Virtual Canuck

With all the buzz about blended learning coming from our campus based colleagues, it got me thinking about the value of “blended learning” in distance and online courses. I realize that there are a number of different ideas and “blends” associated with the term ‘blended learning’, but it seems the common institutional and educational use is to describe blending online and Face-to-Face(F2F) education programming. What strikes me as especially salient is the blend of synchronous and asynchronous learning activities and opportunities. The increase in availability, coupled with reduction in cost for online forms of synchronous (audio, video, text and immersive) conferencing, got me thinking. Maybe what is critical in the F2F experience is the immediacy and social presence associated more with synchronous activities than with the face-to-face, body language enhanced gathering. And maybe this provides a promising theoretical rationale for 0nline blended learning.
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In a very interesting post titled Social Network Transitions, Fred Stutzman discusses the often lemming-like move of the masses from one social site to another. Of particular interest is Fred’s distinction between between object and ego based social software sites. Fred writes “An ego-centric social network places the individual as the core of the network experience (Orkut, Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster) while the object-centric network places a non-ego element at the center of the network” (Flickr, Digg, del.icio.us etc.).

In our attempt to design and build education social software sites to support distance education students, I wonder what combination of ego-centric versus object-centered site is most appropriate? Obviously artifacts created during learning activities are important components of any educational social software (ESS) application. Thus, the capability to upload, share, version, collaboratively edit, and add multimedia to documents is critical and aligns our needs with other object-centric network sites. The most prominent of these artifacts will likely be the e-portfolio, in which learners aggregate, synthesize and reflect upon their learning. Like other object sites, ESS should allow the owner to set access and edit rights to the objects that they wish to display in their personal network space at the site. These rights should be categorized such that classes of people (those enrolled in the same course, friends, the wide open net and even personally defined classes such as “my relatives”) can easily be created, managed and assigned to indovidual and sets of learning artifacts. In fact the object-centered collections already owned by learners, such as lists of favorite references (CiteULike) should be easily linked to and manipulated within ESS applications. (more…)

David Snowden in an interesting post titled Aggregative or emergent identity? Rethinking Communities

(thanks for the pointer Stephen Downes ) argues that we need more discussion on the aggregations of individuals to note the emergent capacity of aggregations – beyond those of individual members being connected. He notes the confusion and multiple meanings around aggregations such as communities, networks, groups, teams. crews, collectives, cliques etc. etc. While acknowledging the need for further discussion, I don’t think his suggestion of adding ‘crews’ to the lexicon of aggregations helps us much.

According to Snowden a crew’s unique features are:

• When the crew assembles the individuals go through a set of rituals (for example the pilots checklist) which instantiate the requirements of that role in the individual. They also frequently wear uniform which adds another ritual to the process.
• The crew is only expected to perform for a limited period, and then moves into a layoff period before it reassembles (but almost certainly with different individuals). This limited period is key to the success of the collective capability of the crew and the subordination of individual qualities to those of the role and the role interactions.

According to the taxonomy of groups, networks and collectives developed by Jon Dron and myself, a ‘crew’ is just another name for a group, much as ‘team’ is often used for a group in business contexts. I like the nautical inference of ‘crew’, but think the distinction implied by the two criteria above fit as well for many of the forms of ‘group’ that Jon and I (and others) have addressed. For example, the classic education group – called a class, also goes through a series of rituals (from first meeting introduction, to the end of class party), members may well wear uniforms or some type of identification, and is usually time bound. (more…)

On the train yesterday, through the beautiful fall colored Swiss countryside, I was delightfully surprised to speed through the small town of Elgg – It is located between Zurich and St Gallen. It seems the kind of town you’d feel comfortable owning a pet Jersey cow but I image you could get by with a St Bernard dog or two as well. Unfortunately, I wasn’t prepared with my camera, so the opportunity to capture a shot and share it with the ELGG community evaded me! But  ELGG exists!

As an aside, we see online trumping the real world as I looked for a photo of Elgg Switzerland in Flickr and found 1476 tagged photos, but after looking at the first 20 screens full of thumbnails, I saw many pictures of elgg screenshots, elgg gatherings and Ben and Dave, but alas no REAL Elgg photos – so you just have to take my word for it that it exists!! Maybe the real world Elggians better get a photo up before they are eclipsed by the online world!

Terry

Here at Athabasca University we are finally getting serious about ELGG and bringing our instance (Me2U) inside the single signon set of apps we provide to all staff and students (portal, library, Moodle, etc.). This means all new login names and thus all data from the old version is lost (sigh…..)

It is annoying having to re enter data in my profile for even my own system, much the less the hassle of doing so for any of the other 1618 Web 2.0l apps (up from 1400 last month) listed now on www.go2web20.net

This frustration lead me check out the blogsphere for any progress on profile portability. I liked Rolf Skyberg’s rant that “It’s not that Facebook hasn’t done some new and clever work in opening their platform, but they haven’t gone far enough to offer the next-gen interoperable experience. People want more, and FB has given them yet another, site to maintain, monitor, and fret over while still locking it away in a gated community.”

Hunter Nield at socio media added some technical detail on the issue with some of the emerging solutions. He described micro-formats and the forever just-around-the-corner Friend of a Friend. But is seems Web 2.0 architects are more interested in gathering eyeballs than in creating the glue to stick apps together and reducing redundancy. Until this happens our capacity to engage with new applications is severely limited due to the ever consuming time pressures needed to establish a presence in every new application and domain. (more…)

I’m tempted to make this post just another in a growing list of whines from the edublog community about what I don’t like about SecondLife. I could talk about the terrible support – prepare to restart the whole process of building your avatar if you ever forget your password. Or I could note the disappointment when 20% of your class can’t even use the system due to hardware or connectivity restrictions. I could also whine about challenges of keeping any sense of social order, or facilitating a collaborative walk around in SL without loosing half the group, but some of these complaints are due to my own newbie status and lack of practice.

Mostly, I’d like to note that SL doesn’t allow users to synchronize their real life and their second life. For some this is just fine and the reason they go to great lengths to develop a fully featured secondlife. However as an educator, I want my students to develop insights, explore new information and apply this learning in their real lives. (more…)

Scott Wilson notes some concerns with the “lack of clarity” between the three entities of the Many that Jon Dron and I have been discussing and blogging about.

An educational taxonomy or a model gains its pragmatic value by the extent to which it helps practitioners and online learning researchers develop, implement and assess learning contexts, environments and activities. This value is enhanced by clarity and lack of overlap and redundancy in the elements of the model. I won’t argue that our work is the “definitive work” but, I continue to believe that it is useful to think of social and networked learning to be contextualized by these three broad domains. A quality learning experience might be focussed at one level of the many, but learners gain greatest value by exploiting the affordances of all three. In fact one could also argue that an educational experience is not complete unless it exploits the affordances of groups, networks and collectives. (more…)

Jon Dron and I were pleased to see Stephen Downes’ comments on our proposed “Model of the Many“. The model focuses on the communication among the many at three levels of granularity the group, the network and the collective.

We’ve been trying to map the model to current and projected Net based learning activities and interventions. Stephen suggested that we could do better in labeling the largest granular level, which we referred to as the “collective’. In this post I try to further define the characteristics and affordance’s of the “collective” and then argue why the term collective works – at least until someone can help us with a better term!!
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Jon Dron and I have been having fun developing a paper for ELearn in which we’ve been wrestling with the distinctions between three granularities of social software. In the process it has helped me to clarify Stephen Downe’s distinctions between groups and networks, the way that certain tools seem optimized for different levels of these granularities (for example blogs are better for networks than for groups) and it has helped us to create a rationale for use of collectives in formal education. Jon has defined the three granularities of Social Learning 2.0 in a recent blog posting.

In this post I provide graphic overviews of the three followed by a table comparing the three applications for educational use. (more…)

I have been waiting for a couple of years now for a work that successfully ties together the emerging social software/web 2.0 scene with established theory and practice of distance education. Unfortunately, I didn’t write it myself. However, Jon Dron has created the first in what I assume will be a series of writing, research and experimentation (his and the work of many others) that helps us harness the affordances for enhanced learning provided through a ubiquitously connected lifelong learning population, an abundance of learning content and judicious use of agents to make it easy.

In a nutshell, Control and Constraint in E-Learning explores how to move beyond distance education’s roots as independent study, through the tight cohorts of students moving lockstep through teacher orchestrated activities, to a context in which ‘many learners, loosely joined” can have the freedom and choice to co-create their own learning. A tall order this, but one that is very much coming to a computer near you! (more…)