What motivates your students?

It's time for another cohort of students into the revised Bachelor of Nursing programme. The March intakes are always smaller - about 90 students. ECDL has been left out of this 'Cardiff Nursing Futures' curriculum and so I came up with the UniversIT Information Fluency Portfolio, launched it last October. What's brought me back to blog about it is the reflection that not many, if any, students from the September '12 cohort have engaged with the UIT portfolio. That's in spite of the fact that there are lots of ways we've embedded digital literacy into the curriculum. Students have to create a leaflet individually for one module, for another they work in groups to present a wiki-based health informational Website, we're doing D@SH.
This time it's different though.
Over the last years I have observed that students are motivated by various things. Assessment is of course the major one. But you cannot assess everything (unless you went to a type of 'Community Equity'ish way of assessing micro-contributions, as per my presentation at NLC2012 - link to blog entry ;).
Our students have to sign registers since the governing body requires them to study for a recorded 2300 theory hours. The tweak that I think has changed engagement this time, although it's quite early to be certain, started with a conversation with the programme manager. We agreed to dedicate one of the last days on the timetable for hours representing effort students expended completing their UIT portfolio. If they complete it to my satisfaction by then, they can get these 6 hours added to their total. If they do not, as you may have guessed, they have to make up the hours by completing their UIT portfolio, and there is a deadline for that. I'm laying on face-to-face sessions, notes of which are being posted in their group wiki (CampusPack) where I'm also listing the group names so that I can indicate which of them has finished their UIT portfolio. When they have all done that I will create a group-based certificate for them, I may even include a picture of the group if they can supply a suitable one. There is no deadline for the certificate, so that groups do not miss out if one member is late completing. In these ways I am keying into various types of motivation that stop short of the sharp stick compulsion of summative assessment but which will, I hope, reach deeply enough into the students' minds and lives to promote connections and build working knowledge. Did I mention that there's chocolate at my IT sessions? Strangely enough, the library's sessions with these students are also featuring chocolate this time around...

Reaping what we sow

I've been reflecting on the kinds of learning that are actually possible in different scenarios. Take a fairly generic breakdown of types of learning as described by Illeris (2009):

1. Cumulative - low-level conditioning
2. Assimulative - learning by addition
3. Accommodative - learning that includes an element of unlearning or reformation
4. Transformative - restructuring of a fundamental nature, e.g. of the personality

Mandatory training is an area that has seen increasing use of 'e-learning'. The kinds of subjects involved are fairly momentous, for example, equality and diversity. We would all like to live in a society that values difference and where people can get on with their jobs enjoying the sense of dignity and respect that helps keep them well motivated to function optimally in an organisation. But what kind of learning is required to move an individual from a position of 'hardened bigot' to 'respectful admirer of difference'? That would surely require accommodative or transformative learning. Is that possible in an 'e-learning' package? Let's say this is hard, but perhaps not impossible. Then add in the situation, the context, within which that 'e-learning' package is used: e.g. where 'learners' are time-poor, the main motive is one of compulsion and monitoring by 'big brother'; the materials themselves are electronic 'page-turners' and their assessment is aimed at ensuring you've read through, not that you have become a 'better person'.
It is precisely because of these kinds of scenarios that networked learning needs to stand up and get promoted as an alternative vision for how learning and learners can benefit. Anyone involved in the educational enterprise has a duty to take a critical stance in respect to what is being passed off as 'e-learning'. A good place to begin in order to inform that critique would be the Manifesto written by Beaty et al. I know that is wishful thinking, especially in the face of assertive managerialist and cost/benefit-driven cultures. These cultures undermine education that aspires to learning that is more effective, not to say profound. But what will the real cost to society, organisations and individuals be if all the really important things we are supposed to be and know are 'learned' in such an impoverished way? How do people learn? Can we really load people with 'quick fix' or 'tick-box' learning and expect the same outcomes as we would from when we participate in "learning and teaching environments...  that seek to encourage dialogue, exchange of ideas, intrinsic approaches to study and engagement." (Beaty et al 2002, p6)? I cant put a price on that.

Beaty L, Hodgson V, Mann S and McConnell D (2002) Towards e-quality in networked e-learning in higher education. [Online] Available at: http://csalt.lancs.ac.uk/esrc/manifesto.pdf.

Illeris K (2009) A comprehensive understanding of human learning. In: K. Illeris ed. Contemporary Theories of Learning. London; New York: Routledge. 7–20.

Finding I need to think more about sharable representations of practice

Well this was going to be a tweet but even the quote was too long. Having had one student volunteer a complex flowchart to demonstrate a technique they'd developed, and which caused another student to balk at it, gave me the urge to send a Peter Goodyear's (2005,p120) quote into the ether:

'much of what is worth learning in a rapidly changing field of practice already exists as 'working knowledge' embedded in the working practices of professionals in the field.'

The trick is, how to facilitate that, especially at a distance. There are 'tool' and 'training' issues, some of which are explored in http://www.researchinlearningtechnology.net/index.php/rlt/article/view/11162/12858#

Goodyear P (2005) Emergence of a Networked Learning Community. In: G. Kearsley ed. Online Learning: Personal Reflections On The Transformation Of Education. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications. Available at: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8INcUQxCb2EC&lpg=PA113&pg=PA126#v=onepage&q&f=fals

Goodyear P and Steeples C (1998) Creating shareable representations of practice. Research in Learning Technology. 6 (3). Available at: http://www.researchinlearningtechnology.net/index.php/rlt/article/view/11162

Shared Paths Blog

Finding the right picture to serve as a positive image for a learning design can be a laborious process. When you strike upon just the right one it all seems worthwhile. Blogging is one of the foundation informational forms of the current era and it is important for knowledge workers of all ilks to be gain a reasonable level skill with it. I am introducing students on a medical education course to blogging and here's what I found:

This is perfect in several ways. It hints at the variety of people who are on this learning trajectory (or path) at the same time, with different reasons, ages, speeds, technologies and opportunities. There is even something in there about the benefits of resting a while and having a good old-fashioned conversation. The text, 'Please slow down and keep left', hints at a kind of highway code - bloggers also need to be aware of each other as they participate, even if their peers are not co-located.
There is probably even more to this metaphor than I have sketched here but, for now, I just say thank you to Elliot for sharing and to whoever it was in Birmingham that designed and erected the sign!

On 'educationally driven' interventions

I have an idea for doing something within a module about educational media in terms of learning about the sphere of 'mobile'. Of course the activity has to clearly give the message that starting with the tech is 'bad' for lots of sound reasons. For example, since we have no chance of researching an innovation before it's out of date, the only way to hold on to some sense of purpose is to ground the project in a deliberate philosophy of education and work forward from there. There are any number of solutions out there needing a problem and the only rational angle of attack is to ask, 'what would you like to do'? There is a view that this is the only pure approach to doing learning technology.
For example, "design has to be generated from the learning objectives and aspirations of the course, rather than from the capability of the technology" (Laurillard, 2002, p 145) However, Peter Goodyear (2006) maintains that there is "no great harm in this, it is part of a vibrant process that explores and advances frontiers of application. Solutions should look for problems." (emphasis in the original)
However, if we consider the methods and philosophy behind participatory and/or spiral design approaches and principles, there has to be an ongoing 'conversation' between the problem and the solution, between the designer and those being designed for. One has to inform the other - posh word for this would be a 'dialectic'.

Our knowledge and understanding of and in the world can shape our thoughts and actions without our realising it. An idea may be sparked by noticing something a technology can do differently, but the sparking of the idea will have happened because of the knowledge and understanding of the relationships between the technology and the field it is being applied to. So which way around was that then? Technology first or context/practice/theory first? I'm not talking about some blind determinism that shuts my mind to ignoring and/or conflating all sorts of unintended consequences and factors, or gives way too much agency to the technology. But in what world does any idea begin from a really pure educationally driver, and stay that way for very long? I'm arguing that we should recognise the inconsistencies in ourselves and the world around us and embrace the dialectic, including the distinct possibility that a really good educational technology idea may have come about empirically and it's only afterwards that we can trace the strands of 'good' theory which contributed to the idea. This is not the 'wrong way around', it may be an attempt to side-step the sometimes crushing burden of proof required by the same educationalists, who, in other settings, would be seen fervently espousing the need for ideation and innovation in education.
So, dialectics FTW!

Goodyear, P. (2006). Technology and the articulation of vocational and academic interests: reflections on time, space and e-learning. Studies in Continuing Education, 28(2), 83–98. doi:10.1080/01580370600750973
Lurillard, D. (2002). Rethinking Teaching for the Knowledge Society. EDUCAUSE Review, 37(1), 16–25.Available from http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffpiu017.pdf

Hyperlinks in Grademark rubrics

We've been rolling out Grademark this academic year and we're still in the business of creating our rubrics within the system. A rubric is a table that a marker clicks inside to select the performance they wish to award the assignment under scrutiny. Technology has affordances and constraints, what it enables and what it denies (I was enjoying Peter Goodyear's (2006) comments recently about how impoverished online meetings are compared to face-to-face). On the one hand, the rubric cell will 'only' allow us to use up to 1000 characters of text. This is quite a bit but not enough for what we wanted to do with it recently. On the other hand, a solution was to use hyperlinks, because the rubric does allow very simple html. Frustratingly, hyperlinks within the Turnitin assignments were disabled for some reason, and so I didnt imagine that they would work in rubrics. The question then is, how best to exploit such linking?
I was trying to see if I could go for deep linking to a section of an online version of Price and Harrington's  'Critical thinking and writing for nursing students'. Sadly, I do not think that the permanent linking, that includes a redirect for Shibboleth login will work for this book. But there may be other resources, or our own Confluence-powered Student Handbook that could hang around for long enough to make the effort of hyper-linking Grademark rubrics in this way worthwhile. Come to that, there's no reason to think that the developers behind Grademark will be so kind as to continue to allow html in rubrics so you could go to all that effort of enriching them and come in one day to find none of the links worked any more (check this twitter conversation I had with Turnitin).

Goodyear, P. (2006). Technology and the articulation of vocational and academic interests: reflections on time, space and e-learning. Studies in Continuing Education, 28(2), 83–98. doi:10.1080/01580370600750973

  Price, B., & Harrington, A. (2010). Critical thinking and writing for nursing students. Exeter: Learning Matters Ltd. Retrieved from http://www.dawsonera.com/depp/reader/protected/external/EBookView/S9780857255877/S126

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Digital Academic Supervision Hubs (D@SH)

I'm having a bit of a splurge on Learning Objects Campus Pack at the moment. This time it's a simple enough requirement to do with academic supervision. Records of supervisory encounters, when they are kept, are often trapped in an individual's filing cabinet or inbox. Neither of these places are especially good in terms of organisational contingency... What if staff members become unavailable for an extended period of time? The tutor who has to pick up from there is flying blind as far as previous correspondence. But this can also be true where the roles of personal tutor/mentor and academic supervisor are split. There should be a way of bringing these records into one place for the relevant parties to access. Over time, it is hoped that students and staff will benefit from being able to take the long view of their academic supervision. There may also be something about 'locus of control' with these records, so that greater student engagement is procured as these records are now in their hands as much as they are the provenance of their tutors.
Originally this requirement arose out of an overseas programme we're running where staff in both countries needed to be on 'the same page' in terms of supervision, but it was successful and made sense to try it on our other programmes.
The recipe is simple enough:
1. Set up a VLE module which pulls in all students on a programme automatically
2. Set up the module with just the bare essentials: a userguide, a link to a central forum for queries.
3. Within the module, create an 'Batch Assignment Blog' This makes the whole thing scalable. You do not have to create an individual blog for each student and lock each one down individually.
4. Enrol only the staff that need to do supervision. Offer as much support as necessary (but really this whole thing is very simple).
5. Create groups of students on a per-cohort basis to allow access rules to limit visibility of a cohort's Assignment  between the cohorts.
I came up with the 'D@SH' brand because blogs have about as much popularity as wikipedia amongst academic staff and so we needed to make the distinction. It also reinforces that this is for academic supervision, not personal tutor-type correspondence which can often be of a highly sensitive nature.
Of course, being essentially a 'blog' (ssshhhh!!!), it benefits from the commenting, subscription alerts, exporting and tagging features, as well as coping with whatever new fangled media people may want to share nowadays. If you just want to post draft essays, I'm sure that will be fine too. But there's no getting away from the fact that this is another plank in the move towards embedding digital/new fluencies/literacies into the curriculum for students and staff ;)