning and reading large bodies of text. Or rather, a link between an inability to do this with the fast-pace of linking between different media in the Web 2.0 world. Well, I just don't buy this. In fact it's rubbish.

Firstly, literate doesn't just mean reading large bodies of text, you can be literate in a number of diffrerent communication tools. Not just the one that dominated by necessity being the only means of mass media distribution available for a while. Now the oral tradition is making a comeback and I have no real problem with that. It's the way it was done before books were on the scene and its still the dominant way in many non-western societies who can now take advantage of what's on offer. Also, text literacy isn't threatened by social media it's enhanced by it. Facebook and messaging forced teenagers to use words and sentences for their communication where previously it was only speaking (I never wrote a letter to a friend when I was a teenager). Ok, it's short but what the matter with that. I'm more in line with Negroponte on this issue. He says:

"Reading and writing are going to be around forever. The word is not going to go away and collecting words into bodies of thought is not going to go away." and

"There is no question that words are powerful, that they always have been and always will be … But just as we seldom carve words in rocks these days, we will probably not print many of them on paper for binding tomorrow."

Let's not confuse reading with publishing. Publishers want reading to be synonymous with books. But it doesn't have to be this way and it really isn't now.

The ability to quickly reference, aggregation, annotate and manipulate text is a massive, massive plus for learning and understanding. It can be done and was done in the old way but not by nearly enough as we'd care to admit to ourselves. Often the book champions are avid readers. What about those that don't read much. Surely, engaging in social media is plus for them. There exposure to words goes up drastically. Now the conditions for learning (admittedly only in computer rich societies) are far more desirable. Thinking about how I learn, I like printing and noting, but I also like RSS, online note-taking, bookmarking, and blogging. There things are fundamental. These things facilitate my learning and democratise it for all. The single biggest factor in helping the quality of my literacy is this blog (please don't comment on my grammar, it's improved a lot)!

The biggest barrier to this is learning how to learn this way and an obstacle in the way of this is the negative light social media is painted in.

Learning Technologies promote conversation

I stumbled upon How Managers Learn by Good Practice for Leaders and Managers. Although aimed at businesses rather than education there is one very interesting finding that's obvious when you think about it:

The most-used as well as the most effective informal learning method was: informal chats with colleagues... Conversations carry news, create meaning, foster cooperation, and spark innovation.

The excellent Harold Jarche observed

There are many great tools and technologies to facilitate conversation... but the key is having a culture of conversation.

Think about education, think about the pedagogy. Facilitating conversation is really what social media is all about; it's what a lot of Web 2.0 of all about; it's what many learning technologies try to do. Maybe describing things in this manner will be useful when describing (sorry selling) learning technologies in my work context. The more I think about it, the more I believe it. It's difficult not to reveal a bias towards the active/communicative pedagogies as a natural consequence of being a Learning Technologist (at least for me anyway). The problem with this is that it's open to question/debate particularly in the academic world I inhabit and rightly so. For some reason, it seems less controversial and more valid to talk about things in terms of promoting conversation. Even though it's feels more facile and too simplistic.

Anyway, this feels quite powerful and I can here myself saying it and hear it sounding ok.

Web 2.0/Social Media overview

I've created a presentation which gives an overview of Web 2.0/Social Media and framed within the structure I introduced in the post Structuring Web 2.0. I haven't been creating presentations in this way for long so my technique needs a bit of work.

Anyway, I thought I'd share it here:

Structuring Web 2.0

Web 2.0

As a follow-up to Clarifying Informal Learning & Web 2.0, I've been reflecting further on a Web 2.0 classification system and resolved to do my own one. One which tried to simple and clear. The stimulus for this has been the need to design some Web 2.0 training. Previously, I've used the classification from the document Education 2.0? Designing the web for teaching and learning which aligned web 2.0 with four typically human dispositions:

Socialising the playful: games and virtual worlds
Socialising the expressive: media design, sharing, and publication
Socialising the reflective: blogs, social networks, and wikis
Socialising the exploratory: syndication, recommenders, folksonomies

However, I wanted something simpler and came across the Make, Share, Find classification in The CU Online Handbook. However, I think this misses out some of the key messages. So, I have come up with what's at the top of this post.

The idea is that everything fits into 1 of the 3 categories. I seperated the social element because it should run through everything. Overall, it serves a purpose for myself and is hopefully presentable enough for others to understand. However, I'm not crazy about the shape and there might be more reflective to be done on the details so things may change.

Anyway, it certainly fits into the category of Learning Technology Learning so it's worth posting here.

Clarifying Informal Learning & Web 2.0

I've been reading The CU Online Handbook which I found through someone's else blog. It's a fairly big document and I wasn't sure it was worth wading through. However, early on I've found a good article which has some insightful comments on Informal and Web 2.0.

Apart from a belief that informal learning needs to be acknowledged and utilize in our education, I have a lot of "learning" to do on informal. The following quote by Phil Antonelli in the chapter Make, Share, Find: Web 2.0 and Informal Learning has helped:

"learning is a natural human cognitive process that is constantly occurring whether someone is in a formal learning setting or not. A simple example of this is how toddlers learn to speak their native tongue. They may be "coached" by parents and familiy members but barring physical deficits there are no formal classes necesary to learn ot speak. This type of learning had been defined as informal learning."

This is a useful example. Just as I hope we can eventually drop the e off e-learning, I hope we can eventually drop the informal/formal prefix to learning. Let's just learn! And not have it defined against our organisational structure or the delivery methods.

Phil also uses a useful classification structure of Make, Share, Find with Web 2.0. In the past, I've used the classification from the document Education 2.0? Designing the web for teaching and learning which aligned web 2.0 with four typically human dispositions:

• Socialising the playful: games and virtual worlds
• Socialising the expressive: media design, sharing, and publication
• Socialising the reflective: blogs, social networks, and wikis
• Socialising the exploratory: syndication, recommenders, folksonomies

The latter is more comprehensive and more academic, but the former feels like a better way of spreading the message. I always look for the simplist way to explain something. You could align:

• Make with playful and expressive
• Share with reflective
• Find with exploratory

I'll keep reading and share the learning here.

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.