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POT Cert Week 22: POT Cert, PELeCON and Personal Learning Networks #potcert #pelc13

It’s neat that the title of this week’s POTCert class is Personal Learning Networks (PLNs), seeing as I’m off to PELeCON this week and looking forward to meeting up with people that I consider to be a significant part of my PLN. 🙂

pelecon 4

I’ve mentioned before on this blog how it was a combination of Steve Wheeler’s, or rather @timbickteeth‘s “trivial and terrific tweets” that alerted me to the potential of Twitter, but I’ve not mentioned before that I was “Jenny-No-Mates”, the only student on an on-campus taught masters course about technology who desperately needed some classmates to learn with. And that’s what a PLN gives you, class mates to learn with!!

Connecting with people online has enabled me to go on and build a really useful PLN. How otherwise would I have learnt of Lisa Lane’s open online course, Pedagogy First?

Coming back to which, one of the readings for this week’s class is an article by Gardner Campbell (2009), entitled A Personal Cyberstructure, where he calls for students to be instructed and supported in developing the infrastructure of the Web to develop a personal learning environment of their own. This resonated with me completely; in fact, I was thinking of calling this post something like “this be the verse”, that is, until I realised that I could get what I think is commonly referred to as a “twofer”, and use it as a precursory blog to PELeCON. Anyway, here’s what Gardner Campbell says,

in building that personal cyberstructure, students would not only acquire crucial technical skills for their digital lives but also would engage in work that provides richly teachable moments ranging from multimodal writing to information science, knowledge management, bibliographic instruction and social networking. Fascinating and important innovations would emerge as students are able to shape their own cognition, learning, expression and reflection in a digital age, in a digital medium. Students would frame, curate, share and direct their own “engagement streams” throughout the learning environment.

It sounds like a pretty awesome digital learnscape to me, and which just so happens to be the strap-line for this year’s conference as well. What’s more though, Gardner Campbell goes on to say that educators should lead by example, “students must be effective architects, narrators, curators, and inhabitants of their own digital lives”. Here. Here. That’s why, in the last year, I’ve heeded the advice of Martin Weller regarding “The Virtues of Blogging as a Scholarly Activity” and I’m trying to go some way towards Alec Couros‘ vision of “Teaching and Learning in a Networked World”, both of which form part of this week’s reading as well. Incidentally, Alec Couros spoke at last year’s conference. At the time though, I didn’t really understand his message. I just recall that he was passionate about taking photos of his everyday life and sharing them online. I get it now, it’s about promoting openness and taking charge of your own digital identity… and, I’d also like to think, your own destiny as well.

Entitled, “Taking Advantage of New Opportunities”, the final chapter of the POT Cert course textbook, which is also signposted reading this week, starts

Because online education is a relatively new enterprise, you have an opportunity to make a positive contribution to this growing field. To take full advantage of this new opportunity, you would do well to keep yourself informed of the latest trends and issues and to continually improve your skills and knowledge.

Well, that’s what I’m endeavouring to do. You see, I live in a beautiful, yet ultimately peripheral location in rural Ireland, but I’d like to think that I could expand my horizons and take my passion and insight for digital literacies and social learning online, so if I may, I’d like to share a few slides with you (1 min), introducing myself and where I live. Originally, I intended to put this together as my digital introduction for #etmooc, but I never got round to finishing it on time, so hopefully it will serve nicely as my networking introduction to what looks like is going to be a great conference.

As always, I’ll keep you posted #pelc13 #POTCert

References:

Campbell, Gardner (2009) A Personal Cyberstructure. Available at: http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/personal-cyberinfrastructure

Weller, M. (2010) The Virtues of Blogging as a Scholarly Activity. Available at: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Virtues-of-Blogging-as/131666/

Ko, S. & Rossen, S, (2010) Teaching Online: A Practical Guide, Third Edition. Taylor & Francis. Kindle Edition.

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POT Cert Week 18: whether to take an off the peg LMS or cobble one together, that is the question #potcert

Essentially, this week’s POTCert task is to learn about a course/learning management system (CMS/LMS) “with which you are not familiar”. Well, in my case that won’t be difficult because in truth I’m not really that familiar with any of them. Not as a learner, and certainly not as a tutor.

In week 2, when I set out on this journey, I was asked to think about where I was in terms of getting started. At the time, I wanted the focus of my teaching, or facilitation, to be on discussion and on group activities, so I offered the following comments:

I’m investigating the types of social learning platforms that are currently available to me. I’ve seen Buddypress in action and really like how this could be used to support my project but despite Ko and Rossen avowing that you don’t need to be a computer expert, I don’t have the skills or technological capacity to ‘self-host’ it. I’ve also heard of Instructure Canvas, which can be hosted in the cloud, but again it looks like it’s designed for a bigger project than the one I envisage. Therefore, I’m going to have to explore how I can make it all hang together using a combination of familiar discussion and collaboration applications like Facebook, Blogger or WordPress and Google Docs. Wish me luck.

At this point, Ted Major jumped into the conversation and offered me his positive insights of using Canvas. So, I investigated the platform and went ahead and signed up for a free tutor account. Since then, I’ve made a start at getting familiar with the platform, and outlining the course structure and loading content.

I made the point in week 3 that I wasn’t coming from the position of “converting” a f2f course and that I wanted my course design to reflect my pedagogical goals; I was keen to avoid what Lisa refers to as “insidious pedagogy“. That is, where the parameters of the technology influence the pedagogical choices available. So, in this respect the Canvas platform seemed to offer much of what I was looking for, everyday web tools readily integrated into the platform along with a philosophy that claims to support “flexible pedagogy”.

So, to get a feel for the platform in operation, I recently participated in a couple of open courses hosted on the Canvas Network, Mooc Mooc and Social Media. The classes were entirely different in their approach, indeed it’s probably not really fair to compare them. However, if I recall this correctly, it seems that one was designed to be perceived as operating on the open web with Canvas providing the underpinning  course architecture, whilst the design of the other promotes the Canvas platform in the first instance and then looks out onto the web. Like I say, it’s not really fair to compare them, and for reasons that I’m not totally sure of, the Mooc Mooc course, for me, wasn’t a total success. Maybe it was over ambitious given that it was only a week long course, which at heart sought to represent something of the freedom found on the web. On the other front, I found the Social Media course to be somewhat claustrophobic. It seems straight-jacketed into the LMS, and despite advocating the use of participatory social media tools and allowing for some group activities, it’s pedagogy is largely tutor centred.

At this point, I might add that since the start of the course I think my pedagogical goals have altered somewhat and become more wide ranging. Initially, I declared that I wanted my focus to be on discussion and group activities and that I was investigating a suitable supporting “social learning” platform. However, thinking more closely, what do I actually mean when I say “social learning” platform. It’s here that I recall Harold Jarche saying, “social learning is how work gets done in the network era“. I’m increasingly coming to think of social learning as learning in networks. It’s probably why the following tweet caught my eye this week, and resonates so loudly.

In addition, the terms that I initially used, “discussions” and “group activities”, don’t now seem to be as network facing as the terms “conversations” and “collaboration”.  Consequently, I’ve arrived back at my original quandary in relation to the optimum choice of platform and I’m wondering if I might be better served as Miguel Guhlin suggests by using Google Apps, or any collection of web based tools, and “cobbling together an LMS” of my own.

Cobbling together an LMS
Cobbling together an LMS

Although this sounds a bit daunting, I can appreciate how such a move would serve to facilitate the new set of pedagogy required for teaching and learning on the web as well support the principle of heutogogy that’s necessary for the development of self-directed learning, which Miguel Guhlin also refers to.

Image Source:

Valentyna Sagan (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

References:

Lane, L. (2009) Insidious Pedagogy. How Course Management Systems Impact Teaching. Available at: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2530/2303

Jarche, H. (2013) Social Learning in Business. Available at: http://www.jarche.com/2013/02/social-learning-in-business/

Guhlin, M. (2013) Using GoogleApps as a Free #LMS. Available at: http://www.mguhlin.org/2013/02/using-googleapps-as-free-lms.html

Guhlin, M. (2013) Cobbling Together an LMS: Towards Self-Directed Learning. Available at:  http://www.mguhlin.org/2013/02/cobbling-together-lms-teachers-work.html

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A review, or two, giving the heads up for social learning designs #oldsmooc

Well, #OLDSMOOC draws to a close this week with time being given over to look back and learn something of participants’ learning narratives or design narratives and to review the course itself. Over all, for me, the course has been a great success, but that’s not to say it’s not been without its trials and tribulations, most of which seem to stem from the constraints of the Cloudworks platform, used by the course as a central hub and repository for content, and the challenge of designing for collaboration and the successful establishment of social contacts on which this collaboration might be built. So, in order to throw some light on these aspects, I’m going to use this plenary session to look back and review the “social” design of the course and take a closer look at Sheila MacNeill’s prototype, which addresses the problem of visualizing networks and content within Cloudworks.

In week 5, the concept of prototyping for teaching and learning was explained as being part of the iterative process within “design science”, that is “the need to build on what others have done and learned, to experiment and test, and then use this to improve the design” (Laurillard, 2012). Well, that’s certainly what Sheila did.

Seeking a better way “to make Cloudworks more friendly and show how some of the social data there could be used to give users a different view of what they’re doing, and maybe help them to make more connections and maybe use Cloudworks a bit more”, Sheila used Balsamiq to prototype her envisaged Cloudworks make over.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/59403361 w=500&h=299]

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I think Sheila has done a terrific job here. The prototype, and her demonstration, clearly shows the advantages of making these modifications. It shows how the platform might be used to provide alternative views highlighting the relationships amongst networks and amongst content. Used in this way, like Sheila, I can really see how Cloudworks has the potential to be used more widely, not just as a content repository, but as an individual’s portfolio/personal working space across a range of learning events, and so support their lifelong learning. Clearly, like Richard Site says in his article, “working with prototypes can point out deficiencies and reveal unseen opportunities”. Sheila’s design modification, and rationale for doing so, has been warmly received. Indeed, one of the original Cloudworks developers has responded positively in the discussion forum, adding “what would be most useful for me is to know the exact navigation issues that folk are having difficulty with: what exactly are you having problems finding and how are you trying to look for it at the moment?”

It’s here that comments from learners, or end users, can be illuminating. Kelly Edmonds says, “I don’t find Cloudworks intuitive and it has hindered my ability to jump into the social aspect of this MOOC”, and Paige Cuffe‘s response also seems particularly illuminating when she says, “I really like your idea of organising around people to whom you are connected through interaction – it would greatly facilitate conversation within this environment rather than driving discussions out of Cloudworks into a plethora of spaces (twitter, FB, google closed groups…)”.

So what participants are having problems with, apart from visualisation of the platform, is finding how to develop conversations within Cloudworks and nurture relationships in order to help facilitate meaningful collaboration.

By switching perspective, it appears much as Diana Laurillard says, “the closer teachers learners are to the specification of digital learning designs, the more these programs are likely to achieve useful learning goals. The detail of the design must not be left to programmers!”

It seems to me that the same sentiment might well be applied to course designers as well. I wonder whose opinions the OLDSMOOC designers solicited. Who did they envisage would be their MOOC participants and what learning proclivities did they envisage them having? I wonder if they used the Ecology of Resources (EoR) Design Framework in the inquiry stage because, if I understand this correctly, the EoR framework seeks to include the views of course participants into the process.

I know the course designers did survey participants upon registration, but I wonder if instead of just paying attention to the course materials, individual learning goals and to the course website and tools, if sufficient acknowledgement was given to the “social” dimension pertinent to MOOCs and to the extent to which participants were willing and able to engage in social and networked participation in order to support their learning. I’ve looked over some templates provided within the course, but I can’t detect anything noteworthy that relates to this aspect.

To be fair, attempts were made within the course design to encourage collaboration, but this proved to be too much of a challenge in the short space of time available. Particularly as the course bizarrely advocated that participants assemble themselves not just into a collaborative project group but also into a study group as well. This is puzzling, indeed possibly plain wrong, and I can’t figure out the reason behind it. It seems to me that one encourages learning by doing whilst the other encourages learning about, and adds up to a lot of effort. Mysterious.

Despite all that, it seems that the design challenge for such courses in the future is how to “jump start” conversations so that people can make connections, build trust and go on to develop working relationships. My own learning narrative demonstrates that finding commonalities with other participants is vitally important. Additionally, Penny Bentley showed how by disclosing small snippets of personal information you can reach out and invite contact. During the first OLDSMOOC convergence session she provided a link on Twitter to pictures of her recent camping trip, such a simple act that helped spawn the development of a supportive learning network. What’s more, looking to strengthen the “social glue” within the MOOC, Penny went on to initiate the OLDSMOOC Facebook group. To me, the social underpinning of a course such as this appears to be just as important as its content, structure and facilitation.

Talking of which brings me back to the course itself. Over all, the course was very good. The content provided was both expansive and of a very high standard, and facilitation of the course was excellent too. It’s amazing that a “rookie” like me was provided with access to so many experts in the field of learning design. The course was highly structured, possibly over structured, but I’m not sure if that was a bad thing for me. I didn’t know anything about learning design before I started the course, so I probably benefited from being “micro-managed” within such a tight structure, even if the timings for some activities seemed highly fanciful at the beginning. However, I definitely found the project based premise of the course to be very useful, and I’m coming to think that with all this talk of MOOCs and their ideological prefixes – whether it’s a cMOOC or an xMOOC – that the real gem might just be the pMOOC. After all, if done well, participants have the opportunity to come away with not only tangible skills and competencies but also an enhanced personal learning network too.

Finally, I’d like to add that incorporating a badge strategy into the MOOC has proved interesting. Some participants have reported that they’ve found it strangely motivating, whilst others have found it a source of irritation as it seems to introduce an element of competition. I don’t know what to make of the effect it’s had on my participation. I know that in week 7 I was tired, and because I didn’t need to participate for it to count towards a badge, I largely ducked out, and I know, like you might already have suspected, that this “review” is a blatant attempt to bag another badge.

Anyway, to end, I’d like to thank not only the OLDSMOOC design team but also all the facilitators on the course as well. It can’t have been easy designing for what’s pretty much unknown territory, but your efforts are sincerely appreciated. I’ve lots to take away with me, not just in terms of learning design but also in terms of new buddies for future laughs and learning.

Thanks OLDSMOOC 🙂

References:

Laurillard, D. (2012) Teaching as a Design Science. Routledge. New York

Site, R. (2013) Prototypes Are Essential to e-Learning Design. Available at: http://info.alleninteractions.com/bid/94339/Prototypes-Are-Essential-to-e-Learning-Design

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Sites 2013 http://info.alleninteractions.com/bid/94339/Prototypes-Are-Essential-to-e-Learning-Design

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