Rowland’s Blog about e-learning matters

Today I am in Wolverhampton taking part in a day on using podcasting.

So far we have had two sessions, both of which were very interesting but rasied some interesting issues - more about that later.

At the moment I am supposed to be learning to use Itunes and have downloaded the Ricky Gervais podcast - must do the same on my system when I get home.

Technology section of Itunes site

DiggNation looked to be a bit over the top so now I am looking at Go Digital which is a weekly broadcast on digital technology news - looks to be well worth a download.

While I listen to Go Digital I am downloading ITC: open Source which have IT conversations - after the adverts there was a presentation by “an expert in the field” - might be worth exploring further - take a look later.

Now I am looking at WebDevDesign- 21st Century: set up for web designers but seems to concentrate on technologies like Flash - may be of interest to keep up to date with some of the technologies but I will have to be selective.

Science Section

NOVA E=MC2 ideas about Einsteins contribution to science from different scientists - may be well worth a further look - casts are quite short

Then A NASA site Science@ NASA - short podcasts about astronomy - I am listening to Moon storms and it an interesting idea which links into the NASA technology experiments.

I am now going to http://itunes.stanford.edu/ to look at their material. If you go to their site with Itunes software open then their page goes directly into it. I went to Faculty Lectures and looked at the lecture on global warming - need to take a further look but seems to be a limited selection.

Audacity

Free download but need to download and install Lame as well to transfer to MP3. Need to locate the lame file from within audacity so remember where you have put it. Can add in Creative Commons music for educational purposes.

I have used audacity to make a podcast but I can’t find how to put it on my blog. So I put in on my e-learning wiki. Now I will try to link to it.

Looked at text readers like ReadPlease and Textaloud - Google “text to speech”

I have just taken a look at the blog of proximal development and read an interesting blog about the impact on students of having a blog taken away. It also mentioned a piece of open source blog software that might be worth a look. [Though not if you are in France :-)]

I have also added a link to my web site under the My links section in response to some comments I read recently on Stephen Downes’ blog about bloggers who do not say who they are.

I have taken a look at the Edublogs awards and might well have a go at voting if I can work out how to do it.

It would be interesting to know what the criteria for selection were. Many of the entries are so different from one another that it is difficult to work it out from looking at the blogs themselves. 

I have just been looking at the JISC pages on e-learning pedagogy which contain some useful information. The aim of the e-Learning Programme is to improve the quality of e-learning across the post-16 and higher eduaction sectors. The Programme focuses on four areas: e-learning and Pedagogy; Technical Framework and Tools for e-Learning; Innovation and Distributed e-Learning.

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

Found some interesting information on Josie’s blog about the Learner’s Charter for a personalised learning environment which is a publication from Nesta Futurelab.

There is some excellent discussion here about how things might go if learner’s are given a flexible and personalised learning environment to work with rather than the manager centred systems that we have at the moment. In fact it might be a useful advance if tutors in higher education were allowed the freedom to use their own learning tools rather than being constrained by a central system that fails to do a good job for anybody.

Unfortunately many tutors seem to like the ability of these systems to give some control to the tutor and take it away from the learner. I was at an event last week where a tutor had his students send material to him and he loaded it onto the system. As there is a presentation area available on the system where the students could upload their own material, though it can be difficult to use, I am not sure whether this was censorship or paternalism.

I hope that we can all go with the idea that anything we put out for others to see is work in progress and we welcome supportive evaluation and critique. That is the way I work as I don’t pretend to be an expert in anything but I have some ideas that I would like to investigate and to share with others. Not that anybody reads this blog

Things have been very hectic since I went to the conference and this is the first time I have had to write on this blog. My session seemed to go well and I had some positive feedback from a number of participants. Every body had an opportunity to discuss possible advantages of e-learning but the concept of e-learning improving pedagogy may have been a step too far. There was not a lot of time in a 45min session to do a lot but hopefully participants went away having been encouraged to think about the concept.

One interesting idea which came out of the discussion was whether the attempt to use e-learning in your teaching, because it is a “new” and “unfamiliar” environment, encourages you to rethink your pedagogy. Certainly the feedback you get from using things like conferencing will allow you to see, to some extent, what learning might be going on. The first time you do this it can be a bit of a shock and this revelation that your students are not learning as much as you hoped can encourage a rethink.

As for the rest of the conference there were some interesting ideas from some of the sessions:

Finally I was reminded about the the two SEDA staff development “modules” on e-learning which I need to explore further. They are Exploring learning technologies which is a subset of Embedding learning technologies and both are part of the SEDA Professional Development Framework.

I need to think through how my staff development e-learning modules can be integrated with this framework.

First thing tomorrow morning I am off to give a session at the SEDA conference. I suspect that there will be no access to the Internet at the conference so it will be either find an internet cafe or not blog for a couple of days.

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

I have just found the blog amalgamation software at suprglu. I am using it at the moment in experimental mode just to amalgamate some of my blogs. However I wonder whether it might be a useful tool to use with students in a module. If each student had a module blog which was amalgamated using Suprglu then they would be able to see all the posts in one day all together and it might be better for the purpose than Bloglines. I suppose it depends on how quickly Suprglu updates. I am going to publish this post and then go to suprglu to see what happens.

Just tried it and have found that suprglu takes some time to refresh. It says in their blog that they do not have a huge server capacity at the moment so it will not refesh pages very quickly. At the moment it looks as if there ise not going to be an easy way of looking at module blogs in real time so I will either have to wait until the refresh situation improves or I will have to devise a methodology that uses the blog amalgamation tools over the longer term. It would still be useful to have a place where all the blogs come together even if the refresh rate is a bit slow.

As I am running a session at the SEDA conference to explore people’s conceptions of whether e-learning can help to promote good pedagogy I thought I would ask the question on an educational mail list to which I belong.

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.

I am leading a session at the SEDA conference next week about whether e-learning encourages good pedagogy and this made me think about what I was going to say to the group in the way of introduction. So I thought I would try out some ideas here.

I am Director of the Learning and Teaching Centre at the University of Worcester and I also teach web design which puts me in the privileged position of working in a teaching room where all the students have computers.

I first started using computers with students in the 70’s, at first as part of extra-curricular activities and then as part of my core teaching. There was no web so much of the work involved simulations on standalone machines.

It was not until the advent of the web in the early 90’s that I was able to use networked tools easily. It was then that I started to use a web server, which I set up myself, and a conferencing system, BSCW from the University of Heidelberg.

I was able to set up systems where students communicated with one another and with me using asynchronous conferencing and I provided information via web pages. All of this was relatively open and I could join anybody I liked to the system.

The University then set up its own system for BSCW and gradually the controls were applied so that participants were limited to registered students and relatively complex procedures were set up for use of the facilities. This culminated in 2003 with the setting up of WebCT which took control away from even the tutor let alone the student and causing a serious degradation in the flexibility of use of on-line systems.

Since then I have been experimenting with the use of blogs as a communication tool and the use of open web pages as information sources in an attempt to avoid the issues of students not being able to access learning materials because they could not log on to WebCT.

I am now in the process of extending use of blogs and wikis to enhance and encourage student learning.