I am using blogs in two ways:

• on my third year undergraduate module I have set up a module blog on which I post and the students comment. Most of the comments are in response to activities or are giving feedback about the student’s experience. Given these constraints the blog seems to be working well however I wouldhave preferred a system where all the students have their own blog. At the moment this quite a job to set up as we do not have our own blog server at the university. There is also a wiki on this module which is used by groups of students to put together their ideas in response to a set of questions:

• what are the basic web design principles and how do we put them into practice?
• what is “Extensible HyperText Markup Language” (XHTML), how and why should we use it?
• how can we style web pages using cascading style sheets (CSS) and what are the reasons for doing so?
• how can we set up web pages using “extensible markup language” (XML) and should we bother?
• how can we use “Extensible Stylesheet Language” (XSL) to style web pages and what advantages and disadvantages does it have?
• what are the advantages and disadvantages of separating design from content?

On my master’s module each of the students has a blog and they also cooperate as a group on a wiki. They have to use their blogs to provide evidence that they have satisfied the learning outcomes of the module. Their claim for a grade will initially be developed on the wiki and then transfered to their own web pages. Criteria for the grades will be developed by the students in discussion with me, on the wiki, and will provide a basis for the grade claim. At the moment the blogs seem to be working well and I have had some excellent feedback from students. This may be partly because they do not have the opportunity to see one another between sessions, unlike the undergraduate students. At the students requerst we are experimenting with an online week for session 3 (Feb 14 -16). I look forward to seeing how this goes when the only communication is via web pages, blogs, the wiki and email.

I have written a second year module, which will be available next year which is about web publishing in its broader sense and will use blogs and wikis as an integral part of the module and the student’s reflections on their use will form part of the subject matter. I am hoping that the inclusion of the use of blogs and wikis as part of the learning outcomes and assessments will help to make the blogs a more dynamic force in the student’s learning.

On Josie’s blog there is an interesting post about accessibility which I hope to have more time to look at later.

A post about commenting on CogDogBlog which inspired me to comment. This is backed up by this post on Edublog Insights.

I have introduced blogging into my master’s level module on exploring web design. Students will use their blog to record their reflections about their work together with their personal responses to a number of activities. More detailed information will be put on the module wiki where it can be shared and adapted by the group.

Some of us here at Worcester are trying to empower students to make their own decisions about what data is appropriate to use and to help them develop criteria and skills to judge the worth of information for themselves. Others still have an idea of a fixed hierarchy of “information value” usually expressed as “peer reviewed journals books and then the rest”.

I have colleagues who will give assignment instructions which warn against using the Internet as a source of information, this is particularly galling for me as I teach web design and for my students the Internet is a source of excellent information.

I have known tutors who will not allow students to post their own links to information, they insist that the student sends the information to them so that it can be vetted before it is published (or not). Not only does this present a bottleneck it strongly discourages students from posting material and of course it removes any possibility of the students learning from an open debate about the worth of the material. In my experience it is difficult enough to get students to contribute material and ideas without putting additional obstacles in their way.

I have had a similar experience recently with posting a comment on a blog, when I found that it did not appear but went off to the administrator for vetting. My first response was to never comment again but on reflection I contacted the administrator and explained my attitude to the situation to them and they changed the settings to allow open comment.

While I am on the subject of student autonomy I was listening to the Go Digital blog from the BBC World Service about the 100 dollar laptop and some excellent points from a guy from Nottingham University about how the students needed to be empowered to use it for learning and how this needs to be built into the system. They then went back to the studio “expert” who seemed to miss the point entirely and talked about how a VLE could be used for lesson plans. It worries me that such “experts” might be listened to and the whole project may not fulfill its potential as a consequence of this.

Transfer	Transform
Inflexible:  Teacher centered	Flexible: Student centered
Fixed module contract: tutor decides on the structure of the module and the assessment criteria	Student negotiation: Tutor and students negotiate the structure of the module and the assessment criteria
Notes: tutors provide notes and other inputs using MSword and Powerpoint	Evaluation and selection of learning materials: students are guided towards sources of information and make their own decisions about which ones to use, supported by sets of negotiated assessment criteria.
Discussion areas: tutors set up closed discussion areas on a VLE such as WebCT	blogs [ aggregation via RSS ]: each student has their own blog where they can develop their own voice.
Presentation areas: set up and controlled by the tutor	wikis: the group has a wiki where thay can produce a consensus about different materials
Fixed Syllabus: all students cove rthe same material which is determined by the tutor.	Open syllabus – student selected: students decide on the content they will learn after negotiation with the tutor to help ensure that it meets the learning outcomes of the module. This will allow for differing experience and previous knowledge.
Fixed activities: All students do the same things to achieve the learning outcomes	Negotiated activities: Extend student’s ideas to achieve the learning outcomes: The open syllabus idea is extended to the activities that the student undertakes.

I am hoping to extend/modify/explain further this list later

Sharon gives an excellent summary of the lecture on her post so I won’t repeat it here. I found the lecture very stimulating and I think it helped me to get to grips a little better with connectivism. However at the moment I can’t see that it is entirely inconsistent with social constructivism. If I understood what was said it was proposed that a learner has different perspectives on the same concept at the same time, the idea of placing themselves at different nodes in a network to view the same concept from a different angle.

As far as I am aware social constructivism allows for different perspectives on different concepts which might well contradict one another, at the same time and different perspectives on the same concept at different times. This is not quite the same thing but if you allow that the “different concepts” are really different aspects of the same concept then the two views become similar.

The other issue for me is whether understanding is a social group activity. I am happy with the notion of learning being so but less happy with understanding being other than an individual thing. Clearly I need to think about this a bit more.

I find the e-learning and pedagogy most interesting as that is my main focus of work. There is a whole page of information about their outcomes so far (a bit old now as it was published in 2004) with links at the bottom to lots of resources.

The section on effective practice in e-learning is backed up with a series of resources and case studies and there area a series of national workshops to take this forward. They are called “Planning and Evaluating Effective Practice with e-Learning” and I am going to one of these at Birmingham in January.

Perhaps I will have more to say when I have been to the workshop.

 Also see JISC press release about funding

My session is exploring whether e-learning can help to imprive pedagogy and I am using a PBL approach to explore ideas with groups of participants.

One of the issues with this sort of discussion is that it gets bogged down in the “old question” does e-learning improve learning, to which the stock response seems to be “it is not the technology it is what you do with it”. Though I might agree with this response this is not what I am getting at.

I am trying to explore whether using e-learning can be used to encourage tutors to improve their pedagogy. In the way of an example let me suggest two, very simplified, scenarios where this might happen:

• first the “negative scenario” – a tutor decides that they are going to try out a virtual learning environment by putting their lectures on-line and then giving the students a quiz to see if they have learnt anything. They do this and the net result is that the students have not learnt much. Reflecting on this the tutor decides that they need to use some other pedagogy than basic lectures if the students are to learn.
• then the “positive scenario” – a tutor sets up a discussion area on the university VLE for students to discuss ideas from the course. To her suprise she finds that some of the students continue to use the discussion board outside the prescribed sessions and as a consequence engage with the material much more deeply. She realises that a discussion forum can help to give students more time to discuss ideas to improve learning and decided to encourage this use by a more structured approach.

It will be interesting to see what I can get from the groups who take part in this session. I hope we don’t get bogged down in the other “old chestnut” about the difficulty of accessing materials on VLEs and the “control obsession” of many university IT departments.

Perhaps more on this after the conference

There have not been a lot of reponses as yet but it seems that I have not explained my question very well as it has been interpreted as asking whether e-learning promotes effective learning. Responses have then gone on to say things like “there is no evidence that e-learning improves learning” or “learning depends on how the tutor uses the technology not on the technology itself”.

I do not necessarily disagree with either of these statements but they have missed the intended thrust of my question. What I was asking was whether there was any possibility that the use of technology could actually encourage better pedagogy in the sense that tutors might do things that helped students to learn as a consequence of using technology.

For example if learning is enhanced by dialogue between the tutor (expert?) and the student, as Vygotsky would suggest, then does the use of such things as asynchronous discussion boards encourage more dialogue and therefore more learning?

Of course the availability of technology does not mean that it will be used at all, let alone effectively but I was interested in a discussion of the possibility that technology might make effective pedagogy easier to use and therefore give the student more opportunity to learn.

Perhaps more on this if, and when, I get more responses to my message.