Rowland’s Blog about e-learning matters

I have just come across James Farmer’s post on his weblog about his submission for ASCILITE 2005. Apart from being a very useful and interesting article in its own right it has some excellent links to further information about e-learning and blogging. I am creating a reference here so that I can go back a read it further. I look forward to seeing the finished article after the conference.

I was looking at Chickering and Ehrmann’s paper IMPLEMENTING “THE SEVEN PRINCIPLES: Technology as Lever” and wondering how well it ties in with the concepts of e-learning 2.0.

Good practice:

I am trying to think about how blogging can “hit” these principles.

I am envisaging a series of blogs (one per student and one for the tutor?) with everybody using some software like bloglines to manage their reading.

I think this is clearly capable of hitting [1] and [2] by encouraging student-student and tutor-student interaction.

It can hit [3] if the students are asked to address a series of activities in the context of their field of learning.

[4] is encouraged if the activites allow students to feedback about their own learning experience and tutors to feedback to students their perceptions of how the students are learning.

[5] can be encouraged if the system is used outside formal sessions. Not sure how best to encourage this, clearly intrinsic motivation is best but some element of extrinsic motivation [ links to assessment] might be necessary, at least at first.

I am not so sure about how [6] and [7] can be hit explicitly as a consequence of using a blogging tool. Clearly it depends on how the tool is used with students but it seems to me that other on-line tools would need to be used allow diversity. Perhaps [6] can be encouraged by the way that the tutor responds to posts by students but a balnce needs to be struck between encouragement and inhibition in the tutor posts and comments.

I have just been taking a look at George Siemens ideas about connectivism on his blog. There are some interesting ideas here about the way that peolpe are perceived to learn. I particularly like the idea of giving each student a blog which is aggregated with something like bloglines so the the tutor can see how the students are developing and adapt the course/session accordingly. Interestingly although it comments on the advantages of the students seeing the ideas of their peers I still get a feeling of tutor control rather than the students be let go to find and evaluate their own material, as in the ideas of Stepen Downes (see previous blog entry).

On reflection perhaps students need to go through a supported phase where  material is supplied for them so that they can build up their experience, expertise and confidence enough to “have a go themselves”.

I totally agree with George’s comments that a VLE is a backward step and causes more problems than it solves. Of course the question is how do we get away from our manager’s desire to control everything? 

According to Stephen Downes e-learning 2.0 is all about the learners developing their own ideas from a variety of sources and sharing ideas in a community of learners. Learners will take charge of their own learning using such tools as blogs, wikis and podcasts. No longer will a tutor set up an e-learning course with a prescribed set of activities and a specific set of content. Learners will develop and find their own material, reshape it and share it with others. An essential technology to allow this is the RSS feed allowing learners to aggregate their information sources using a service like bloglines.

This is music to my ears as it is the approach I have been trying to develop on my web design module (COMP 3092) although I still have a long way to go. Some students are reluctant to “be set free” from fixed content and setting up a set of blogs takes time. Let’s see how it goes next semsester with a new group, each with their own blog.

I have been thinking about the relationship between a blog, a wiki, and a set of web pages.

It seems to me that I might use them in the following way:

• blog: to be used for brief reflections and reflecting upon action and ideas.
• wiki: to be used to expand these ideas and work on a more detailed discussion of the ideas. Essentially work in progress
• web: to archive the more mature ideas that have been developed on the wiki. Of course the web would also be used to work on issues that cannot easily be done on a wiki – probably those relating to web design.

There seems to be some confusion about the meaning of the term “blended Learning”.

Possible alternatives include:

• learning that includes more than one mode e.g. face to face and distance learning
• learning that includes more than one technology e.g. printed material and on-line learning but at different times
• learning that includes more than one mode or technology and links them together into a coherent whole.

I am intending to explore these ideas in more detail on my e-learning wiki as there is a lot more to this than can be included in a short post.

Having used blogs for the first seven weeks of the COMP3092 module I have a few reflections about how it went.

The main blog has been a useful way of getting feedback about student activity and their perceptions about their own learning. Asking students to respond to a post by using the comments facility has worked better than getting them to create post themselves. The latter has resulted in a lot of posts which has made it difficult to read as the structure tends to be quite disordered. On the other hand responding to a post with comments has helped to make things more ordered and easier to follow.

The group blogs have been less succesful and I need to explore the reasons. Is it because:

• students, for a variety of reasons, do not find time to do activities outside the taught session?
• as it is a group blog there is no real ownership and therefore little incentive to post?
• a blog is not a very good way to organise group collaboration? [Perhaps a wiki would be better]
• it is not directly assessed and therefore motivation is reduced?
• some other reason?

I thought I might gather together some of the useful stuff I found out about at the Edublogs day in London yesterday. Some of this might be better put in the blogroll or somewhere else in the sidebar but if so I will move it later.

Here is a link to my page on bloglines, however I find that I have two bloglines accounts, one under hotmail (the new one about blogs) and the other under tiscali. It is fairly easy to move between them by logging out and back in again.

Some of the slides and notes are on the edublogs blog and there is also useful information about blogging at technorati.

Links in the presentation include:

I had a problem with making the links open in a new window. Even editing the html did not work so I may have to right click and do it that way.

I might also take a look at using calendars at kiko.

There was some really interesting stuff discussed at the edublogs session in london today.

The two things I found were especially useful was the opportunity to set up a blog (this one ) using wordpress. This allowed me to see what the possiblities were for authorship so that I can set up a range of “posters” if I wish.

The second thing was the use of bloglines to set up a number of RSS feeds to blogs. Of course this means that I have to find some blogs I want to subscribe to and find the time to read the interesting posts.

A third thing, setting up my own RSS feed, I think I will leave to another time.