Category Archives: Mature

How can we manage our digital identities?

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digidentitiescreenshot

We have been running monthly online seminars for almost a year now through the Jisc Users and Innovations Evolve project. This spring the seminars are being run in conjunction with the German Educamp organisation.

Yesterdays session on Careers and the Internet was one of the best yet. There were two excellent and complementary  presentations by Mario Grobholz, creative director of the myON-ID Media Corporation, and Steven Warburton from Kings College London who is working on the Rhizomes project. Almost as good was the participation in the chat room with many questions and ideas emerging.

Steven focused on what he called our ‘fractured digital identities.He focused in particular on on the tensions between online personal and professional identities and public and private identities and how these were changing. Mario looked at reputation management and introduced a platform his company has developed to help people manage their reputation online.

Great stuff. The full recording is available on the Jisc Support, Synthesis and Benefits Realisation Elluminate site (no log in required). If you missed the session and are interested in these issues it is well worth watching.

User enagagement

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I’ve been working this afternoon on a series of use cases for the Mature-IP project. Of course, there is always a problem, especially in an international project, of agreeing exactly what a use case is! But at least for me, it does provide some degree of focus on what users are going to do with software. In the context of the Mature project which seeks to support knowledge maturing processes through the development of Personal Learning and Management Environments and Organisational Learning and Management environments, a focus on users seems very relevant.

Indeed, I am somewhat confused as to why educational technology development is not more often focused on end users. I liked the approach of the Jisc Users and Innovation programme in implementing a so called Users and Innovation Design Model – now called a User Engagement Approach:

Jisc say “a user engagement approach needs to meet certain requirements to benefit both users and developers. It must be able to:

  1. Identify, describe and analyse the users, their tasks, real world objects and usage contexts.
  2. Translate the user’s world into a system’s world
  3. Involve users throughout the whole design/development process
  4. Flexibly explore different design responses and decisions
  5. Test the effectiveness of the user engagement throughout the development life-cycle.”

The mystery for me is that such an approach is seen as novel. Far too often learning technologies are based on innovative approaches to technology itself, regardless of whether it is of any  practical application for learners. And one of the base assumptions behind the design of much educational technology, appears to be the present paradigm of course and classroom delivery of learning. If we are to extend educational technology to support informal learning and work based learning,  understanding users, their tasks, real world objects and usage contexts would seem critical.

That does require new approaches and models, not only for software design and development, but to understanding the processes of learning from work and of how informal learning results in knowledge development. And this in turn would seem to require multi disciplinary approaches involving developers and researchers as well as learners from different specialities and with different areas of expertise.

Skilled performace as a basis for professional practice?

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Chris Sessums asks: “What would a knowledge base for the teaching profession look like? How can we get one?”

He goes on to say: “Imagine teachers collaborating around the globe to improve education. Sound like a fantasy? Is there a path that could lead from classrooms to a shared, reliable professional knowledge base for teaching? Is it because practitioner knowledge is highly personal, highly contextual, and lacks the vetting process associated with scientific research that such a path has never been developed? Given the millions of teachers producing knowledge of classroom practice everyday, is it worth examining what would be needed to transform teacher knowledge into a professional knowledge base for teaching? What would such a path look like?”

These are good questions. However, they pose problems over the nature of practice. Chris bases his idea of practioner knowledge around the idea of “elaborating a problem” and alaborating and testing answers to such a problem. But surely this is only part of the practice of a teacher. Can teaching be reduced to a knowledge base? In struggling to envisage what form such a knowledge base might take Chris suggests it could be developed around lesson plans. Although a readily accessible and open bank of lesson plans might be a valuable resource, it still ignores many elements of the practice of teaching. It is perfectly possible that no two teachers would use the plans in the same way. Of course that is not important. But such a knowledge base might then fail to capture the essence of professional practice (I am unconvinced of Chris’s distinction between practioner knowledge and professional knowledge).

Reckwitz (2003) distinguishes 3 different meanings or understandings of practice:

  • Practice as embodied knowledge;
  • Practice as a skilful performance with artefacts;
  • Practice as implicit knowledge, as the implicit logic of doing things

It may be possible to develop a database of the background knowledge and of the artefacts. Far mor problematic is the skilful performance. Yet it is this element of practice which would seem to be most useful for teachers and trainers.

Is one of the problems the divisions we have made between so called scientific (or professional) knowledge and practice? I wonder if it might be possible to develop taxonomies for practice embodied as skilful performance and then develop social software which would allow the sharing of such practice. If, so how and what might it look like? Does anyone have any ideas?

Reference

Reckwitz, A. (2003). Grundelemente einer Theorie sozialer Praktiken. In: Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Jg. 32, H. 4, 282-301.

Personal Learning Environments – the slidecast

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Personal Learning Environments: The future of education?

Last week I made a presentation at an Evolve Open on-line seminar about Personal Learning Environments. The seminar was very well attended, with a great presentation on e-Portfolios by Sigi Jacob and a lively debate.

As ever I promised I would post my slides on Slideshare. Trouble is I promise and don’t always do. There are two main reasons. The first is the struggle to make sure I acknowledge all sources – especially the photos. And the second is that my slides do not really make sense without audio. They are designed as an extra and complementary channel of communication. I see little reason to write on a slide and then read it out verbatim. Rather they illustrate what I am talking about. And thus on their own they make little sense. Of course I could record my presentation live and add that soundtrack to the slides. But I find that live presentations do not necessarily work as a recording. In general I think recordings – or slidecasts should be short and preferably under ten minutes. This mean re-recording the sound track and then syncing with the slides. It is not difficult but it takes time.

Anyway I have kept my promise and I hope you find it worthwhile.

Barriers to Personal Learning Environments

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I am speaking at a joint Evolve / Educamp on line session tonight about e-Portfolios and PLes. Coincidentally, I have been working on background research for the Mature project which is seeking to develop Personal Learning and Management Environments to support professional development and knowledge maturing services.

One topic in my brief for Mature was to look at barriers to the introduction of PLEs and PLMEs. As I wrote two weeks ago, PLEs are with us now – in the sense of how learners are using computers to support their own learning. But at the same time there appear to remain institutional and organisational barriers to the wider adoption of PLEs.

Anyway this is what I came up with for the Mature work. I would love any comments or feedback.

Issues in introducing PLEs

Despite the interest from the educational technology community, the implementation and institutional support for PLEs remains slow. This may be a reflection of the need to address a series of issues, both related to approaches to teaching and learning and technology development.

Learner Confidence and Support

One of the reasons why current VLEs have been successful is that they allow universities to centralize support and thus ensure a certain level of competence and quality of experience (Weller, 2005). Supporting learners in creating their own learning environments would be a major challenge.

Furthermore many learners may not have the confidence and competence to develop and configure their own tools for learning. However, Wild, Mödritscher and Sigurdarson, (2008) consider that “by establishing a learning environment, i.e. a network of people, artefacts, and tools (consciously or unconsciously) involved in learning activities, is part of the learning outcomes, not an instructional condition.”

Moreover, the advances in Wb 2.0 tools and social software are reducing the technological complexity and knowledge required by the user in configuring such tools.

Moving beyond issues of technology, many learners may feel challenged by the shift towards more learner centred provision and by the idea of managing their own learning. Setting aside issues of whether this is a core or meta level competence, learners will often still require support.
Institutional control and management

A further barrier to the introduction of Personal Learning Environments may be fear by organisations of loss of institutional and managerial control. This is a complex issue. It may imply a difficulty in pedagogical change and innovation with the move towards more learner centred learning. It may reflect the requirement of institutions to utilise computer based systems for managing programmes and students with present functionality for this provided through integrated Virtual Learning Environments. It could also reflect the requirements of centralised curricula and prescribed learning materials and learning routes. It may also reflect the preference of Systems Administrators to control software systems and server access and the need for data security.

At university level many students now use their own laptop computers, thus alleviating some of these issues. However, this will not be so in an enterprise.

Also at university level, many institutions are moving towards Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs). These may allow specific learning services to be delivered in formats that can be consumed through a PLE, whilst maintaining the integrity of administrative systems and services.

Contexts of learning

In seeking a generic approach to PLE development, design and provision, there is a danger of overlooking the different contexts in which learning and knowledge development take place. Not only will different users be dealing with different knowledge, subject areas and data, but the physical environment in which the learning takes place will vary as will use of the learning. This may have profound implications for PLE design and deployment.

Experimentation, Development and Interface design

There are many interesting projects working on different aspects of learning design and development and contributing to what we might call a future PLE. Inevitably, much of this work is being undertaken by computer programmers and specialists, with a greater or lesser understanding of education and learning. To evaluate the potential of such developments requires trialling with real users. Yet, most of these projects are at best at a beta stage of development. Many do not have well developed user interfaces and the design of such interfaces is time consuming. Yet, without such interfaces it is difficult to persuade users (individual and organisational) to involve themselves in such trialling.

User centred design models may offer a way forward in this respect.