Virtual Canuck

I was pleased to read a recent article that creates a framework for use and adoption of blogs in higher education.The article is  Kerawalla, L., Minocha, S., Kirkup, G., & Conole, G. (2009). An empirically grounded framework to guide blogging in higher education. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 25(1). I normally wouldn’t link to or blog about the article as it is walled in a proprietary garden, but the special issue on Social Software and learning in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning is  available (at least today) as  a free sample.

The Framework consists of general considerations related to the functionality of the blog, its use relationship with other course tools and its role in pedagogy. The Framework then presents a raft of question to guide planning and implementation. The Framework is a good start and asks many of the detailed questions that will lead to much better, or at least more thoughtful implementation of blogs in formal courses.

I like a framework or a model to be simple enough to serve as an easily remembered mnemonic to guide practice, rather than a never quite complete, but often too many, list of questions.  So brainstorming a way to talk about the complexity of implementing a blog innovation, takes me back to Durkheim’s (suicide theory) and the use by Tinto and many other educators to talk about the need for academic and social integration to explain healthy living and persistence in formal courses. The integration factors also resonate with Everett Rogers characteristics of successful interventions – one of the main factors of which is Compatibility or how easily the innovation meshes with or integrates with other salient features of the learning context.

My implementation model includes: (more…)

In my recent talks, I’ve been reminding audiences of the green effect and the potential for reducing carbon emissions and energy consumption by choosing distance as opposed to campus based education. Ironically, I’ve often had to fly on a carbon footprint expanding airplane, to get to these conferences, but that is another irony that escapes few- especially my wife.

Although it seems obvious that studying at home will reduce transportation costs, there are many other ways in which participation in courses requires energy expenditure – from the extra costs of heating the house while you stay up late doing online work, to the cost of running the computer versus reading a book.  It can become very complicated and challenging to quantify the differences. Thus, I was delighted to read the 2005 report from the Open University of the UK, that quantitatively addressed this issue. The report Towards Sustainable Higher Education: Environmental impacts of campus-based and distance higher education systems by R Roy, S Potter, K Yarrow, & M Smith is extensive (56 pages) and covers detail down to how many sheets of paper are consumed by both teachers and learners in a typical course delivered full or part time on campus or via learning or print based distance. The results are “that the distance learning courses examined on average involved nearly 90% (87%) less energy consumption and produced 85% fewer CO2 emissions per student per 10 CAT points than the conventional campus based university courses”  The summary chart below illustrates the savings in energy consumption per 10 CATs (a British course unit – 360 CATs required for a degree).

The graph and commentary in the text notes that e-learning has a slightly lower impact on the environment than print based courses. “E-learning courses appear to offer only a small reduction in energy consumption and CO2 emissions (20% and 12% respectively) when compared to mainly print-based distance learning courses.” This was not a big surprise as I think the benefits of e-learning over print based relate more to pedgagogical flexibility, access to additional resources, groups, networks and collectives and access to multi-media than to energy savings alone.

I look forward to a follow up study that looks at blended learning models in which increases of online learning are paired with potential reduction in campus based activities. This will likely result in energy efficiencies, but if the students are forced to travel to campus everyday anyways for some ‘blended component” the energy or CO2 costs may actually increase as compared to straight campus based programming.

Congratulations to the the authors and the Open University for taking the time and effort to quantify the important envrionmental impacts of our choices of learning modality.

Defining terms like Open and Distance Education has consumed the interest, and resulted in many publications for vocabulary squabblers and some noted educational academics over the years. The rapid evolution of technologies and their adaptation and adoption within the learning and education communities provides opportunities for yet more of this discourse and this post, will likely be yet one more. It is intriguing to note that recent posts on the history of open education have completely neglected the earlier debate and begin with the relatively recent Open Educational resource movement. (more…)

Thanks to Stephen and Graham Atwell, I discovered a fascinating development in the Personal learning Environment development. To date most of the PLE implementations I have seen have been aggregators of RSS feeds, with not much more functionality than a iGoogle or Pageflake portal. The paper “Designing for Change: Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments” by Fridolin Wild, Felix Mödritscher and Steinn Sigurdarson introduces (to me) a markup language by which designers or learners create scripts of learning activities that in room time mashup a host of Web 2.0 tools that allow individual or groups of learners to create their own learning context and content. In the process, of course, they gain skills of media production, increase their social capital by expanding and deepening personal networks and create archives of artifacts available for retrieval by themselves and others.

The background to the paper overviews the importance of the creation of an adaptable context that the learner creates to support and retain their own learning. They note ” It is not about learning design it is all about learning environment design”. By letting learning emerge from rich inquiry, collaboration and publication tools, learners are able to play active roles in the creation and sustenance of their own learning contexts. These skills, the contexts and the products of course do not end when the course LMS site is closed, but rather become life long learning attributes and capacity. Thus the creation of a rich learning environment that the student creates, owns and continuous to build with is the major learning outcome, the specific knowledge domain outcomes are useful but less important outcomes in a life long learning context.

Wild, Mödritscher & Sigurdarson Iintroduce the Learner Interaction Scripting Language (LISL) which they argue is less cumbersome and more easily configured by users to create and exchange learning activities. The model derives from activity theory with roles for tools, actors, activities and actors and grows from a bottom up perspective as opposed to the top down perscriptions associated with IMS Learning Design. These are scripted and supposedly a run time engine mashes various applications (such as Wikis, schedulers, link aggregators, mindmap tools etc in real time. The activities can saved and edited in chunks the size of patterns.

While the article is not detailed on the availability of a run time engine to execute the scripts, the work seems very promising. Beyond the pedagogical insights of environmental development, is the promise of learning activities that can EASILY be created, shared, contextualized and exchanged.

Thanks to the DownLoad Squad I bumped into a very interesting tool to mine collective knowledge. Avanoo is a social software tool that allows members to query others through simple Likert like scale items. Nothing too new here except that everyone gets to view and segment the results according to demographic criteria including gender, nationality, age, income level etc. For example I can create a questions and then determine if Canadians answered that question differently than non-Canadians, men differently than women or the wealthy differently from the poor. If I want I can augment my response to any question with a comment or explanation. Again nothing too new here, except that this type of analysis and results are usually costly to gather and remain the property of the survey owner, not the recipients.

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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…)

During the last eight years of his life the Canadian media theorist Marshal McLuhan worked on developing and validating four “Laws of Media” He argued that every new media Enhances through new affordances, Obsoletes through improvements in form, function and cost; Retrieves older patterns of behaviour and Reverses when over stressed into older, non functional patterns.

This work was published posthumously in text in 1988 as the Laws of Media: The New Science and covered in the 2002 NFB video McLuhan’s Wake. According to McLuhan these four immutable laws effect all media and understanding them helps us to fathom both the intended and the unintended, the positive and the negative aspects of every media. McLuhan was fond of challenging readers and audiences to think of a medi that did not demonstrate all four laws or to think of the 5th law or argue why they should be reduced to only three.

Dale Hunshler (2001) overviews Mclulan’s wider theories and notes how the web itself, illustrates the four laws of Media.

In this post I extend that work by very briefly applying McLuhan’s Laws to Personal Learning Environments (PLEs).

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I am certainly not the first to ponder the relative merits of blogging inside or outside of education’s closed garden walls (see Bill Ives Is Blogging Inside the Firewall an Oxymoron?) However, I’ve recently seen a couple of presentation by University innovators using blogging – but from behind the institutional firewall and password protection – inside the ‘garden wall’. This of course resonates with some of the large LMS (VLE) builders who are adding blogging to their suite of (closed) applications. But, the presentations left me with a skeptical notion of the value of this learning activity, especially given the availability of threaded discussions which are often much easier to use and more familiar to both students and teachers as a blog.

A significant value of blogs and most other social software is the capacity to extend and develop networks beyond the limited circle of ones existing place-bound friends. Social software can of course be used to enhance or support place-bound communication, but it is sort of like driving a car on the sidewalk – gets you to destinations, but its slow, bumpy and often inconvenient to others.

So why do teachers develop learning activities behind the ‘garden wall’? (more…)

I’ve been on the road (well make that airplane, train and ‘coach’) for most of the past 6 weeks having gratefully responded to offers from colleagues to present keynote talks at a number of interesting academic conferences. I’m not nearly prolific enough to hit the blog compose button after each event, so am summarizing my discoveries and experiences here and linking to the major presentations now posted on slideshare. (more…)

Nancy White has done a great series of postings where she creates a simple taxonomy of three types of blogs – single blog centric, topic centric and community centric. (more…)