Virtual Canuck

I much enjoyed the sessions at the second Canada Moodlemoot last week in my home town of Edmonton. Many of the sessions and all the keynotes (including my own) were distributed (often 60-70 remote participants, over 300 F2F) and recorded using Elluminate. Slides from 34 of the presentations are accessible on Slideshare with the tag Canadamoot.

Throughout the sessions issues relating to ownership, persistence, the ever expanding functionality of multi-tool LMS environments and the value of utilizing (in formal education) the host of evolving web 2.0 apps, were raised. All of these issues are exacerbated when we follow Martin Wheeler’s maxim to “make the formal informal and the informal formal” or perhaps we should just try to maintain the separate distinction of both as argued by Jennifer Maddrell?

I wanted to reflect in this post about the tension that arises when choosing the best facilities to host the interaction and learner contributions that define web 2.0 type education. There seems to be 3 major contenders for the honor of hosting and both pros and cons for each alternative. These are:

1. Hosting Behind the Garden Wall – hosting behind the password protection of the institution - 
2. Hosting in the Front Yard – hosting by the institution, but allowing access, visibility and comments from outside the institutional community.
3. Hosting on the Commons, or in Someone Else’s Yard – hosting by external commercial or non profit hosts.
   

1. Hosting Behind the Garden Wall. This is the current state of the vast majority of both online and campus based models of learning provided by formal educational institutions. The model fits well with institutional practice and culture as it extends online existing practices -courses take place behind the protected doors of campus based classrooms.  Institutions are used to being able to control who enters these classrooms, the time and nature of the activity that takes place within them and generally there is little contention as, quite clearly, the space belongs to the institution – trespassers can legally and quite easily be locked out. Recently institutions have been trying to facilitate increased access behind the wall for registered learners by creating single sign-ons and portal technologies allowing access and importation from services beyond the course, including library and institutional record access. In addition there is an ever growing number of tools built into modern LMS systems. Registrars use passwords to allow or deny access to courses, the resulting interactions and to restrict access to licensed learning materials. Institutional control also insures that services can be maintained and that changes in versions, services and resources are controlled by the institution – thus minimizing surprises and possible disruptions and maximizing control over the online environment within which education processes occur. The closed wall also protects the garden by use from unauthorized spammers and unregistered students (heaven forbid that those without prerequisites or course fees, be able to peer in). Finally the wall provides a safe space – long a requirement for open scholarly debate by faculty and for the development of the skills and “half-baked ideas” that students may be reluctant to share with the general public.

However at least two problems arise from this model. The first relates to ownership and persistence. Assuming that learners retain copyright on the works  that they contribute to the course (the default condition for any creative works), then it is hardly responsible behaviour for the institution to restrain or restrict access to or to destroy these works at the end of the class. Students may also want ongoing access to this work – perhaps for a formal e-portfolio development or for whatever purposes they choose to use their work. A second problem arises when public access and commentary related to  the work is essential for pedagogical efficacy. Two instances come to mind, the first is the capacity to invite guests to participate in the course. At many institutions this was an easy process prior to the LMS era (one opened the classroom door, or the teacher allowed access to the coures web site. Now, as often as not, registrar control over a single sign-on systems, makes giving guests access problematic, since the guest may or may not need access to a host of auxiliary services, some of which may not be licensed for non registered users. The second and more pedagogically challenging issue is that some educational artifacts rely on access and comment from external audiences to gain authenticity and value. Creating blogs with out access to external audiences and external comment, negates a great deal of their educational value. In addition wikis and other web 2.0 often have their pedagogical value greatly  enhanced by contribution beyond the course to other students at the institution and more importantly to other general and targeted audiences. More generally, almost all social software gains functionality and value as the number of users increases – restricting access only to registered students often reduces the value of the educational transaction.

Hosting in the Front Yard

An institution may license, create it own proprietary,  or use an open source application on its own servers to provide access to both registered and unregistered students and perhaps the general public- including search engines. Moreover, some tools (notably elgg) allow individual to set the read and the comment permissions individually on  the profile data, blogs, presentations, tagged resources and teaching and learning content, thus allowing individual users to determine the access to their content. Institutional hosting also can insure the integrity and persistence of the data produced, since this information is stored on servers owned by the institution -  thus eliminating the fear that student or faculty work will just disappear. Secondly, allowing individuals to control access and privacy insures that these are set to match the wishes of that individual. For some exposure to the wide world and related search engines is a terrifying thought, for others it is essential for building and maintaining a positive net presence. Finally, since the application is hosted by the institution, there are no advertisements or promotional links -except those added by the institution.

Disadvantages include the challenge of either allowing a single sign-one that may restrict guests, or forcing students to maintain two sets of passwords- one for secure institutional sites and the other for more user controlled ‘front lawn’ access.  Hopefully a day of Open ID will insure a solution to this “every location demands a different authentication”, which seems to define the day. Front lawn solutions also challenge system administrators who like to see applications as either within or outside of password protection- not ones that are half in and half out and carrying potential for infiltration and risk of unauthorized access. We have had unpleasant experiences with spammers creating offensive links and presence on at least two sites (IRRODL Journal and Canadian Institute for distance Education Research) that we operate on Athabasca University’s front lawn. A final disadvantage comes from the cost of technical support and hosting for applications that MAY work as well on someone else’s front lawn as on our own, without incurring institutional costs.

Hosting on the Commons, or in Someone Else’s Yard

Some of the most interesting sessions at Moodlemoot demonstrated linking of moodle sites to externally hosted resources (see for example the interesting links from a Moodle course created by University of Victoria staff at http://moodle.uvic.ca/course/view.php?id=1324). The gotoweb20.net site currently lists nearly 3000 web 2.0 applications, many of which can be harnessed for teaching and learning. No institution is able to match the innovation spurred on by web 2.0 developers eagerly trying to create the next killer web app. Thus, mixing and matching applications from learning innovators across the web insures maximizing innovation at low cost. The out sourcing of the development and hosting to others can be cost effective. However, eventually even web 2.0 apps have to generate money, so at some time the service will either include ads, charge fees, invent some new revenue stream, or go broke. – not scenarios that inspire construction of long term course offerings. Another advantage of external hosts is that students may already be familiar with and using these systems. For example, Facebook now hosts 26 different Athabasca University groups (most of which are not very active). This reminds me of bank robber Willie Sutton’s response to why he robs banks “I rob banks because that’s where the money is.” There has also been argument that students view these non-institutional sites as “their space” and don’t appreciate institutional interventions. However,  I don’t leave such suggestions uncontested, just as I retain the right to walk into a “student’ pub on campus.

Many of the business plans for these web 2.0 innovations are based upon selling out  (sooner or later) to a larger firm, and as we have seen even purchase by a secure company like Google or Microsoft, in no way guarantees that the application will survive or be included in other offerings from the purchasing company. Some institutions have legal or moral obligations to keep copies of student work that is used for assessment. This is an important issue as most assigned work in higher education must  be assessed or at least credited in some ways if it is to be taken seriously by many instrumental and time challenged  learners. In addition hosting of private information on servers outside of the country or that can be viewed by external agents such as the USA Department of Homeland Security, may violate learner privacy rights.

Summary. Despite the attractions of security (behind the wall solutions) and cost effectiveness (on someone elses’s yard), I conclude that there is no one best solution from the three I discuss above. Perhaps only dancing among the compleixty and simultaeously  hosting all three solutions in every fromal education program creates the necessary blend of security, innovation and public presence that defines quality education in networked era.

Larry Ragan, Director of Faculty development at Penn State’s World Campus has put his flip camcorder to good use over the past few months, cornering various ‘experts’, practitioners and generally experienced online teachers. He  asked each to describe one core competency for successful online teaching.

He has uploaded about 30 of these 1-3 minute videos to YouTube, including my own contribution COTS – Terry Anderson

They can all be accessed by typing “world campus cots” into the YouTube search window.

Thanks Larry, besides the useful tips and ideas for professional development activities, you’ve shown a cost effective way to document and aggregate emerging ideas and allowing some of the tacit knwoledge we are developing to become explicit and shareable.

I’m sitting in the Rio airport one leg down and three to go on my way home from the Canadian-Brazil International Seminar on Distance Education, just concluded in Goianas. The seminar featured presentations and lots of questions from about 200 Brazilian delegates and Canadian DEers Heather Kanuka, Griff Richards, Elizabeth Murphy and myself. I did two presentations, the first titled Distance Education: Past, Present and Future and a shorter panel presentation on quality in distance education.

Elizabeth was the star of the show, with her panel presentation in Portuguese. She also had her video camera out and captured a few minutes of my concluding comments on Web 2.0 implications for quality DE programming. The camera angle reveals my midriff  bulge that increased significantly after five days of fine Brazilian food and beer.  She uploaded the video to YouTube, demonstrating the ease with which video can be captured and shared with minimal editing.

Brazil is well on its way to developing a vibrant online distance education community with a consortium (Brazilian Open University consortium) supporting course development and learning centre support for a number of Universities. I have a lingering fear that the 30 person max cohort model of asynchronous online courses, may fall short of meeting the large demand for postsecondary education. But as pointed out by Brazilian colleagues, Brazilian culture is one of conversation and communication and perhaps the more cost effective “industrial model” used by most of the Open Universities in developing countries, is not a good match. I was always surprised how few students were carrying laptops (or at least have ready access to desktop machines) , which seems to be a prerequisite for the type of online distance education predominately practiced in Canada. This reinforces my interest in self paced courses that allow options for cooperation and collaboration using social software and promise more scalable models than the 30 student, teacher led cohort.

I feel less engaged in shameless self-promotion, with this announcement of the 9.3 issue of the International Review of Research on Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL), as Jon Baggaley was the editor in charge of this fine issue.

The issue features a video as well as text editorial by Jon, neither of which should be missed. As usual, each of the 8 main section articles is available in HTML, PDF and MP3 format- no excuse for listening to hot tunes on your IPOD, during this week’s commutes, when you could be engaged learning with some of the world’s best distance education researchers and theorists!! The issue also contains 4 book reviews and 2 “research notes” articles. As always, IRRODL articles are available to all as Open Access resources, distributed under a Creative Commons License. Don’t forget to register for a free email subscription, in case you miss my blog post announcing Issue 10.1 in a few months

EduBloggers, while likely be especially interested in the review of connectivism by Rita Kop & Adrian Hill and a research article on student motivation for blog use by Paul Henry Leslie and Elizabeth Murphy. Adminstrators will enjoy learning about re-engineering distance education processes in a great article by M’hammed Abdous and Wu He. Theorists will welcome both the constructivism article and one on the role of Transaction Theory by Sushita Gokool-Ramdoo as the major theoretical grounding in distance education.

Jon Baggaley has gathered a very international mix for this issue with articles from Japan, Iceland, Ghana, United Arab Emerits, USA and SE Asia – affirming IRRODL’s claim to be the most international of the distance education journals. My thanks to Jon for very ably editing the last two issues of IRRODL, while I was on sabbatical.

This issue also is the final one to be constructed by Managing Editor, Paula Smith. Paula has been the key factor in the timely production and innovations of IRROD over the past 6 years. She leaves to begin her own web 2.0 communications company. I am sure all those who have directly interacted with Paula during the review and publication of IRRODL articles will wish her well and join me in thanking her for her considerable efforts. For those whose only contact with Paula, was indirect through reading IRRODL articles, you have benefited from her keen eye for detail, publishing innovations and competent procurement and distribution of many important works during her tenure. Best wishes Paula, from all your IRRODL friends and subscribers.

Terry Anderson- Editor, IRRODL

My friend Jon Dron has finally nailed his own (and no doubt others) ideas about the collective nature of Wikipedia. His recent post notes:

• the individual actions that create most of the articles,
• the groups of administrative types who manage the overall infrastructure and set in place the algorithms that manage the look, feel and performance of the system
• the networks of mostly regular users responsible for maintenance and collaborative development of the articles and finally the way we mine
• the wiki as a collective resource.

I realize that some folks think this task of dividing and allocating ideas into categories is an arbitrary function that just gives rise to arguments (see for example Dave Snowden’s diatribe and his focus on ‘crews’.)

However I think our ‘Taxonomy of the Many’ classification system has value and defend it and classification systems in general in the rest of this post.
(more…)

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…)

From the AU News Room:

Dr. Terry Anderson’s appointment as Canada Research Chair in distance education has been renewed for five years. He was presented with the award at the Convocation ceremony on June 10.

Leslie Chivers, communications director for MP Brian Jean, presented Dr. Terry Anderson with the documentation to officially renew his Canada Research Chair in Distance Education.

The CRC program, which is funded by the Government of Canada, will provide $500,000 in research funding over the next five years. Canada Research Chairs are selected by a college of reviewers, composed of experts from around the world, to recognize exceptional researchers, acknowledged by their peers as having the potential to lead in their field. Terry was first awarded the chair in distance education in 2001.

For the past five years, he has been investigating the kinds of interaction that occur among teachers and students in online learning environments and how the degree of interaction impacts learning, satisfaction and completion rates. Over the next five years, his research will focus on unpaced learning and how social software tools can build communities of learning online despite the individual nature of the process.

“Distance learning has come a long way since the days of mail-out exams,” Terry said. “Today’s technology allows for the near-instantaneous exchange of material between teacher and student and between students. The Internet challenges educators to look for ways of improving teacher-student interaction while creating cost-effective learning experiences.”

“Enhancing and expanding distance learning methods through research is a continuing priority for Athabasca University,” President Frits Pannekoek said. The university has specialized in university-level distance learning for over 30 years. It employs a variety of electronic technologies as well as print materials and telephone-tutoring in its teaching. More than 85 percent of AU’s courses are now wholly or partly online.

“Dr. Anderson’s research in network technology is vital for Athabasca University because it speaks directly to our mandate,” President Frits said. “Athabasca University is one of the world’s leading distance education specialists. By focusing on innovation in learning, we continue to remove barriers and makes exemplary post-secondary education more accessible.”

Terry is Tops

The accolades for Terry Anderson keep on coming. In a letter from Dr. Michele Jacobsen with the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology (CJLT), she advises him of a prestigious recognition:

“It is my pleasure to inform you that you have been chosen to receive the 2006 CJLT Editor’s Award for your Volume 31, Issue 2, Spring 2005 article, Design-based Research and its Application to a Call Centre Innovation in Distance Education.

“The CJLT Editor’s Award is presented by the Editor of AMTEC’s Journal to an individual who has provided the most outstanding article to CJLT during that year. In making my recommendation for this award, I have relied entirely on feedback from the Editorial Board … your article emerged as the clear favorite.”

Terry’s article discusses a new methodology for distance education research and applied the model to work done with call centre innovation in AU’s School of Business.

In his acceptance comment at the CADE/AMTEC conference held in Montreal in May, Terry reminded delegates that at various times in his carreer he had submitted and had articles rejected from both CJTE and the CADE Journal, but that “one shouldn’t let such setbacks stop efforts to share the insights from one’s research and practice.”

Congratulations!

Another AU connection from the CADE conference: Liam Rourke, Ph.D. adjunct faculty in Centre for Distance Education and former Canadian Centre for Distance Education Research (CIDER) employee, now with Nanyang Technological University, won the Excellence in Graduate Research award.

Stephen Downes nicely ties ideas of ownership, control, learner centricity and choice from PLE’s into notions of the mutlimedia and readwrite nature of web 2.0. Great stuff! Wish I had been there!.

I was especially interested in his update of the Community of Inquiry (COI) model that Randy Garrison and I created some years ago. This model was done to help us conceptualize and measure learning communities that we were building using computer conferencing and analyzing the results with transcript analysis. This work has spawned quite a few studies and maybe just a few insights into text based and asynchronous learning (see communitiesofinquiry.com )

In particular the Venn diagram (below) we created has been used as a conceptual tool in many studies.

Stephen provides the first major edits to the model in 5 years as follows:

The COI exists within the larger context of the educational semantic web. I also envisioned the larger Net with all of its social, teaching and cognitive stimulation and support as being outside – but directly linking in to the “three presences”. Visualized as the whole the model immersed in the flow of the Net. Stepehn’s additions make that more clear and explicitly site the encumbusing effect of the Net on learning and living these days.

The second change substitutes ‘self’ for the ‘educational experience’ in the Centre of the COI. This is similar to the way in which a psychologist traditionally views the world through the lens of the individual psyche, whereas the sociologist tends to look at life through a social lens. We focused the COI model on the social because it was meant to explicate the social and paced environment emerging in CMC based formal education courses. In this context the ‘educational experience” was our focus and we assumed that creating a stimulating, supporting and challenging environment (by noting the three presences) would create an environment for the ‘self’ to grow and learn. I am sympathetic to the need for a great more individual freedom than afforded by most formal education systems. (see Anderson, 2006) But we also need to create and visualize the ways in which communities of inquiry and especially the type that people pay for (formal learning). The freedom of relationship in which learners are empowered to create the type of social relationship they find most beneficial is of critcial importance to many learners and too great an emphasis on the self, CAN diminish the energy needed to sustain powerful learning relationships Untangelling the social from the individual has been a very knotty challenge (see ideas on social cognition and especially Brown and Dugoid’s Social Life of Information.). I don’t have any problems seeing the individual at the centre of the community, but I’m not sure it really helps us to focus on the networked social learning that the model is designed to inspire and measure. Being explicit about the social expereince of a cohort based system and maximizing the input of various members of the community is a very powerful way to learn. The judicious use of social sofwatre will allow these groups to form more spontaneously and be supported over different boundaries of time and space, so there is a sense in which the individual will be able to create the mix of social and self that most meets their needs at any given moment. But many will still want to frame at least their formal learning in a social context

We haven’t been going to pubs and churches for hundreds of years for nothing, when it is cheaper and more convenient to drink (or worship) at home!!

Thanks for the great slides Stephen.

We sponsored a full day PreConference workshop on Distance Education Research sponsored by the Canadian Institute for Distance Education Research CIDER at the Canadian Association for Distance Education (CADE) and AMTEC conference held last week in Montreal. Most of the presentations are online at the CIDER site, but I wanted to discuss the use of PBWIKI to facilitate the workshop participant evaluation.

Unlike like a good adult educator, I had not gotten my act together to create and photocopy the traditional exit survey. However, I did have the email addresses of the registered participants, so I very quickly (maybe 20 minutes max.) set up a site (cidereval.pbwiki.com) at the free PBWIKI site and typed in 4 questions (the usual, what did you like, best, least, suggestions for next year) and invited reflection on the use of the WIKI for this evaluation.

I chose to make the site visible to others (check it out) but restricted editing capabilitity to those who had participated in the workshop. We had a very small learning curve as we learned (thanks Elizabeth Murphy) to place a line with single space between comments. This allowed each unique comment to each question to appear in a separate text book- looks very smart.

There are three obvious advantages to using a WIKI for this purpose.

1. Ease of creation and administration, lack of cost and saving of trees
2. Using the WIKI benefits not just the organizers, but the participants as well. Everyone gets to read the reactions of others and comment on them. The visibility allows participants to gauge their perceptions against those of others. This auto validation serves to enhance the reflective nature of the evaluation, forcing participants to not only present their own reactions but judge those reactions in comparison to those of others – questioning any discreancies.
3. Finally, the process is efficient for all participants as they don’t need to write what has already been posted, but rather can expand, contrast, discuss or illustrate thier own perceptions.

Of course I didn’t get the usual means from Likert scales assessing each presentation nor a sense of how many people actually edited or just read the evaluations, but that data seems to not really add much value to my plans for enhancing next year’s conference.

So the ease of use, extremely low cost (thanks PKWIKI) coupled with metacognitive nature of the reflection seems to make WIKI’s a very useful tool for this application.

Congratulations to the folks at Nuvvo a Canadian, employee owned company that has released an AJAX based, web service that allows ANYONE to create and manage their own e-learning system. And the cost is FREE (unless of course you want to charge people to take your courses) in which case the cost is $9.99 a month (but those are Canadian – not REAL dollars).

The service offers interactive (blogs, quizzes and emails) and dissemination tools to create and host a course. The program seems at first glance to not be dissimilar to Moodle or other LMS systems – except there is NO installation needed and the price is right.

The lowering of the e-learning creation and delivery entry barriers to $0 or $9.99 a month allows a whole new group of teachers and education delivery agents to enter the market -check out the list of currently available courses.

As i’ve long predicted, the era when quality elearning courses can only be produced, distributed and supported by an army of professionals is rapidly ending.

Terry