Category Archives: Taccle

Social networks, research and education

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Warning – this article is not based on any reliable research. However it is based on talking to a lot of people over the summer about their attitudes towards social networks and how they use them. Most of the people are working on various educational projects and are based in Europe although some were from north America and the Middle East. So in no way a representative sample but an interesting one.

Firstly there seems to be an increasing number of people who are opting out of Facebook or, if maintaining accounts, merely forwarding posts from Twitter or another social networking service. Reasons vary from Facebook privacy issues, difficulty in managing ‘friends’, social network overload, disliking the Facebook apps (Farmville is often quoted) to just feeling Facebook is a personal network not suitable for business or educational use.

Against that there seem to be a growing number of people who are separating out their use of different social networking accounts, for example using Facebook for keeping in touch with family and friends and Twitter for work.

There seem to be less people who ‘don’t get Twitter’ although against that a growing skepticism about its future with some feeling it will become increasingly taken over by commercial interests.

Many I have spoken too are thinking about the longevity of social networking services, especially free services. This seems to be increasing as so many people have invested time and effort into Flickr which they fear may be in danger due to Yahoo’s financial woes.

Google+ is the big unknown. Firstly its insistence on real names is alienating substantial numbers of social network evangelists. However, many also see its use as a business and research tool, particularly the use of circles and hangouts for project communication. However, many, like me, are struggling to maintain a presence in so many different networks!

And finally blogging. Without wishing to revive the old #F-Alt debate that micro-blogging is killing blogging, I sense a return to blogs, as offering a form and medium which can be used for substantial writing and reflection.

Regardless of feelings and preferences over individual services, there seems to be a general acknowledgement that social networking is here to say and that it is becoming an integral part of research, communication and exchange for projects and education. Probably the fastest growing services being used for project management and communication are Dropbox, Google docs and Skype.

Be interested in any of your opinions.

Rethinking e-Portfolios

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The second in my ‘Rethinking’ series of blog posts. This one – Rethinking e-portfolios’ is the notes for a forthcoming book chapter which I will post on the Wales wide Web when completed..

Several years ago, e-portfolios were the vogue in e-learning research and development circles. Yet today little is heard of them. Why? This is not an unimportant question. One of the failures of the e-learnng community is our tendency to move from one fad to the next, without ever properly examining what worked, what did not, and the reasons for it.

First of all it is important to note that  there was never a single understanding or approach to the development and purpose of an e-Portfolio. This can largely due be ascribed to different didactic and pedagogic approaches to e-Portfolio development and use. Some time ago I wrote that “it is possible to distinguish between three broad approaches: the use of e-Portfolios as an assessment tool, the use of e-Portfolios as a tool for professional or career development planning (CDP), and a wider understanding of e-Portfolios as a tool for active learning.”

In a paper presented at the e-Portfolio conference in Cambridge in 2005 (Attwell, 2005), I attempted to distinguish between the different process in e-Portfolio development and then examined the issue of ownership for each of these processes.

eport

The diagramme reveals not only ownership issues, but possibly contradictory purposes for an e-Portfolio. Is an e-Portfolio intended as a space for learners to record all their learning – that which takes place in the home or in the workplace as well as in a course environment or is it a place or responding to prescribed outcomes for a course or learning programme? How much should a e-Portfolio be considered a tool for assessment and how much for reflection on learning? Can tone environment encompass all of these functions?

These are essentially pedagogic issues. But, as always, they are reflected in e-learning technologies and applications. I worked for a whole on a project aiming to ‘repurpose the OSPI e-portfolio (later merged into Sakai) for use in adult education in the UK. It was almost impossible. The pedagogic use of the e-Portfolio, essentially o report against course outcomes – was hard coded into the software.

Lets look at another, and contrasting, e-Portfolio application, ELGG. Although now used as a social networking platform, in its original incarnation ELGG stared out as a social e-portfolio, originating in research undertaken by Dave Tosh on an e-portfolio project. ELGG essentially provided for students to blog within a social network with fine grained and easy to use access controls. All well and good: students were not restricted to course outcomes in their learning focus. But when it came to report on learning as part of any assessment process, ELGG could do little. There was an attempt to develop a ‘reporting’ plug in tool but that offered little more than the ability to favourite selected posts and accumulate them in one view.

Mahara is another popular open source ePortfolio tool. I have not actively played with Maraha for two years. Although still built around a blogging platform, Mahara incorporated a series of reporting tools, to allow students to present achievements. But it also was predicated on a (university) course and subject structure.

Early thinking around e-Portfolios failed to take into account the importance of feedback – or rather saw feedback as predominately as coming from teachers. The advent of social networking applications showed the power of the internet for what are now being called personal Learning networks, in other words to develop personal networks to share learning and share feedback. An application which merely allowed e-learners to develop their own records of learning, even if they could generate presentations, was clearly not enough.

But even if e-portfolios could be developed with social networking functionality, the tendency for institutionally based learning to regard the class group as the natural network, limited their use in practice. Furthermore the tendency, at least in the school sector, of limited network access in the mistaken name of e-safety once more limited the wider development of ‘social e-Portfolios.”

But perhaps the biggest problem has been around the issue of reflection. Champions have lauded e-portfolios as a natural tools to facilitate reflection on learning. Helen Barrett (2004) says an “electronic portfolio is a reflective tool that demonstrates growth over time.” Yet  are e-Portfolios effective in promoting reflection? And is it possible to introduce a reflective tool in an educations system that values the passing of exams through individual assessment over all else? Merely providing spaces for learners to record their learning, albeit in a discursive style does not automatically guarantee reflection. It may be that reflection involves discourse and tools for recording outcomes offer little in this regard.

I have been working for the last three years on developing a reflective e-Portfolio for a careers service based din the UK. The idea is to provide students an opportunity to research different career options and reflect on their preferences, desired choices and outcomes.

We looked very hard at existing opens source e-portfolios as the basis for the project, nut could not find any that met our needs. We eventually decided to develop an e-Portfolio based on WordPress – which we named Freefolio.

At a technical level Freefolio was part hack and part the development of a plug in. Technical developments included:

  • The ability to aggregate summaries of entries on a group basis
  • The ability add custom profiles to see profiles of peers
  • Enhanced group management
  • The ability to add blog entries based on predefined xml templates
  • More fine grained access controls
  • An enhanced workspace view

Much of this has been overtaken by subsequent releases of WordPress multi user and more recently Buddypress. But at the time Freefolio was good. However it did  not work in practice. Why? There were two reasons I think. Firstly, the e-Portfolio was only being used for careers lessons in school and that forms too little a part of the curriculum to build a critical mass of familiarity with users. And secondly, it was just too complex for many users. The split between the front end and the back end of WordPress confused users. The pedagogic purpose, as opposed to the functional use was too far apart. Why press on something called ‘new post’ to write about your career choices.

And, despite our attempts to allow users to select different templates, we had constant feedback that there was not enough ease of customisation in the appearance of the e-Portfolio.

In phase two of the project we developed a completely different approach. Rather than produce an overarching e-portfolip, we have developed a series of careers ‘games; to be accessed through the Careers company web site. Each of the six or so games, or mini applications we have developed so far encourages users to reflect on different aspects of their careers choices. Users are encouraged to rate different careers and to return later to review their choices. The site is yet to be rolled out but initial evaluations are promising.

I think there are lessons to be learnt from this. Small applications that encourage users to think are far better than comprehensive e-portfolios applications which try to do everything.

Interestingly, this view seems to have concur with that of CETIS. Simon Grant points out: “The concept of the personal learning environment could helpfully be more related to the e-portfolio (e-p), as both can help informal learning of skills, competence, etc., whether these abilities are formally defined or not.”

I would agree: I have previously seen both as related on a continuum, with differing foci but similar underpinning ideas. However I have always tended to view Personal Learning Environments as a pedagogic capproach, rather than an application. Despite this, there have been attempts to ‘build a PLE’. In that respect (and in relation to rethinking e-Portfolios) Scott Wilson’s views are interesting. Simon Grant says: “As Scott Wilson pointed out, it may be that the PLE concept overreached itself. Even to conceive of “a” system that supports personal learning in general is hazardous, as it invites people to design a “big” system in their own mind. Inevitably, such a “big” system is impractical, and the work on PLEs that was done between, say, 2000 and 2005 has now been taken forward in different ways — Scott’s work on widgets is a good example of enabling tools with a more limited scope, but which can be joined together as needed.”

Simon Grant goes on to say the ““thin portfolio” concept (borrowing from the prior “personal information aggregation and distribution service” concept) represents the idea that you don’t need that portfolio information in one server; but that it is very helpful to have one place where one can access all “your” information, and set permissions for others to view it. This concept is only beginning to be implemented.”

This is similar to the Mash Up Personal Learning Environment, being promoted in a number of European projects. Indeed a forthcoming paper by Fridolin Wild reports on research looking at the value of light weight widgets for promoting reflection that can be embedded in existing e-learning programmes. This is an interesting idea in suggesting that tools for developing an e-Portfolio )or for that matter, a PLE can be embedded in learning activities. This approach does not need to be restricted to formal school or university based learning courses. Widgets could easily be embedded in work based software (and work flow software) and our initial investigations of Work Oriented Personal Learning Environments (WOMBLES) has shown the potential of mobile devices for capturing informal and work based learning.

Of course, one of the big developments in software since the early e-Portfolio days has been the rise of web 2.0, social software and more recently cloud computing. There seems little point in us spending time and effort developing applications for students to share powerpoint presentations when we already have the admirable slideshare application. And for bookmarks, little can compete with Diigo. Most of these applications allow embedding so all work can be displayed in one place. Of course there is an issue as to the longevity of data on such sites (but then, we have the same issue with institutional e-Portfolios and I would always recommend that students retain a local copy of their work). Of course, not all students are confident in the use of such tools: a series of recent studies have blown apart the Digital Native (see for example Hargittai, E. (2010). Digital Na(t)ives? Variation in Internet Skills and Uses among Members of the “Net Generation”. Sociological Inquiry. 80(1):92-113).  And some commercial services may be more suitable than other for developing an e-Portfolio: Facebook has in my view limitations! But, somewhat ironically, cloud computing may be moving us nearer to Helen Barrett’s idea of an e-Portfolio. John Morrison recently gave a presentation (downloadable here) based on his study of ‘what aspects of identity as learners and understandings of ways to learn are shown by students who have been through a program using course-based networked learning?’ In discussing technology he looked at University as opposed to personally acquired, standalone as opposed to networked and Explored as opposed to ongoing use.

He found that students:

Did not rush to use new technology

Used face-to-face rather than technology, particularly in early brainstorming phases of a project

Tried out software and rejected that which was not meeting a need

Used a piece of software until another emerged which was better

Restrained the amount of software they used regularly to relatively few programs

Certain technologies were ignored and don’t appear to have been tried out by the students

Students used a piece of software until another emerged which was better  which John equates with change. Students restrained the amount of software they used regularly to relatively few programs  which he equates with conservatism

Whilst students were previously heavy users of Facebook, they were now abandoning it. And whilst there was little previous use of Google docs, his latest survey suggested that this cloud application was now being heavily used. This is important in that one of the more strange aspects of previous e0Portolio development has been the requirement for most students to upload attached files, produced in an off line work processor, to the e-Portfolio and present as a file attachment. But if students (no doubt partly driven by costs savings) are using online software for their written work, this may make it much easier to develop online e-portfolios.

John concluded that :this cohort lived through substantial technological change. They simplified and rationalized their learning tools. They rejected what was not functional, university technology and some self-acquired tools. They operate from an Acquisition model of learning.” He concluded that “Students can pick up and understand new ways to learn from networks. BUT… they generally don’t. They pick up what is intended.” (It is also well worth reading the discussion board around John’s presentation – - although you will need to be logged in to the Elesig Ning  site).

So – the e-Portfolio may have a new life. But what particularly interests me us the interplay between pedagogic ideas and applications and software opportunities and developments in providing that new potential life. And of course, we still have to solve that issue of control and ownership. And as John says, students pick up what is intended. If we continue to adhere to an acquisition model of learning, it will be hard to persuade students to develop reflective e-Portfolios. We should continue to rethink e-Portfolios through a widget based approach. But we have also to continue to rethink our models of education and learning.

25 practical ideas for using Mobile Phones in the Classroom

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We have been writing a lot about ideas on how mobile devices, and particularly phones might be used to support learning. But most of this work has been from a somewhat theoretical angle. Now Jenny Hughes has written a great guest blog on the practical work she has been doing on the use of mobiles in schools.

“I’ve been working with (primary and secondary teachers) on e-learning in the classroom – particularly the use of web 2.0 applications – as the roll out and dissemination of the TACCLE project. Part of this has been looking at the use of mobile phones as learning tools in schools.

There seems to be a lot of debate around the technology, the theoretical perspectives, the social dimension and so on but just at the moment the ‘doing’ is engaging me far more than the research. And as I’m always the first to complain about the practitioner – researcher divide, I thought maybe we should contribute by sharing some stuff we are experimenting with in the classroom.

What follows is some of the output from teachers. Firstly there has been a debate around the feasibility of using mobile telephones in schools; teachers from schools that have banned them outright, teachers from schools where they are allowed and teachers who are actually using them for learning generated a list of For-and-Against arguments. Secondly, there are some practical suggestions for using mobile devices (mainly phones), tried and tested and either contributed by teachers or trialed on the TACCLE course.

Arguments against allowing mobile phones in schools – for learning or social purposes

  • Loss and theft and potential bullying
  • Distraction and interruption
  • Taking photos of tests and instantly passing them on to other pupils
  • Texting answers of tests to other students
  • Taking photos of pupils in changing rooms, toilets
  • Spreading rumours fast
  • Sex texting and cyber-bullying
  • Non-filtered web access that can be used to spread content that some parents do not want their children exposed to.
  • Recording teachers and pupils in the classroom – can be detrimental to teacher and student reputation and proper consent to publish not asked for or given. Even bigger problem with younger children vis a vis Child Protection issues
  • Privacy issues with teachers having personal phone numbers of pupils and vice versa.

About using phones as learning tools –

  • Have and have not situation – some pupils will not have them, some will not. Some will support less applications than others – need to work at level of common denominator.
  • Cost implications for pupils and their parents – not just the cost of the hardware but the cost of use. Many pupils on ‘Pay-as-you-go’.

Arguments in favour of allowing them and using them for learning

(We excluded I-Phones, Blackberries etc as teachers in this area said most pupils do not have them) -

  • Is cost effective for schools
  • Reduces the need for all students to have access to computers in classroom
  • Need less equipment like digital cameras, camcorders, mics etc
  • If pupils are going to have them in schools anyway, irrespective of whether it is officially allowed, they may as well be exploited for learning. Overcomes some of the problems of ‘distraction’ etc.
  • Uses cheap and familiar technology
  • They are a good vehicle for teaching about ‘use-and-abuse’ issues such as digital identities, protocols, bullying, net safety etc
  • Can be used as data collection and recording devices – audio, pics and video – for recording experiments, field work, voice memos etc
  • Can be used as creative tool – making podcasts, picture blogs, twittering etc
  • Can use the phone itself as learning aid – creating ringtones, wallpaper etc (more on this later)
  • Pupils can ask questions of the teacher they may be too embarrassed to ask publicly.
  • Encourages engagement e.g SMS polling can ensure every pupils  voice is heard.
  • SMS polling (e.g using Wiffiti or PollEverywhere) can be used for formative assessment
  • Can be used for collaborative learning and communication (see below)
  • Pupils are encouraged to use general reference books so why not phones – as dictionary, spell checker, thesaurus, encyclopaedia etc
  • As specific research tool via web access

Practical ideas for using phones for learning that teachers tried out

(NB these are ideas generated by teachers working in a formal learning environment. We are aware of the huge potential of mobile devices for informal learning but this was not in our brief!)

Firstly, a few ideas about using the phone itself – rather than using it as a communication device.

  • Pupils can customize the wallpaper on their phones using something like pix2fone or pixdrop.
  • Either the teacher can ask them to take a picture with their phone around a particular theme or can send everyone in the class a picture she wants them to study / talk about to use as wall paper. This could be a photograph or a key message or reminder of some learning point.
  • Pupils can create ring tones using e.g  phonezoo. They create the ‘tone’ in Audacity, Garageband etc and export to phonezoo which then sends it back to mobile phone where it is saved as a ringtone.

We tried making up jingles for a particular topic, key dates for a history test, a poem to be learned for a literature test, a foreign language phrase and lists of chemical elements in a particular group in the Periodic Table!

Some more general applications:

  • Use sites like gabcast or evoca to make ‘instant’ podcasts straight from a mobile that can be accessed from a mobile (and you only have to be over 13 to use them) without having to use podcasting software. We did a geography quiz on local landmarks and geographical features “From where I’m standing I can see….where am I?”
  • Setting up audio tours e.g one group is working on a guide to places of interest in their town where at each point of interest there is a notice “to hear the story ring this number”
  • Using their phones to access podcasts. Some mobile phones can already subscribe to podcasts and a fair few can listen to streaming MP3s from the Internet. Even if these features are missing, pretty much every mobile phone you can buy nowadays can be hooked up to a computer and have MP3s sent to it to listen to on the go.
  • creating mini-documentaries using the camera in their phone. We did ‘food preparation hygiene’
  • recording field trips – using photos or voice or texting back observations to other pupils.  We did a nature walk where leaves / flowers / trees were observed by one group and identified by another group back in the classroom. We experimented by sending text only descriptions, pictures or voice calls and combinations of those to see which was the most effective. (Also posting back pictures to their blog / wiki whilst they are actually on the walk.)
  • be in different places working on the same project and be talking via instant-messaging.  Our example was a history  ‘Treasure Hunt’ where groups were competing to find objects and information. The groups split up and group members updated each other on progress using mobile phones.
  • recording science experiments and including the pictures /video with their written reports.
  • Using twitter. History teachers chose a period in history (was the second world war) and had groups of evacuees, host families, parents of evacuees back in bombed cities sending messages to each other about their feelings.
  • Use twiddeo to upload video made on mobile phone to twitter.
  • Make a tee-shirt using Reactee on twitter that you can wear in the classroom. Ours was a line to ring to get homework assignments and deadlines.
  • Photoblogging using telephones. (Blogger is particularly good for phones). We did local landmarks and geographical features. Also a vocabulary exercise where each person was given a word to illustrate with three photographs by the end of the day. (If you are going to use blogs use one that is mobile-friendly – like WordPress where you can get a plug-in called WP-Mobile so that students can access them from their mobiles)
  • Making slideshows for mobile phones You can make slideshows for mobile phones. It’s easy but you need a few basic techniques (which we can share if people are really interested.)  We made ‘revision’ slideshows which each teacher could produce for their subject area to be viewed on mobile phones.
  • Brainstorming using wiffiti. We found wiffiti is a wonderful way of getting pupils to create a communal, real time visual brainstorm, on a screen, from their cell phones.
  • Accessing Voicethread. You can use mobile phones to comment on Voicethread, which is a ‘digital conversation’ application. (We used some pictures of geometrical patterns and shapes and asked people to comment using mobile phones on where they could see those shapes and patterns in their townscape or in nature.)
  • Making simple Stop Motion animations. Take lots of photos on a mounted mobile phone e.g of a Plasticene model or bendy toy then import them into a slideshow presentation and set the show to change slides on the fastest (e.g 1 second) autochange. We did pictures of a the notes of a simple tune drawn with felt pen on an A1 sheet then ‘moved’ an arrow to each note in turn so that the pupils could see which note was being sung.
  • To save the cost of texting, use freebiesms on your computer
  • For those students with Bluetooth, a natural progression from students e-mailing homework or assignments might be to get them to send it by phone to your laptop at the beginning of a lesson.

Plans for future events

  • Experimenting with QR codes into which you can embed text, url, phone numbers and sms. (Camera phones can have software freely installed on them to recognise these codes and decipher them into meaningful text/links/images. This could be useful for homework or for embedding a ‘live’ link on a paper-based worksheet.)
  • Experimenting with 12seconds.tv for asynchronous debates, for synthesising work, commenting on Voicethread, making composite class documentaries, as a reflection tool for e-portfolios, as an ideas box, exemplifying good practice
  • Thinking about how we are going to use Google Wave

Thanks Mr Belshaw http://teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk for these great ideas – he should be on everyone’s RSS together with his blog http://dougbelshaw.com/blog .”

To learn – to find and follow a track

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Jenny Hughes has been undertaking the thankless task of trying to edit (or more to rewrite) an article of mine on Personal Learning Environments as part of a handbook for teachers for the Taccle project.

I am intrigued by her reference ot the orgins of the words ‘curriculum’ and ‘learning’ in this excerpt from the draft:

“Traditionally, knowledge has been conceived of something possed by ‘experts’ . The formal education curriculum is based on the idea that learning can be neatly and conveniently divided into subject areas which in turn are based on traditional university disciplines.  The people who have the knowledge (the teachers) are accorded higher status than those that do not (the learners) and although all good teachers maintain that they learn a lot from their pupils, the passage of information is conceived as being one-way. There are desgnated places (schools) where learning officially takes place, where learning is tested and  which control access to the next stage or level of learning

The new technologies have challenged this status quo.  The explosion of freely available sources of information has increased the range of knowledge available to people and has made it accessible when and where they want it, in bite sized chunks that do not necessarily form a coherent subject discipline.

We are moving from the idea of knowledge being developed and controlled by experts to collaborative knowledge construction which can be facilitated by the use of social software, as we describe above. Even more importantly, we are starting to rethink what qualifies as ‘knowledge’.  Instead of the ‘curriculum’ being defined by experts, communities of people interested in the same things – or even just by being part of a community – are acting as a curriculum.

Interestingly, the word curriculum comes from the latin ‘currere’, which means to run or race and ‘curriculum’ was a race or racecourse. It is easy to see how this was adopted to describe a learning course which had a starting point, travelled along a straight route and reached a finishing point with competitors battling with each other to finish first or to be the best.

Maybe for the first time learning has stopped being a race course. Conversely ‘to learn’ originally meant ‘to find and follow a track’  and this seems to sum up rather well the current shift in emphasis from formal curriculum to informal learning.

This changing model requires not only different approaches but different technologies and implicit is the change from an institutional approach to learning to a more learner centred approach.”