Waving Around Identities

Posted on October 21, 2009 by Graham Attwell

Invites to Google wave seem to be fast rippling out so time for some first thoughts. Like most people I guess, my first reaction was what is it and what can it do?

The first problem is trying to find someone to play with. Wave is decidedly a collaborative environment and it is not easy to find open waves to join. I found an educators directory and added my name along with the 300 or so others there. But that didn’t seem particularly useful – why create a list of people just because they are in education and in possession of a precious wave invite.

So I reverted to some old technology and twittered out. Pat Parslow invited me to join a ‘sandbox wave’ he had set up for people to introduce themselves and play. And play we did – to such a degree that it was decided to copy what was useful and sensible to yet another introductions wave.

More importantly, the next day Shirley Williams suggested we try out a serious project. Given that Pat and Shirley are working on the This Is Me project and I am working on the Rhizome project , both funded by Eduserve and both focusing on Digital Identities, we chose that as a subject. Pat posted a short text to launch the Wave, and then we all waded in commenting and annotating the text. And much to my surprise it seems to work. It is the first truly usable collective authoring tool that I have used. A bit like Google docs on steroids. And it is particularly interesting to see how we are fast evolving social conventions for using this new tool

Don’t get me wrong, Google Wave is by no means finished. The interfaces can be clunky, it is not always easy to find where text has been added or edited or commented on, the replay doesn’t work – at least on my computer, and the people aspect of social networking seems a little rudimentary.

Now onto the next experiment, suggested by Pat and Shirley – to create a Workbook to help educators, mentors and guidance staff (e.g. careers guidance and the like) learn about their Digital Identity (process…) and how to enhance it, tame it, and use it.”

The idea is to write the workbook together in one week and to publish it under a Creative Commons BY SA license on www.lulu.com with co-authorship to anyone who contributes. Shout (or should I say wave) if you are interested.

Digital Identities and Social Relations

Posted on October 12, 2009 by Graham Attwell

Just spent half an hour checking around blogs and twitter to see what is new on a Monday morning. And I was interested to see the latest survey from Pew Internet (just an aside – why cannot we organise as thorough a survey in Europe as Pew does for the US?).

The latest Pew Internet & American Life Project survey asked respondents to assess predictions about technology and its roles in the year 2020 and they provide the following summary of the (very substantial) report:

The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.
The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.
Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.
Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing arms race, with the crackers who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.
The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.
Next-generation engineering of the network to improve the current internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.”

I will be coming back to many of these issues in the next few posts. But I am particularly interested in the issue of the division between personal and work time and between physical and virtual reality – although I am not sure about some of the terminology. two weeks ago we ran a workshop on Digital identities at the European Conference on Educational Research in Vienna as part of the Eduserve Rhizome project on Digital Identities. We are working on a short video on the workshop which should come out later this week. Most of the issues arising from the workshop were as we would have expected and in line with similar workshops we have organised in the UK. But what was surprising were some of the discussions in the workshop especially around the issues of privacy, personal spaces and work . personal life issues. Why surprising? Mainly because there was such a divergence of feelings around these issues. there were some 18 participants in the workshop from 15 different countries. And it appears that attitudes towards privacy and work / personal life divisions are heavily influenced by culture. This finding requires far more investigation than we were able to undertake in a short workshop. But it does appear that in different countries there are very different attitudes towards for instance what data should be private and the degree ot which entries on a social networking sites should be viewed as part of professional activities.

One participant provided an example of where a teacher had expressed personal opinions on a social networking site which were seen as racist by parents of some of the students and resulted – if my memory is right – in them being dismissed. Some felt this was reasonable, given that such an opinions would effect their ability as a teacher. Others felt that however objectionable such opinions this infringed on rights of personal free speech in a non work related forum.

Steven Warburton summaries the dissussion on the Rhizome project blog:

The “richness in nationalities immediately foregrounded what is an often overlooked dimension in discussions around digital identity – namely the impact of cultural difference. Different cultures both create and consume their [digital] identities in different ways. This was most keenly reflected in the shared conversations around where we perceive the boundary between our public and private lives. The mass use of social services such as Facebook can appear to have a homogenising effect, erasing cultural distinctions through normalised ’social-networking’ practices.”

I have not read the full Pew report. But issues like this will not go away and I am intrigued to find out in which ways the experts Pew interviewed see the mixed impact on basic social relations

Exploring Personal Learning Environments

Posted on October 8, 2009 by Graham Attwell

In September, we organised a symposium on Personal Learning Environments at the the 2nd World Summit on the Knowledge Society (WSKS 2009), “an international attempt to promote the dialogue for the main aspects of the Knowledge Society towards a better world for all.”

I rather rashly promised to publish the products from the symposium. It has taken a little longer than I had hoped, but here they are. The slides and links to the full papers are included in the text, the audio recordings of the presentations can be accessed at the bottom of this page.

The first speaker was Ricardo Torres. His paper was entitled “Using Web 2.0 applications as supporting tools for Personal Learning Environments.”

The abstract is as follows:

” This paper shows the results of a pilot study based on a proposed framework for building Personal Learning Environments using Web 2.0 tools. A group of 33 students from a Business Administration program were introduced to Web 2.0 tools in the context of an Information Systems class, during the academic year 2008-2009, and reflected about this experience through essays and interviews. The responses show evidence of learning and acquiring skills, strengthening social interactions and improvement in the organization and management of content and learning resources.”

You can download his full post here.

CoPs to Support Social Learning in DE / Teacher PD through web 2.0 Environments

View more presentations from Cristina Costa.

The second presentation was was by Cristina Costa from the University of Salford. Her paper was entitled “Teachers professional development through Web 2.0 environments.

Her abstract reads as follows:

“Teacher professional development is no longer synonymous with acquiring new teaching techniques, it is rather about starting new processes as to engage with new forms of learning, reflected in the practice of teaching. With easy access to the panoply of online communications tools, new opportunities for further development have been enabled. Learning within a wider community has not only become a possibility, but rather a reality accessible to a larger number of individuals interested in pursuing their learning path both in a personalised and networked way. The web provides the space for learning, but the learning environment is decidedly dependent on the interrelationships that are established amongst individuals. The effectiveness of the web is reflected in the unconventional opportunities it offers for people to emerge as knowledge producers rather than information collectors. Hence, it is not the tools that most matter to develop a learning environment where more personalized learning opportunities and collective intelligence prospers as the result of personal and collaborative effort. Although web tools provide the space for interaction, it is the enhancement of a meaningful learning atmosphere, resulting in a joint enterprise to learn and excel in their practice, which will transform a space for learning into an effective, interactive learning environment. The paper will examine learning and training experiences in informal web environments as the basis for an open discussion about professional development in web 2.0 environments.”

You can download her full paper here.

An Infrastructure for Intercommunication Between Widgets in Personal Learning Environments

View more presentations from Tobias Nelkner.

The third presentation was by Tobias Nelkner from the University of Paderborn. He talked about the development of a widget infrastructure to support Personal Learning Environments. Here is his abstract:

“Widget based mashups seem to be a proper approach to realise self-organisable Personal Learning Environments. In comparison to integrated and monolithic pieces of software developed for supporting certain workflows, widgets provide small sets of functionality. The results of one widget can hardly be used in other widgets for further processing. In order to overcome this gap and to provide an environment allowing easily developing PLEs with complex functionality, the based on the TenCompetence Widget Server [1], we developed a server that allows widgets to exchange data. This key functionality allows developers to create synergetic effects with other widgets without increasing the effort of developing widgets nor having to deal with web services or similar techniques. Looking for available data and events of other widgets, developing the own widget and uploading it to the server is an easy way publishing new widgets. With this approach, the knowledge worker is enabled to create a PLE with more sophisticated functionality by choosing the combination of widgets needed for the current task. This paper describes the Widget Server developed within the EU funded IP project Mature, which possibilities it provides and which consequences follow for widget developer.

You can download his full paper here.

Language micro-gaming: fun and informal microblogging activities for language learning- Maria A. Perifanou

View more presentations from Univ. of Athens.

The fourth was Maria Perifanou from the University of Athens. She talked of her experiences of using microblogging for language learning. the abstract reads:

‘Learning is an active process of constructing rather than acquiring knowledge and instruction is a process of supporting that construction rather than communicating knowledge’. Can this process of learning be fun for the learner? Successful learning involves a mixture of work and fun. One of the recent web 2.0 services that can offer great possibilities for learning is Microblogging. This kind of motivation can raise students’ natural curiosity and interest which promotes learning. Play can also promote excitement, enjoyment, and a relaxing atmosphere. As Vygotsky (1933) advocates, play creates a zone of proximal development (ZDP) in children. According to Vygotsky, the ZDP is the distance between one’s actual developmental level and one’s potential developmental level when interacting with someone and/or something in the social environment. Play can be highly influential in learning. What happens when play becomes informal learning supported by web 2.0 technologies? Practical ideas applied in an Italian foreign language classroom using microblogging to promote fun and informal learning showed that microblogging can enhance motivation.”

Maria’s full paper can be downloaded here.

Appropriating technologies for contextual knowledge: Mobile Personal Learning Environments

View more presentations from GrahamAttwell.

The final speaker was Graham Attwell from Pontydysgu. He talked about the European Commission Mature-IP project which is developing a Personal Learning and Maturing Environment. His paper was jointly authored with John Cook and andrew Ravenscroft from the Metropolitan University of London. Here is the abstract:

“The development of Technology Enhanced Learning has been dominated by the education paradigm. However social software and new forms of knowledge development and collaborative meaning making are challenging such domination. Technology is increasingly being used to mediate the development of work process knowledge and these processes are leading to the evolution of rhizomatic forms of community based knowledge development. Technologies can support different forms of contextual knowledge development through Personal Learning Environments. The appropriation or shaping of technologies to develop Personal Learning Environments may be seen as an outcome of learning in itself. Mobile devices have the potential to support situated and context based learning, as exemplified in projects undertaken at London Metropolitan University. This work provides the basis for the development of a Work Orientated MoBile Learning Environment (WOMBLE).”

You can download the paper here.

Podcast music is ‘Miss is a sea fish’ by Ehma from the Jamendo web site.

Are we still getting e-learning wrong – how can we get it ‘right’?

Posted on August 25, 2009 by Graham Attwell

I have written many posts about what I consider wrong with approaches to e-learning based on attempts to ‘manage’ learning through Learning Management Systems and Virtual Learning Environments. I have also written about the promise of alternative approaches based on Web 2.0, social software and Personal Learning Environments.

But are we still getting e-learning wrong? Not the technology but what we are trying to use ot for and with whom.

As with most technological innovation, first attempts at implementation tend to mimic previous social paradigms. This the idea of the virtual classroom and the on-line university. Teaching and learning through technology have changed with the idea of blended learning and the increasing integration of technologies within curricular and pedagogic approaches. But the main thrust of use of technology for learning remains the delivery of ‘traditional; curricula or bodies of knowledge to translational students groups – albeit extended through distance learning to a wider student cohort.

I have long thought that the transformative potential of Technology Enhanced Learning is the ability to support explorative (I am desperately trying to avoid that vague ‘constructivist’ word?) learning for anyone, anywhere. And, in a developmental perspective, the most interesting work may be the use of technology for supporting work based learning and informal learning outside traditional courses. In this respect, it is interested to see the increasing interest of projects funded under the European Commission Research programme and Education and Training programme in competence based approaches to education and training.

However, this approach remains problematic. attempts to develop standardised taxonomies of competence tend to ignore the importance of context, especially or work based learning and Continuing Professional Development. Recently, I have been involved in a number fo projects looking at how we can use internet based technologies ot support learning, knowledge development and knowledge maturing for Careers Advice, Information and Guidance practitioners in the UK. Of course, ‘training’ is important for such a group of knowledge workers. But even more important is the ability to learn, everyday from the work they carry out, both individually and collectively. Within the Mature-IP project we have developed an approach to knowledge maturing aiming at the development and implementation of tools for Personal Learning and for Organisational learning. In reality it has proved difficult to separate out the two. Individual learning rests of more collective learning processes, within a community of practice, and equally organisational learning is largely dependent on the individual learning of the practitioners. it is possible to look at the roles and tasks carried out by Careers professionals and then to develop tools to assist in carrying out such tasks. such an approach has the merit of supporting everyday work, thus meaning that potentially learning is integrated within the work process. However, there is no guarantee that merely using technologies for task management results in significant learning and knowledge development at either individual or organisational level.

One answer appears to be to integrate more social software functionality into platforms and tools designed to support learning. this autumn, we will launch two platforms: one for policy makers within the careers field based on a mash up of WordPress and the excellent Open University Cloudworks software, and the other a professional development site for careers practitioners based on Buddypress. with both we are attempting to encourage and facilitate peer group learning based on social interaction.

Whether or not these approaches will be successful remains to be seen. But, overall, I am convinced that such projects are key to developing a more transformational direction to the use of technology for learning. In undertaking this work we are lucky to have the support of the Mature-IP project which allows a more focused examination of teh relation between theories and practice in learning and the development of Technology Enhanced Learning tools and platforms. One issue that has become apparent is that research into Technology Enhanced Learning is truly inter-disciplinary – needing at a very least a bringing together of expertise in pedagogy, education, organisational learning, work sciences, design and psychology as well as computer science. Such interdisciplinary research provides a challenge in terms of methodologies.

Projects like Mature-IP and the JISC funded Emerge project offer the basis for rethinking what we are doing with e-learning – and perhaps even for getting it ‘right’ this time round.