What is Networked Learning?

WebPA

2011-12-12T19:55:00.001Z

WebPA was on the boil a few years ago and seemed to fade from sight like too many good projects.
Now it has been updated and could well be coming to a University near me soon.
I got to test-drive it today.I was trying to replicate a peer assessment I use Bristol Online Surveys for normally.
I opted out of using the VLE as the survey tool there can't handle the types of questions I need to use to do peer assessment.
Here are some observations from my quick trial which included the full cycle of uploading data through to viewing reports.

Uploading data was a bit tricky using CSV files... I think it required me to include the headers....
There was only one 'Template' for uploading staff/student data and it does not include the 'group' header... so needed to be added in. If you vary from the prescribed syntax it fails to upload... or at least it seemed that way... I say 'seemed to' because one of the uploads I thought had failed and that did not appear straight away, re-appeared later on...
The first time I met the form it requires a student to score themselves (self assessment) by default but this can be changed in 'Assessments' so that you can do peer not self AND peer assessment.
Nice to be able to email those who have responded or those who have not.
Setting the group marks was intuitive.
As a student fills in the form it highlights clearly where the student missed a score after having tried to submit a form.
You can also penalise students in the scoring if they do not respond. Perhaps this should be the same as the maximum percentage of marks they could have potentially obtained from the peer assessment? Need to see that one coming and make a policy decision.

I think WebPA is a lot nicer to administer than my current approach, where I am clearly using a generic survey tool, rather than something especially designed for the task. WebPA also offers an alternative scoring system whereby students are required to share a certain amount of 'score' between the group members. That way they cannot all simply award each other top marks. Again, this would require some thought and expectations management before launching the assessment.

Evaluations and other articles in JIHE

2011-11-08T12:23:00.000Z

Just reading a bit this morning in the Journal of the Internet and Higher Education for this month - quite a few papers in the alert caught my eye. The article on peer-assessment is similar to what we do in Year 2 with students although they undertake a group presentation. I note that they stop short, as we do, of getting students to mark each other's work, as a tutor would. This is an understandably conservative route, but I was a little disappointed... I also noted from Owsten et al's lecture capture paper that it seemed to be most used by lower performing students, but in a way that I would decry. These students are viewing the entire lecture, whereas the higher performers were locating the chunks they wanted to access again. The paper does not really help us to know which way to read this relationship and it continues to bemuse me. Would the low-achievers become high-acheiver if only they could take a better approach to their studies..?

In the conclusion to Dziuban and Moskal's paper I found this:

The class for many contemporary students is an increasingly complex network of interactions. Recently in discussing generational difference a student said to the authors, “You will learn by reading a book or the manual. We will learn through interaction with each other and the Internet.” (Hartman, Dziuban, & Brophy-Ellison, 2007). If this is true, then end-of-course evaluations offer very little opportunity for interaction. Perhaps one should consider new instructional evaluation protocols that are not summative and after the fact, but instead those that are more reflective and interactive. The opportunity cost involved would require a much greater investment of time and resources, but good news is that such an approach would increase the student voice in their learning and support a more collaborative educational environment.

I had not read this kind of philosophical rationale for moving to a more formative style of evaluation, which is greatly underused IMHO. Our evaluation forms have recently been under review in the light of the National Student Survey questionnaire. But it begs the question whether we can really account for the kinds of learning experience students are experiencing at an individual level when so much of it happens almost as a co-incidence of their ability to make connections (of all kinds). It must be our role as designers of education to do what we can to assure the potential for students to do that... embracing formative evaluation must be part of that...

Dziuban, C., & Moskal, P. (2011). A course is a course is a course: Factor invariance in student evaluation of online, blended and face-to-face learning environments. The Internet and Higher Education, 14(4), 236-241. doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2011.05.003

TILT blog

2011-10-13T13:06:00.000+01:00

It was a pleasure to meet the Accelerated Graduate Programme students this morning. This programme is designed for students who already have a degree and want to become a nurse. We had a chat about the role of IT in nursing and then went on to classic induction stuff. Just before the session I suggested the following to the programme manager and got a warm reception. I set up a CampusPack blog and called it 'Things I Learned Today'. I told the students that they would be writing a single entry per month, and they were all given a number (there are less than 30 students). I explained how that a key engine for learning was writing, or framing discourse, and that assessments were often just a way of getting students to do that. Here we have a different audience completely but still the learning process potential with blogging that could benefit the individual and the cohort.
The introductory post went like this:

Please post an entry on your allotted date. Write something that you learned today, even if you do not think it was very significant. Something that struck you on the radio, in a session, and why. You can write about anything you think you and your group of students might be interested in. You can be controversial, but please stay within the bounds of 'polite'. Keep the language conversational and succinct. Don't feel you have to write more than 75 words. Make sure you add some tags to help us all find what you wrote. Feel free to add a (helpful) comment to an existing post. The list of 'dates' and names is below - best to stick to that for the first time around. That way everyone gets the same opportunity. I'm not going to be holding people to their date although I reserve the right to listen in occasionally: I've clicked 'Subscribe' to get an email notification of new posts (you should too).
I hope you make a go of this because it has great potential for your own learning and that of your peers. If I can be of any assistance, including moving to a different blogging platform, please get in touch.

I then asked for volunteers to go first, listing the first few.... But then I noticed a few looking uneasy so I carefully asked if everyone was ok with this. I was able to address their concerns about whether staff could read what they wrote, for example. The answer to that question was 'yes'. So I offered that, if they wanted to, I'd help them set up a blogger/wordpress blog and shut us out. In the event, they were more than happy to start out using our University platform. My role here was clearly to facilitate the process.
I've also posted an example post as follows:

I don't want to steal Amy's [not real name] limelight (yes, this is your day ;) but I did say I'd share that link to the report this morning on Radio 4 about the NHS failing the elderly. The radio broadcast can be heard again over at the BBC 'listen again' site. If you want to add a link to a post just get the URL, highlight the text to hyperlink and then click the 'chain' button on the far left of the bottom toolbar.
This report attracted my attention for a number of reasons, firstly because I know someone who suffered quite a lot of neglect and negative culture, which the NHS seemed unable to deal with. The second reason is because the key to this in the report is 'leadership'. How will you go about unpicking the tightly knit cliques that exist and resist positive change? (hmmm... that was 145 words)

Nothing really new here... but it does emphasise the role of the teacher in terms of designing and facilitating networked learning. Someone has to be in there 'promoting connections'. That reminds me, I probably should give Amy a reminder that today's her day... or should I?

Chapter from Social IT

2011-10-07T14:02:00.000+01:00

Here's a PDF of a book chapter I wrote, published in 2008. Sorry that the figures are still at the end - blame APA 5th.

Johnson, M. R. (2008). Investigating & encouraging student nurses’ ICT engagement. In T. T. Kidd & I. Chen (Eds.), Social Information Technology: Connecting Society and Cultural Issues (pp. 313-335). Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference.

Edge effect

2011-09-29T16:59:00.002+01:00

Probably this is another area with a massive literature I know nothing about (although it was evading me in scopus and scirus :(
But it struck me the other day and today the penny finally dropped. I was in a class of students who were learning about the role of a clinical teacher, one of whom, a Mental Health nurse, stated that they were enjoying the 'edge effects' of a clinical and education-based role. I asked for some clarification and apparently this idea was from ecology, permaculture in particular - wikipedia is worth quoting here actually:

The edge effect in ecology is the effect of the juxtaposition or placing side by side of contrasting environments on an ecosystem. Permaculturists maintain that, where vastly differing systems meet, there is an intense area of productivity and useful connections.

I'm not sure I can live up to the 'intense productivity' side of things, but I do think I enjoy the 'edge effect' of useful connections through working in a School of Nursing and Midwifery but also within Higher Education and being into learning technology, or IT in some form or another. I have observed that if you spend all your time in learning technology circles, it can have a very detrimental effect upon your vision for learning technology, in terms of making assumptions about how well or not people are likely to engage with your 'grand designs'.
I like the term 'edge effect' so much that I think I'll use it for tweeting from conferences and learning technology stuff when I think it's going to get particularly busy over on my original account. So, if that is a version of me you'd like to follow, I'm at http://twitter.com/#!/edgeeffect
There are probably 'not so beneficial' edge effects though... one of those is the difficulty of being spread too thinly to get anywhere near a credible research profile. Ah well... just got to keep plugging away at the nlc2012 paper.
What are the implications for networked learning about the whole concept of the 'edge effect'?

New Literacies vs. Digital Scholarship

2011-09-15T12:14:00.001+01:00

I've read a few authors recently who seem to be arguing that the new literacies that children(are assumed to) have are to be embraced and encouraged. Teachers everywhere must adapt their practice so as to avoid alienating these young people and value their huge new skill-sets. This is familiar enough line to take butto me it must impact on time and attention given to traditional foundational literaciesand does not account for the harsh realities of the digital literacies thatstudents need to run with on entering Higher Education. I think there is adifference: social networking and mash-ups contribute to a growing trade in memes and pop-culturallyinformed media on the internet, but what role do they play in building usefultheory (including within one's own brain), what role can they really play in the individual gaining expertise in participatingin the ‘unpopular culture’ that also subsists on the Internet (i.e. the worldof research, digital scholarship, knowledge work)? In particular, how do 'new literacies' contribute to learning to be a good nurse/midwife?
There is a significant missmatch between being able to type in a few words into a generic search engine and performing a literature review. A significant amount of unlearning old 'new literacy' ways needs to happen before students can really progress and gain a good grounding in their subject. Perhaps this accounts for why students were confident that they were 'effective online researchers' while they still request training in 'how to effectively research and reference reliable online resources' (NUS 2010 report for HEFCE cited in JISC infoNet Digital Literacies page).

What constitutes Networked Learning activity?

2011-09-09T17:25:00.000+01:00

Having previously asked, 'What does it mean to be network learned?', I am now thinking about what networked learning looks like from the outside. I wouldnt presume to be able to measure or define what happens inside the brain, but the results of neurological synapses can surface in various kinds of networked learning activity. Since we are not able (yet) to use telepathy, and since many non-face2face interactions are possible, if not actually carried out, via the Internet, it must be possible to recognise and come up with a reasonably complete list of these networked learning activities.
As a start, there is:

writing something in a shared space
reading something someone else wrote
replying to something
rating something (selecting a score from a list of options to express your opinion of value)
building and maintaining a network (and all that goes with it - i.e. needs unpacking),
sharing a link via social bookmarking

If you know of more, please comment or get in touch.
Of course, implicit in this some of the items in this list is an ethic that values sharing and an in-built commitment to and awareness of the network(s) in chosing what move to make while engaging in learning activity. If we are to see students becoming networked learners, they will not only have to perform the items in the list with sufficient elan, they will also have to become 'network aware'. Is this too much to hope for? Or is it possible to so design curricula and constituent activities that require networked learning activity for long enough for students to become wired to 'think the network'?

Mindset 1 and Mindset 2

2011-07-14T11:57:00.003+01:00

How much does it matter if you're a Mindset 1 person being asked to do things a Mindset 2 person does? This is admitted as a gross over-simplification, but, as you may have realised, I'm after the extreme end of the cohort: anything from the "I'm rubbish at computers (although I book holidays online, have a zillion friends on Facebook, etc. etc.)" downwards.
So while there may be a much more complicated picture out there, this one will do for now. I was reading Chris Jones recently (in J CAL 10.1111/j.1365-2729.2010.00370.x ) again on the Digital Native thing and want to steer well away from deterministic concepts. But here's the table from Lankshear and Nobel's New Literacies Sampler 2006 (you can get the whole book as a PDF ):

Do you really need a 'Mindset transplant' to embrace learning with technology?

Collaboration tools and securing engagement

2011-07-06T12:26:00.000+01:00

So the latest wheeze for getting students to engage with information technology with a view to networked learning concluded the other day.
The assignment for this module is a group presentation and so I give a talk about online collaboration tools. The audience has 'mixed' ability when it comes to information technology skills or any desire to use computers at all. Re. IT, this works well because the groups usually have at least one person who knows what they're doing and the others are in a good position to learn a lot from their peers.
The NMC requires undergraduate nurses to accumulate 4,600 programme hours (divided into 2,300 hours of practice and 2,300 hours of theory). Students sign a register in lectures and this, at least, gives them a reason to come. However, in an attempt to provide flexibility, I tell students that they need not attend the IT-lab workshop as long as they participate online. More importantly, no register is taken in the workshop, their register hour is logged by dint of their participation online, whether they attend the workshop or not. This usually means that I get to see the people who really want to come, and the rest can 'learn by doing', or merely demonstrate their ability at a time/place of their choosing.
Following my lecture, as the students were working in groups, I asked for one member of the group to reply to a discussion board I had set up, explaining what collaboration tools they had chosen to use and why. I asked them to return at the end of the module to reply individually to their group's original thread. It was this latter post that got them the 'workshop theory hour'. Specifically, I asked them to reflect back on their experiences with their group's chosen tool-set. About half the group did this, some of the comments being slightly perfunctory. But there was a good smattering of important lessons learned...
Some students had tried to use Dropbox for collaborative authoring of a presentation but this had caused problems because you can't really share the same file at the same time and someone needed to take charge with organising the shared space. One or two groups had tried to use Zotero on its own, uploading files to the shared library etc. but, unsurprisingly, they found this clumsy. Another group had shunned the perceived complexity of Dropbox and set up a dedicated Hotmail account, then shared the username and password with the group. They had found this to be rather messy, with multiple copies and versions of the same presentation going around and around. Facebook was popular for communication but was found to have very limited support sharing files.
So the overall message in this for the students was that they needed a range of tools to collaborate effectively. I hope the number of them will have learned how to complement the various component parts of a given activity with an appropriate tool. This is foundational 'working knowledge' for accomplishing anything with IT and something my colleague Joe Nicholls has been banging on about for some time...
Here's a prezi I'm building to guide students:

I want to... on Prezi

Addictive learning

2011-03-29T11:05:00.003+01:00

A quick Scholar search of this term gives a few references to game-based learning. One useful article that appeared was Eynon & Helsper's paper http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1461444810374789 but that was only by chance that the words ended and started a sentance.
Why addictive? Because, as Kanuka and Rourke 2008 point out, 'when learner's private lives remain a priority, learning becomes a second priority.' I dont mind where the learning takes place, if a learning intervention can cause such a disruption to those priorities that related thoughts start firing off before dropping off to sleep, when you wake up, when the in the bath/shower, at breakfast, in the middle of your commute, distracting you from your work, distracting you in a meeting, cropping up in conversation over lunch, your Web-browser history is full of cross-references to it, and so on.
This is the very best form of mobile or ubiquitous learning, because we carry it around with us literally whereever we go. I link this with Goodyear's ideas about 'working knowledge'... (see

Goodyear, P. 2002. Psychological foundations for networked learning. In: Steeples, C. and Jones, C. eds. Networked learning: perspectives and issues. London: Springer.)

So, how can learning become an addiction?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/miikas/

Epistemic what?

2011-01-21T12:06:00.001Z

This is the response you'll likely get if you voice 'epistemic fluency' as an aspirational outcome for students in higher education... unless you've looked at Peter Goodyear's work on it. Maria Zenios recently published a paper in J-CAL which extended...

Ohlsson's (1995) list of epistemic tasks to include activities such as reasoning, negotiating, comparing, exploring, clarifying meanings, and offering new perspectives. (p9)

Back at the office, we were discussing how a proposed workload metric could account for 'corridor conversations', having been chatting over some key/current issues.
We're looking at developing a new curriculum and I waved a copy of Maria's paper around in the hope of getting a chance to advertise epistemic fluency. Another issue was a complaint about the behaviour of a group of students in a session where they would learn a practical clinical skill. I wasnt that familiar with it so youtubed to locate a few examples. The tutor immediately started to critique the video I'd found. I suggested that this was exactly the activity that we would want students engaging in. One nice thing about video is that they include cultural settings and artifacts, like uniforms, experienced/expert staff: exactly the conditions that students face and have to challenge when they enter the clinical area. I challenged my colleague to come up with an 'epistemic activity' that framed the way that students would search for, find, evaluate and share those videos, supporting their learning of the clinical skill. It's the first time I'd really seen clinical skills as something wider than merely teaching a person to perform a physical task, and the first time I'd made such a concrete connection between epistemic fluency and learning a primarily physical skill.

Zenios, M. (2011). Epistemic activities and collaborative learning: towards an analytical model for studying knowledge construction in networked learning settings. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, doi:10.1111/j.1365-2729.2010.00394.x

Which is better, visible or invisible technology?

2010-11-25T10:04:00.000Z

According to folk like Donald Norman, 'things' should be designed to be as easy to use as possible. There should be no need for a manual, still less expertise, even when pushing the limits of what a 'thing' can do. Requiring basic IT skills or new/digital literacies is just obstructing an individual's ability to concentrate on their job in hand.
Some of you will have come across AOL-only users, who think that AOL IS the Internet. Some Apple users are also totally thrown by the seeming complexity of Microsoft's offerings. Why do they have to make it so complicated!!?! Ignoring the fact that there has been significant convergence in 'ease of use' of competing operating systems, Apple's touch-interfaced i-phone and i-pad have changed the usability cosmos (in the aorist tense). I hear compelling accounts of all manner of 'non-computer people' swooning with wonder at the simplicity and elegance of reading from an i-pad.
I know Apple fans, at least, are going to find this risible, but I just want to ask, are we breeding a new generation of people who do not know how to even hold a mouse (i.e. the pointing device which first appeared in the latter half of the 20th Century)?

CEQ and group-based networked learners

2010-11-16T11:09:00.000Z

Following my chat with Andrew again a week last Friday, I finally got around to looking at Community Equity (CEQ), which plugs into Confluence quite nicely. I wrote a bit about my ideal VLE before and this post is about thinking whether CEQ could fit some of those requirements.
I detect a growing consensus that group-based activity and the dialogue it promotes is gaining ground at many levels of education (I've been reading Littleton and Howe's book about educational dialogue).
When the group has divided up its work and separated, how can their activity be measured? Networked learning is about 'promoting connections' and this needs to happen in the minds and lives of people, not just by designing engaging learning materials, or even a highly relevant and stimulating learning activity. CEQ can incentivise social network activity by making that activity transparent. Contributions to a wiki in terms of edits, comments, bookmarks, ratings, etc., can paint a fine-grained picture of a person's online effort towards the group endeavour.
Perhaps that's enough. Perhaps awarding marks towards a degree classification may only distort the learner's focus, reducing them to a special case of myspace/facebook piracy. There's work to be done on defining performance levels, even if adopting the simple 'pass or fail' system, where a certain level of activity would get students over the finishing line. Hopefully, by then, they'd have become networked learners.
Of course, this is still very formative. I have no idea if we can bring CEQ together with automated 'space' creation/population, based on student information system data... but I'm warming to the idea of a pilot.
The other thing that slightly chills me is the whole development lifecycle of open source software.... but that's for another post...
Here's a video about CEQ...

See also http://kenai.com/projects/community-equity

Contingency in use of Digital Tools

2010-11-08T11:58:00.001Z

Once again, on the theme of implicit digital literacies...
I have been talking with students recently about reference management software. Amongst others, the students can choose between:

Endnote
Endnote Web
Zotero

The first two are 'supported' at Cardiff University: there are 'styles' for both the School's in-house Harvard as well as Cardiff University's variant. Option 1 is expensive while Option 2 is quite clumsy to use (requires signup on-campus and 'nasty' passwords). Zotero is a dream to use and it's free, although the School's house style for Harvard is not available currently (another job for muggins perhaps).
However, with the recent demise of drop.io, it could be argued that recommending the open source, unsupported Zotero exposes students to an unacceptable risk. What happens when the student fails to submit coursework on time because Zotero failed? Of course, couching recommendations with cautionary remarks chill-off students from engaging with and benefiting from a tool that is unlikely to fail.
Expert use of tools like Zoterio and drop.io will have incurred a certain amount of investigation into the robustness/life expectancy of the tool. An expert will have a sense of whether it is necessary to devise a contingency plan in the event of the tool's unavailability, whether temporary (read a book for a bit) or permanent (start looking for an alternative that might be compatible with your archive).
Whether using email, online filestore, collaboration spaces, blog, mindmapping, bookmark sharing or reference management, all of them may suffer 'outages'. But this is something users have come to live with, it is implicitly part of working in these ways.
It is easy to demonstrate the benefits of Zotero. Communicating the 'small print' is far more tricky. But I am at a loss as to how to convey the 'tool appraisal' and 'back-up and rescue' skills mentioned above without completely losing my audience.

Perplexed by 3 approaches to twitter

2010-11-08T10:41:00.001Z

At last Friday's CU Social Media Cafe, we discussed twitter. It soon became apparent that three experts adopted three completely different ways of managing their digital identity.

Have different accounts for different 'identities' (work, hobby, family/friends)
Use twitter for only work and use facebook (or other) for family/friends
Have just one twitter account for every aspect of life.

There were well grounded and rounded reasons for each individual's choice, which I will not enlarge on here. What I wanted to highlight was that these routes perplex new users, not least when in the presence of experts discussing the relative merits of their adopted position. This position is not necessarily fixed either, but could shift over the course of a year or years.
Being aware of and able to hold competing conceptions or approaches of use in tension, without it hindering activity is an implicit ability that undergirds the use of social media. I've been through my own digital identity soul searching, eventually deciding to stump for option 3 above. The hiatus was quite disconcerting for a while. Others will wonder what all the fuss was about, yet others will never get to the point of resolving these issues having been switched off by them completely.

The Chocolate Computer Club rides again

2010-10-06T17:02:00.002+01:00

It was Spring 2006 and, in frustration, at the lack of attendance at IT lab-based sessions, I asked the Undergraduate Student/Staff Panel, 'What then can motivate students to come to IT sessions'?

The immediate answer from some grinning wag was, 'Chocolate!'. Then, when approached by an enterprising librarian, wanting to start semi-formal drop-in information fluency sessions, I joined the two concepts together and came up with, 'The Chocolate Computer Club'.

The tag-lines were sure to flow freely, but I started with:

For those of us who need a reason

and

30 minutes of smooth luxurious IT (15 minutes tuition, 15 minutes practice)

Apart from being very corny, I was quite sure that the concept was half-baked from the kick-off. I mean, who was I kidding that IT could be 'smooth' and/or 'luxurious'?!

By the Autumn of 2007 I had to admit in my appraisal that...

'The Chocolate Computer Club was abandoned after poor attendances'. I was alarmed to hear later on that there had been rumours, spread by staff, that the chocolate would be present in name only. In any case, my choice of chocolate was probably amiss... On reflection, a bar of it may not be something you comfortably share amongst a group of poeple you dont know... I've gone for something more self-contained.

This time of year there are good offers on the tins, so I've been to the shops and got my chocs.

This is not going to be a 'drop-in' session though - it's firmly on the timetable, but students are not obliged to come... there'll be no register (our students have to show they've attended a number of theory hours to keep the bursery flowing).

The session is being run instead of en masse inductions, with a sign-up list in Blackboard for students to claim a place. This is somewhat counter-intuitive because the people who are likely to attend are perhaps less likely to use an electronic tool... However, a reasonable number seem to have managed it so far.
In the event, seven students, wide-eyed and avowedly IT-phobic came along. We had a merry time shaking heads about how aweful computers are and how slow the University systems are, etc. Apart from my brief skit about IT knowledge needing to be founded upon problem-solving, the students asked about their issues with accessing ECDL from home, navigating Blackboard and how to master online submission. We spent a while going through these but actually, of course, the students were as much a help to each other as anything I said.
Promoting connections... with chocolate ;-)

The ideal VLE

2010-09-20T11:42:00.001+01:00

Reluctantly, I was tried to form an answer to the question of what would make up the ideal Virtual Learning Environment... I usually maintain that point 1 is the most important in the following list:

Do a good job of handling programme/cohort/group affiliations and keep those affiliations while handing students over into groups within 3rd party tools like Grademark and Questionmark Perception.
Integrate with GradeMark and QuestionmarkPerception
Allow easy and quick organisation of content (I spend half my day waiting for the browser to refresh)
Allow easy dissemination of information - via announcements and bulk email
Allow interaction, perhaps via discussion list, blog, wiki-type activity, with reasonably fine-grained permissions
Allow embedding video, and various other media... like this (cue attractive picture to liven things up a bit):

Well - some of that sounds a bit like what we have already... But it might be worth thinking, no, lets not do the VLE thing (toolbox of generic technologies for organising learning and assessment). Let's think how something like an enterprise wiki could play to it's strengths and work powerfully for promoting connections and networked learning...

Where collaborative authoring is required as part of the activity, the wiki could show me, and other readers, what a person has done very easilly and transparently on a page. One of the things that happens with wikis is that people lose ownership of what they've done in the wiki which is a dissincentive for them to engage with it. In our present wiki tool (campuspack), clicking on the person's name in the list of page authors just takes me to their profile. I want to click on it and see their contribution highlighted, and possibly even award them marks for that there and then... see next point...
I would like to be able to allow easy, on the fly, recording and reporting of my and others' assessment of what they've done, indicating their opinion, along a series of criteria and levels of performance - perhaps a pop-up box that I could define. This would break with the notion of single points of assessment, and therefore learning for that assessment alone, as students would be contributing and being rewarded for their ongoing activity.
Assessment of networked learning activity. Whether we like it or not, assessment drives everything in Higher Education. Students are unlikely to share without some incentive linked to their final assessment. For networked learning, how can I monitor what each person has done in terms of contributing to everyone's learning. This could be based on stats for access, usage, and other's usage and opinions of what I, the student, have done. For example, if I share a hyperlink through my blog to a resource I get a mark, if someone clicks on it I get a mark, if someone indicates they find what I did useful, that gets a mark for both of us, if someone includes a link to my blog post, that gets a mark, and so on... Over a period of years, this could build into quite a large amount of 'marks', a powerful evidence-base upon which to evaluate someone's performance as a collaborator/sharer/team-player. This would be a way to reward the individual for work done in support of others... always a tricky matter for assessment. Hopefully the fine-grained rewards would assure participants that each and every contribution was counting for something.

I am certain that none of this is particularly unique; the first two occurred to me after a conversation recently and the latter one came up in conversation a while back as becomming possible. These ideas may also not stand up to scrutiny, especially in the environments where they have to be enacted! But that's part of what this blog is all about...

Where to put this wiki...

2010-09-20T10:51:00.001+01:00

Students are working in groups to produce a page of evaluated links to resources around a certain topic in healthcare. Where do I put the wiki?
In their own VLE module? Sadly, this limits the audience and thus the students' awareness of that audience.
In their programme-level VLE module where all students on their programme can access it? As this task is run twice a year, it's soon going to get hard to navigate and muggins is going to have to maintain it. At least building one per cohort keeps it manageable with no overhead of maintaining it.
Somewhere all of our students can see it? This would mean farming them out to a different wiki-space not normally associated with learning and teaching.... politically sensitive! Plus the need to do all the 'gardening' implied in '2' above.
Sigh - looks like I stay with option one. It's, as ever, a trade-off between wanting to do the right thing educationally and yet keep it manageable...

IT Heuristics

2010-06-18T10:43:00.008+01:00

Here is a list of IT Heuristics. I'm sure I collected and wrote these down somewhere before but anyway.... this batch is (mostly) taken from my chapter in the rather expensive Social Information Technology book. But I may add a couple more in here, as they come to me... let me know if you think of any more.
These are the kinds of things that serve experienced IT users on a daily basis, once they've got over the various sets of inhibitions (hatred of IT, etc.) and inhibitors (access to working IT, a job or some other imperative that makes them use IT on a daily basis, etc.) that prevented them acquiring these heuristics all along.

Throw the bone.
Lock up the lions or they will eat you.
Double-check your belt. The monkey probably stole your keys.
After that, you're on your own initiative, right?
Work out your support network: who can help you best with what?
Learn about “backing up” and versioning: delete nothing, version it instead. This is done for you with the likes of googledocs or dropbox.
Error messages: Try and act on their advice but if you dont understand what to do, guess, and learn from what happens next.
If something goes wrong, don’t blame yourself – its usually the computer’s fault.
If something doesn’t work or is taking too long, be pragmatic, find another way – there usually is one.
In design, simplicity is genius: ICT allows you to be creative but that may just waste time and/or obstruct your message.
If you forget how to do something, 'google it' or use a program’s help system to remind yourself.
A key function of computers is that they are good at storing, managing and searching for information. What are the implications of this? Here's one: don't spend ages hunting for a file or sentence, the computer knows where it is - get the computer to search for you.
ICT is made up of files: learning to manage files is key.
Typing is still an important skill: Use a “learn to type” program to gain efficiency and confidence.
Copy and paste: it works between applications although Paste Special, unformatted text is useful to avoid carrying over the formatting.
Become familiar with these 4 shortcuts (there are more): WindowsKey+e (Windows Explorer)or WindowsKey+d (show desktop), Ctrl+c (copy) Ctrl+v (paste).
Right click to access task specific functions (e.g. open link in new browser).
ICT can not be trusted.
Everything is owned by someone (beware of copyright)
Never use the space bar to align text – use tabs, indents or a table instead. Find out about these from the help system.
Use heading styles in Word (enables table of contents, document map, etc.)

There are probably a few more, but that's quite enough to be going on with. I identified this as a major flaw in attempts to get students doing networked learning. If they can't or won't use IT, they will not get very far with networked learning. In 2001, the Guidelines authors assume that the mere passage of time will soon negate any problems of engagement and access. In 2010, that assumption seems as strong as ever in my corner of higher education. We have to crack this to move these people on, and the usual tick-box approach to teaching IT skills will not cut it. ECDL, or something like it, may be an option, if students of it are fully engaged, but, as a qualification, it's soon reduced to 'learning to the test'. Organisations can be just as results-focussed, and the learning opportunities they implement suffer as a result. We must 'promote connections of meaningful IT use in the minds and lives' of learners. It is suggested that just such an heuristic-level approach may get them off on a better footing than sitting confused in an IT lab and, when they leave, forgetting everything they learned inside it just minutes before.

Post-reg IT skills

2010-06-11T16:32:00.003+01:00

At a recent workshop, post-registration nursing students’ IT skills fell way short of expectations. This was no surprise to me, but what to do about it...? Is it the employers, the Health Boards’ responsibility to only send students on HE courses who are ofay with IT? Numbers would suffer and no-one wants that. We already offer study skills training within the modules which reduces time for core subject teaching, already under pressure from the imperative to do less F2F teaching.
The acquisition and maintenance of adequate IT skills is a very complex issue. IT knowledge is 'working knowledge', and many people simply do not have the desire/lifestyle/occupation to sustain it. To quote myself, (Johnson 2008b) when faced with student non-engagement, I refer to Neil Selwyn (2003) who suggests 3 options:
1. Restructuring of HE around ICT: Making ICT engagement unavoidable through, for example, requiring the completion of assessments to be mediated through computers. However, such a “strategy of compulsion can be strongly argued to be of limited long-term effect” (Selwyn 2002, p.115) in the same way as knowledge memorized for exams.
2. Realistically embedding ICT within existing practices in HE: to minimize the rejection of learning technologies, using them to “supplement and complement existing curricular processes” (ibid), thus providing meaningful and successful instances of ICT use.
3. Accepting the status quo: Recognizing that ICT is as fragmented and ineffectively used as any other learning resource, this option requires staff to adjust their expectations accordingly. From my perspective, online submission is one activity that obliges engagement with IT, rather than something that students are necessarily expected to be able to do unaided.
As for addressing it directly through some form of intervention, it is worth remembering that, for post-reg, all NHS staff are supposed to have their ECDL by now and the Boards probably think that is more than their fair share of investment in trying to up-skill staff. Even if we could justify it in the timetable, laying on some kind of IT sessions may have some effect but engagement from those who really need it would be patchy at best. It's a similar issue to many other aspects our students present with, e.g. 'key skills', engaging with feedback, etc.
Options include 1. Do nothing, continue as we are, 2. Try and share the problem more with the Local Health Boards 3. Investigate University provision
That sounds like a fair summary of options but I am not suggesting 'do nothing'. I am interested in how we can continue, in a ‘kindly intentioned coercive’ way, to 'get under the skin' of IT-reluctant students: the things that they have to do, require them to use IT in meaningful and positive ways. Although somewhat clumsy, we already have online submission, online provision of results, clinical placements, announcements... etc. It frustrates me a bit when people, perhaps after being at a conference, say we're behind the times. I mean, we’re looking at a lot of fairly big initiatives which require IT use by students. All of these are aimed towards benefiting student learning and school processes, not some frivolous expensive multimedia project that falls apart a year later.
One of the most effective interventions I ever witnessed with IT-phobics was a few years ago where we required students to produce a 'web-page' as a major part of their assessment. Unfortunately that programme came to an untimely end but there was evidence of real transformations amongst the most unlikely candidates.
I have to add that learning and doing IT is a 'funny business'. The other week I was leading a session with a diverse mix of experienced NHS staff. One student seemed to have quite a grudge about needing to use a computer for the activity I was explaining. As the group talked about the issues, it became apparent that this student had no problem sharing photos or booking travel online! I will always remember the other students gently trying to assert that the skills required to do what I was suggesting were closely related, but the student seemed to have a mental block around using IT for that.
So, yes, why not flag the issue up with the Health Boards. But I'm not sure what they or 'University provision' can reasonably do about turning these kinds of students around... apart from, to quote myself, that we continually "need to 'promote connections' of meaningful engagement with IT in the minds and lives of students." (Johnson 2008a; Johnson 2008b)

Refs:
Johnson, M., 2008a. Expanding the concept of Networked Learning. In Sixth International Conference on Networked Learning. Halkidiki Greece: Lancaster University, pp. 154-161.

Johnson, M.R., 2008b. Investigating & encouraging student nurses’ ICT engagement. In T. T. Kidd & I. Chen, eds. Social Information Technology: Connecting Society and Cultural Issues. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference.

Selwyn, N., 2002. Telling tales on technology: Qualitative studies in technology and education, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited.

Selwyn, N., 2003. Understanding students (non)use of information and communications technology in university. Available at: http://www.cf.ac.uk/socsi.

Reviewing the proceedings

2010-05-20T10:22:00.004+01:00

I'm not sure what the best way to go about this is, but I feel the need to read all the papers from the recent conference.
Apart from the choice of technology, there's the issue of how to attack them. Do I take a random choice, go alphabetically by author, follow the numbering system the organisers have adopted (that would be easy as I'd have to start with my own paper!).
Having failed to embed a wave in this blog, I'm a bit nervous about that medium. I know the invitations restriction has been lifted but you still need an account so it's also not as open as I'd like it to be. Also, not sure how manageable it would be... are we talking a single wave for all the papers or individual waves, one for each paper? Probably the latter could work... but then there's the issue of sharing. What kind of comments might I/we make? Do we want to feel free enough to make comments that I/we might worry about the paper's author reading...? (policy clearly ought to be to frame comments as warmly as possible).
I'd thought about using the NLC2010 site's own online environment, but worry about how long that is likely to hang around. Even linking to the papers is not likely to work for that long, until the site is archived, as has happened in previous years.
I can almost hear Gráinne calling... 'cloudworks'... not a bad suggestion... There are already some clouds there from people who attended the presentations...
Perhaps the level of granularity and control I'm after might mean that a simple blog (like this one) might be enough to do the job... and then link back through to cloudworks :-)

Prezi for Networked Learning Conference

2010-05-03T06:48:00.003+01:00

So I'm on at 11:30 but I thought I'd lob this up beforehand as I dont know if or when I'll get a chance to do that later on. Sorry that some of the points/pictures are not fully explained but I'll refer you to the paper for that.

NLC2010 Anonymity in online discussion forums - does it promote connections? on Prezi

Reviewing Wave and my paper at the Networked Learning Conference

2010-04-30T14:49:00.007+01:00

I've acknowledged Dr Joe Nicholls' kindness in reviewing a draft of my paper for the conference, but I thought it might be interesting to share the comments and my responses using Google Wave. I'm not sure how this is going to work out (it may be that you will be unable to see the wave (below) at all unless you are already logged in with a google wave enabled account) or if anyone else is as interested as I am... but if you want to add your comment to the wave then I'll happily add you as a contact if you supply your wave ID.

When is learning not networked learning?

2010-03-26T12:33:00.004Z

Networked learning is not a theory of everything... I think I verge on making that mistake when I talked about 'promoting connections'... in the minds and lives of students and staff, and things you do to promote connections to the point that they engage with/in networked learning. I believe that is vital to bring them to the feast and so it is relevant and foundational, even a pre-condition to it, but not essentially networked learning.
And, in a similar way, I'm not convinced it's useful to extend Personal Learning Environments (PLE) as including 'everything', even if it does temporarily cause us to reflect on the differences between PLE's and VLE's, and how people configure their whole learning environment.
Part of the problem is that learning is very complex in humans and they're doing it a lot, to various degrees...
Recently I was reading a bit of Peter Alheit and when his use of the term 'networked learning' caught my attention:
What do you think...? How is the following 'networked learning'? p117

The purpose behind this new understanding of the term 'learning' is the option of networking these different forms of learning in a synergistic way - learning should not only be systematcially extended to cover the entire lifespan, but should also take place 'lifewide', i.e. learning environments should be engendered in which the various types of learning can complement each other organically. 'The "lifewide" dimension brings the complementarity of formal, non-formal and informal learning into sharper focus' (Commission, 2000, p9.)
Lifelong, 'networked' learning thus seems to become an economic and social imperative of the first degree. The 'new' concept of lifelong learning betrays an ambition that John Field has termed 'the new educational order' (Field, 2000, pp.133ff). Learning acquires a new meaning - for society as a whole, for education and training institutions and for individuals. The shift in connotation exposes an inner contradiction, however, in that this new learning is initially 'framed' by political and economic precepts. The goals are competitiveness, employment and adaptive competence on the part of the workforce. The intention is also, however, to strengthen freedom of biographical planning and the social involvement of individuals. Lifelong learning 'instrumentalises' and 'emancipates' at one and the same time.

This seems to put a high price on 'networking' formal, informal and non-formal learning.... which is haunting me somewhat... Is 'networking' here just another word for 'including' or 'linking', etc. and thus a mere co-incidence, or does it have something important to say to the concept that is the subject of this blog? Right now, it strikes me as pitching for another [learning] 'theory of everything'.... (sorry Peter - probably 'my bad')
As trends in learning theory move from behaviourist, cognitivist, and social learning, the lens shifts to such a wide angle that, in the end, one is depicting 'life', rather than 'learning'. But I think it also happens when I get over-excited about an insight or idea I've just grasped (or re-grasped) so that 'learning theory myopia' (or is it hyperopia!?!) kicks in, and, suddenly, I see nothing else - for a while at least!

Openness

2010-03-24T12:07:00.003Z

I want to promote connections, but how far will the connection go once released into the wild...? This is surely one of the variables that anyone engaged in networked learning will consider.

I am (sometimes painfully) aware that one slight error in handling the interface and a message I intended for one person suddenly and irrevocably gets transmitted to the masses.

But what about the communities I work in? For example, there's the 'IT people' within the school and I have a Lotus Connections Community dedicated to just 'us'. Would it be a good idea to open it up to the rest of the University or even the World? Is there any real threat to each option. Am I really only worried in case those in my own school are more conservative than me about sharing and will dissengage... Perhaps I should pop off and ask them :-)

I may have a 'rose tinted' memory, but I cant remember losing out by sharing... in the words of the proverb:

Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days

But there are times when simply 'open' or 'closed' is too simplistic. I need to be able to discern what level of openness is apt for each communication and that adds overhead to communicating at all! That leads me onto another proverb (paraphrased as):

Even an idiot can seem clever if he can keep his mouth shut

If I post this to this fairly quiet blog, as I have here, chances are no-one much is going to take note. If I post a link to it in my CU-only blog, chances are that several people will take note and may even start commenting on it. The size of the audience and the level of openness will affect whether or not I get some dialogue going, but it also determines the potential reach and impact of my words, beneficial or otherwise.... all this from someone who cant even choose a packet of bacon!

abbreviations - a golden opportunity

2009-10-07T10:53:00.002+01:00

So the new arrivals and returners are mostly up and running. Each time a new BN cohort starts I try to 'promote connections' by creating a small number of discussion lists in Blackboard. This year there are three: 'General support, feedback and collaboration'; 'Profiles' and 'Set Rep'. During induction sessions I encourage students to use them by:
1. Describing how the forums are different to facebook (no-one yet has succeeded in getting all the students into a single facebook group)
2. Reading out a really useful discussion that took place some years ago about student placements.
3. Encouraging students to 'subscribe' to the forums so that they get email alerts when a new message is posted.
4. Letting go, telling them that the forums have great potential but that this will only be realised if they participate meaningfully.
After some initial buzz, the lists tend to quieten down somewhat. But I had reason to hope that some lights might have come on when a student posted up a list of common nursing abbreviations for the general good, adding that the order they were listed in made sense to them and if anyone wanted to contribute some more, they'd be welcome.
This started alarm bells ringing for me because threaded discussion is a poor tool for accumulating knowledge. Threads get lost over time and only one person can add to the original list. So I posted the abbreviations into a wiki page. This wiki has been up for years, in a place where all the students on this programme can access it, but none of them really 'get' what it's for, in spite of my attempts to seed it with useful suggestions. I've had about fifteen 'views' of this new abbreviations page now so I'm hoping it'll at least plant the idea in a few heads.
I believe that this kind of opportunism could be at least as effective, 'pound for pound', for promoting networked learning (as an element of their nascent epistemic fluency) amongst students as anything else I could say or do.

Commentary on 'blogging as a tool for reflection and learning'

2009-09-28T09:35:00.007+01:00

Thanks to @amcunningham for RT -

great! RT @jilltxt: A video lecture I recorded for HiB about using blogging in learning is up at Virclass.net http://bit.ly/4zaUUZ

I really believe in the power or writing for 'an' audience, I see that Dr Jill (Walker Rettberg) has been able to marshal a lot of factors that make her students more likely to engage and 'get' the personal benefits of blogging:

The course is about digital culture (4:52). It used to be that all the 'success' stories about learning technology came out of those who taught Ed Tech MSc's. These days it's the cultural anthropologists... But the point is that the activity in question must be directly in line with the students' view of their short and long term learning trajectory. I really doubt if my nurses see themselves as bloggers, as much as I know they'd benefit from it.
Jill has regular and easy access to class with computers.
While the students are under Jill's pedagogic control, she gets them writing.
The students have well defined well designed learning activities (write down one thing you learned today, google a term and post a link to it) giving them a meaningful reason to engage
She integrates blogging tightly with her teaching (online out of class and in lectures)
'The most important thing' was when she modelled 'good' networked learning activity.
A critical mass of students engage with the concept and each other.
'Experts' outwith the confines of the programme comment on student's posts which accentuates the awareness of audience, further authenticating the activity: "there, I told you Stephen Downes was real" - Do you have a ready pool of bloggers in your discipline?

The implicit theory here is cognitive apprenticeship, which I'm a big fan of. These students are being given a clear trajectory in to a learning community - small wonder if it 'works'. Beware trying this at home unless you too can tick most of the above boxes. 'Good luck'? Not really, just good alignment.
One good video link deserves another: check out Neil Selwyn at seminar.net - also in Norway ;-) (ah... the land of my fathers...)

Do lecture capture systems promote connections?

2009-09-10T11:53:00.004+01:00

Just returning from a presentation about a pilot in lecture capture using Echo360. In a traditional University setting, my hang-ups were:

if the best this is is a revision aid, that's an expensive revision aid.
if this would be useful for students who missed the lecture for some reason, cant they do what anyone else has ever done, get the summary or notes from a peer and do some reading around.
£ for £ there is an almost infinitely greater value for lifelong learning in a simple reference list at the back of an appropriate journal article than there is in a recorded lecture. This also goes for other suggested uses, like recording a summary instead of the whole lecture or recording a 'pre-reading'
if we are aiming at students' epistemic fluency, this only encourages them to rote learn - evidence the statistics that say the traffic sky-rockets at exam time.
how does a recorded lecture encourage them along the cognitive apprenticeship road to mastery in the given discipline?
if we want to keep ephemeral lecture speech lively, how much will knowing your every word is reified prevent you from doing things 'on the fly' that may afterwards seem unprofessional?
limiting the potential audience to just our students (who login to blackboard - assuming they can!) is naff and old hat.
what is a lecture good for anyway? If your lecture is the same every time then you probably shouldnt be giving it as a lecture. The students in a lecture have given ceded some level of pedagogic control over to you, they're giving their attention to what you have to show and say - will they do that at any other time (in competition with, for example, their chores or family/social time). I would not think anyone would want to review my lectures because they do not contain much raw 'content' - the objective is to stimulate them to think - for that limited time that they have volunteered their attention to what I have got to say...

If it was possible for students to interact by starting discussion threads at particular points in the lecture, that might have some promise in terms of promoting connections... but it isn't.
There is a clearer case for providing canned lectures to disparate distance students, but, even there, I would be feeling towards only making them available for a limited time.
Rant over.

Audit Based Learing (ABL)

2009-06-26T15:12:00.001+01:00

I have always secretly wanted to come up with a new(ish) educational acronym. It's a bit like adding a stone to the top of a mountain cairn (here's Asher doin just that on top of Pen-y-Gadair Fawr, Black Mountains). Whether this is new or not... nah!!! No such thing as an original thought these days. But anyway... Audit Based Learning. First of all, I have to say that I do not like the term audit, something from my sad days trying to learn about accountancy. But In strong contrast, I have been surprised to see how misty-eyed even quite irenic nursing folk get at the mention of the word. I think the potential for this is actually quite good or I wouldnt be bothering to mention it. I mean, why on earth add to the passing fads and theorising that education is regularly slated for...!?! It came up at a meeting where we were discussing the research and informatics content of the curriculum and the need to move to something that would integrate research. We were hatching something like inquiry based learning but noting the difficulty of getting nurses and theory/research to understand each other. It was said that nursing audit is a similar activity to research in many ways, and far less grand, complex and fraught. It is research with a small 'r'. Implementing this would require more than just calling research by another name. And we would have to sit on our hands to ensure that we didnt tie down the students with masses of guidelines and red-tape (as sometimes happens with reflections, so called). It has the potential to engage students in the pursuit of knowledge, framed in terms of their practice areas but within the context of higher education. It could be a new way to promote connections across the theory-practice divide where it matters most, inside the heads of students. Delusion of grandeur moment over (for now).

Pedagogically neutral? No

2009-06-18T13:02:00.000+01:00

I do not know what happened just then, but I suddenly saw a little fissure in my (relative) complacency about choice of VLE. Ah yes, I know what it was... I was transcribing something a student had said to me in a recent interview.

[I] don't really put anything into blackboard, it's more what I get out, out of it

Well now, I am not about to bash corporate VLE's. Of course, it's the way that we use the tools that matters most. But part of 'networked learning' ought to be the establishment of links, of all shapes and sizes and levels and types of activity.... but it struck me that they ought not to be one-way streets. In the perception of this student, a discussion list was alien to the overall thrust of blackboard. How can the whole enterprise of being a student @university be re-branded and re-engineered so that the statement above can be inverted to read:

[I - or, better, we] really put loads into blackboard, it's more what I put in, into it

Coopman's First Monday essay about Blackboard

2009-06-03T12:01:00.000+01:00

Sorry to pull off the cream of this one and not add much commentary but this, her last sentance, especially needs some mulling over:

Although Blackboard designers structure the course platform for efficiency and profit, instructors and students need a course environment optimized for learning and performative teaching.

First Monday, Volume 14:6 - 1st June.

too rare, but great when it happens

2009-05-08T23:02:00.000+01:00

It may be rare, but, when it happens, it gives me quite a lift. I'm talking about "connections". In this case, a discussion list, at the extreme end of "loose coupled" instructional design, has given one student the chance to realise that there is another student on placement in the same physical area as them. Now they're planning to meet up and that has huge potential for supporting and encouraging one-another. There's a lot more than that going on on the forum too, but the virtual meeting prompted me to start writing this post.
It highlights for me that the best thing social media brings to the table is the potential for sparking or enhancing face-to-face real-time conversations.

"Loose coupling" is a term I picked up at Lancaster; you can read about it from Peter Goodyear's paper (www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet21/goodyear.html ) but here's a nice quote of his from that one:

The loose coupling of elements gives space within which we can be both disciplined and creative, listen to our instincts and make them accountable to others.

So this is part of my making an instinct accountable... to you. Each year I have set up "General Support, Feedback and Collaboration" discussion lists, just to give some level of interaction potential to our too one-way VLE offerings. The only staff involvement I promise is my own brand of moderation (i.e. fairly hands-off). It strikes me that, for all the attempts at cunning design to draw people out in discourse and dialogue, this loosely framed forum has produced some very special learning opportunities for those involved.
It seems strange, as I think back to a project that ran back in UWCM days, that we dont do more to make students aware of their physical proximity.

johnson's presentation

2009-04-02T10:25:00.000+01:00

poor johnson has not been very well recently (nasty cold + temp spikes), so made this audio recording to go with a pdf version of the presentation he is supposed to be giving this afternoon, along with the cmap, in case he really cant face turning up.
oh yes - the conference is titled, 'e for enhancement' - see http://admin.rsc-wales.ac.uk/events/event_details.asp?eid=472

historical foundations - observations

2009-03-20T11:09:00.000Z

This morning I decided to do some reading. Chose the biggest book I could find and started on page 1. I have reviewed this book actually, which is why I have a copy ;-) but reading it for the sake of it should be something I do more often.... I'm not a very fast reader though, so many thoughts come together it's cruel. Here I take the trouble to note them, for myself as much as anything...

Molenda, M., 2007. Historical Foundations. In J. M. Spector et al., eds. Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology. New York: Routledge, pp. 3-20.

"The history of organized education and training can be viewed as a long struggle to extend opportunities to more people and to devise a means of helping those people learn better than through the events of everyday life" p5

My comment: It is a real challenge in nursing education, particularly in the theory element, to compete with the richness of clinical experience.

"In classical Athens, the Sophists thought provocative, often relativistic, notions of epistemology. The works of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in organising philosophical thought can be seen as a reaction against the Sophists' position that a good argument is one that prevails, if only through rhetorical manipulation, regardless of truth value." p5

My comment: The Sophists are alive and well in learning technology today

"Knowlton and Tilton (1929) study the use of these history films in seventh grade classrooms. One of their major conclusions was that the educational value of such films lay not only in the quality of the materials but also in how well teachers use them." P7

My comment: As Molenda, and probably many others before him, points out, these authors may have been the first to draw this conclusion but they certainly weren't the last! We will always need the pedagogue. Later on on page 7 he notes that there was "considerable resistance to sound films", adding that, "Some methodologists felt that the practice of having a classroom teacher add narration to silent films added a level of customisation and personalisation to film showings". here is the pedagogue who has adapted to the affordances of the technology, only to find the ground shifting beneath them. The technology was helping to promote connections, now that learning conduit is threatened by something that superficially looks superior - an "enhancement". Molenda adds that, "Administrators worried about their installed base, the large investment they had made in silent film projectors". by the 1930s we had a nice little standards war for projectors. What a waste of effort! just think how proficient educators would be and how much money would have been saved over the years if we had stuck with silent film! However, note:

"Producers generally chose subjects that were visual in nature" p7

My comment: no technology is a learning panacea, especially not a new technology. These "producers chose subjects that were visual in nature", and when considering the ergonomics of knowledge work we should not be surprised if video is not top of the list in preference to words-especially 'printed' words.

"The operations that prospered were the ones in which radio played an integral part in the university's mission" p8

My comment: right, everyone read Goodyear 2001 NOW! http://tinyurl.com/2qd6es

Had been reading this chapter for a while when I suddenly realised that there was hardly a single ref to Russian research... sorry - that was a dealbreaker.

My first (proper) conference paper

2009-03-18T11:24:00.001Z

This was as the Networked Learning Conference 2008. The paper is freely available, with all the others, at:
http://www.networkedlearningconference.org.uk/past/nlc2008/abstracts/Johnson.htm

It felt very much like a side-show at the time, but now it's there, online... This is useful as I try to build on that with some qualitative research (with the 2010 conference very much in mind).

Chris Jones mentioned to me that theory building takes time. Let's do something, even if only a fraction of my time can go towards it, worth the effort - far too much of the other sort around in e-learning. I see this recent (good) paper, in JAN by Wilkinson, While and Roberts, as a commentary on the state of things in the literature http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2648.2008.04924.x

My first book chapter

2009-03-18T11:06:00.001Z

I am rather ambivalent about this, but my dissertation became a book chapter in 2008. The sheer price of the book and the amount of titles pumped out by this publisher is unnerving... I've reviewed a couple from them for BJET but tend to avoid them now... unless the title really gets under my skin...
The call for chapters came out just as I was finishing my dissertation in 2006, so the timing had that ring of 'providence' about it. I'm very grateful for this though, as publishing anything when there's so much else to do is not easy. I'm particularly grateful to Terry Kidd who argued strongly for my chapter to be included.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Social-Information-Technology-Connecting-Reference/dp/1599047748

Johnson, M. (2008) Investigating & encouraging student nurses’ ICT engagement in Chen & Kidd Eds. (2008) Social Information Technology: Connecting Society and Cultural Issues, Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing, Inc.

killing connections

2009-02-23T09:13:00.000Z

We've had a few experiments with inter-professional learning recently that tried to use the VLE. Unfortunately, as a tutor comes to it 'straight out of the box', the VLE is more interested in limiting connections with anyone except the select few who teach or learn on the module. This is backed, of course, from several angles by policy: marketing and targeting a module, financing it, populating it, protecting copyright of it; these are all made possible by fixing cost-centres at the module/programme level. With a will, we have found ways to circumvent the boundaries, thanks to support from the centre. But the dreamt-of viral learning, 'learning as infection', mediated through a 20th Century VLE, with its faux social network, demands the demolishing of unhelpful constraints. Yet, ironically, these constraints are they which direct my salery safely to my bank account and certificates to help students get a salery... is this vicious/virtuous circle going to be disrupted any-time soon?

couple of points

2009-02-12T16:38:00.000Z

This is worth a look.
I liked the warmth with which Mike spoke about his students and the enthusiasm for the potential represented by an audience of 400 students. How to unleash that though - keeping them all engaged in the project would be fun in our current context.
I agree that students, as savvy as they may be with facebook/flickr/whatever, are essentially not particularly good at using them for 'these kinds of things' (i.e. learning). Interesting he wants to reduce the ratio of marks given to 'tests' - assessment is everything. If the 'devices' he's talking of could actually track the collaborative activity of students then perhaps that could be assessed.
But the stuff about learning to question is not new (or shouldnt be!). And 'we-learning'? please?!!?

Compendium 3 CMAP 5

2009-01-28T12:48:00.000Z

Comparing Compendium and CMAP

Both offer collaborative visualisation 1-1
Both have a web-publish option 2-2
Both are open source 3-3
Compendium would require admin rights to install at CU unless we wrote a NAL app for it. CMAP is already available on every workstation in the Uni via Networked Apps. 3-4
Compendium stores stuff either on your hard disk or via a MySQL database where CMAP uses a client/server attitude - i.e. sharing is better in CMAP. 3-5

Verdict: I could have gone on but, for my money, while Compendium is nicer to use than CMAP, at my institution, CMAP has the support and architecture where it counts, and it can (with a little coercion - apols to Joe) even be used for Compendium-type stuff.

Teaching by Design

2008-11-10T13:22:00.000Z

Video and PPT by Peter Goodyear at a seminar in September: http://www.jcu.edu.au/teaching/JCUPRD_038072.html
Some scrabbled notes of the points that leapt out at me...
'the challenge is all about integration not replacement' i.e. meshing [thinks - as opposed to mashing(!?)] 'teaching as design' - the linear relation between time/place of a lecture and the potential for a learning task which may take a while to develop but is not so constrained.
@ 26 mins enriching, 'not content, not syllabus coverage, activity... what the learner does... technology should fit around that', 'learning how to think for a living', engage students in activities which lead to meeting desired outcomes - that may work (via ISD) for certain training situations (e.g. armed forces and industry) but not in HE, we want creativity as they work they develop competence in becoming autonomous, we dont know what students do with the tasks we set! Design is 'indirect' as we cant control everything
@ 38 need to pay attention to tasks, environment, tools, community - but in the end, the activity takes place in a space that is 'co-configured',
@ 46 TasD pedagogically neutral, interpretation of task is deeply influential and emergent activity shows that not everyone benefits from our TasD, Ron Barnett - students need space to get it wrong, but, their choices about technology, community, etc. have a huge impact on the effectiveness of the task. We should scaffold to guide, but the institution's culture also works against effectiveness so you get overworked students
sustainable innovation - has to be continuous and central to the university - a shared sense of how it fits in to this broad learning ecology - what information does the library need. Every business unit needs to see itself as a learning unit within a learning organisation - should be able to describe what good learning looks like and how they contribute to which part of that... but time to engage in these discussions...?
There was also some talk of research they had done which shed light on the 'digital native' concept. Students who were technology-savvy would still expect the university to know best regarding use for learning at university.

Promoting engagement = removing barriers to engagement

2008-10-29T09:08:00.000Z

As a frequent if not prolific user of IT, I can fail to appreciate the barriers that others who use IT less than I do face when challenged to do so. One of these is IT skills, another is inclination, another may be 'professional identity'. A friend told me how Microsoft managed to swing their market share from IBM lotus spreadsheets to Excel through identifying and eradicating every last thing about their software which prevented users migrating. This can only happen by talking to the users. The other method of requiring people to use IT to accomplish tasks and activities, but it's hard to really win people like that.

wired or re-wired?

2008-06-05T08:39:00.000+01:00

Reading Thomas's blog again. 'digital natives' is wide open for critiquing but here are some of my thoughts about the implications:
1. We falsely assume that all kids are 'digital natives', disenfranchising those who are 'not fussed on computers' or socio-economically disadvantaged.
2. We, echoing Biggs concerns about 'surfing' and the unfortunate connotations with a 'surface approach' to learning, encourage the thought that being a 'digital native' is somehow in advance of/better than being erudite.

But what I need to know more about is whether the net is promoting evolutionary change to the way that learners' brains are wired and whether these changes are beneficial or cast too much embrained knowledge aside such that 'healthy' living in the non-virtual world is undermined. An example, related to Perkins' 'person plus/person solo' stuff, would be our recently purchasing a satnav. Does the de-skilling around mapreading matter? Do we gain more (in time saved, serenity, not having to get embarrased by stopping and asking, not crashing while trying to perch map on steering wheel, not driving into the congestion zone by mistake, etc.) than we lose from our brains through not having that mental exertion. Does this mean I will become so mentally flabby that I will have to choose to take up mental jogging? Will it free up my mind to become very focussed on my work or interests such that my focus actually narrows too much?

Biggs, J.B. (2003). Teaching for quality learning at university. Open University Press/Society for Research into Higher Education. (Second edition), Buckingham

Perkins, D. (1993) "Person-plus: a distributed view of thinking and learning," in Distributed
Cognitions, G. Salomon ed., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

emergent

2008-05-30T15:38:00.001+01:00

There is a lot of milage in thinking about how networks and networked learning involving them are emergent. I was just reflecting on the fact that I have just started to follow Glyn on twitter. Bearing in mind the high degree of textual aptitude journalists have, has following/being followed by Glyn added something to my awareness of audience...? I may be more cautious about just posting the fact that it is 'well past time for a shave' in favour of something less visceral, more salubrious to my imagined projection of self.

so yeah - the papers are online

2008-05-29T18:26:00.000+01:00

Mine's at http://www.networkedlearningconference.org.uk/abstracts/PDFs/Johnson_154-161.pdf
at the moment but I wonder for how long before it gets moved to something like...
http://www.networkedlearningconference.org.uk/past/nlc2006

Peekamo

2008-05-28T12:10:00.001+01:00

Just wanted to flag up this service which I wrote about in my main blog here:
http://mrmrj.blogspot.com/2008/05/sms-lecturer.html
This is an example of how technology can promote connections within a lecture and perhaps enduringly so outwith the event itself...

is networked learning any different to e-learning?

2008-05-08T16:45:00.000+01:00

many would say no. Is that it? Does it matter?
Are these pages
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Networked_learning
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/E-Learning
different in any meaningful way?

Just for HE?

2008-05-08T09:09:00.000+01:00

The roots of the definition of Networked Learning are based in Higher Education use of technology for learning. Does this implicitly limit the usefulness of the definition for other contexts?

who/what 'promotes connections'?

2008-05-08T08:58:00.000+01:00

The next question that occurred to me as I try to operationalise the definition is, exactly who or what does the 'promoting connections'? I think Chris Jones paper on a 'social practice perspective of Networked Learning' is saying that a book or a comment in a lecture or an email could 'promote connections' which makes networked learning a very broad term 'excluding nothing'. This makes networked learning almost just a frame of reference or a lens with which to see the world rather than a verb or a set of skills as per connectivism or as I have been considering in another post.

What is it to 'promote connections'? and is that 'enough' anyway?

2008-05-05T06:48:00.000+01:00

Chris Jones has examined the kinds of connections or links that facilitate networked learning, Thomas Ryberg is saying that we should also pay attention to the 'flow' along those links. My comment is that those links need managing (Nardi et al) and that this is a real overhead that we need to learn to manage. Furthermore, if this is a kind of meta skill, should we be encouraging it in our students? And if we can demonstrate that an educational intervention did or did not 'promote connections' between students and their peers/learning resources/knowledge, does that sound like a quality measure...?

What does it mean to be networked learned?

2008-05-02T15:47:00.000+01:00

In June 2007 I posted the following message to the networked learning jiscmail list :

I have been thinking about the definition of networked learning and what it means for assessment - especially the central notion of 'promoting connections'. I've come to a question I think might be worth pursuing - what does it mean to be 'network learned'? That is, if one had gone through a degree programme that was designed to 'promote connections', what would characterise the students who graduated from it? Perhaps they would just be the 'embodiment of critical thinking', or some other commonly held aspiration for a modern graduate...

Unfortunately, the 2 responses were about the means of conducting assessment via networks rather than the learning outcomes that any assessment might measure. I tried to re-word the question and eventually sent the following:

I mean, what would a person look like, what would make them different (better even?) from someone who had learned via Communities of Practice or lectures/tutorials? My colleague Joe's off-the-bat response to that was 'appropriateness'. Having the 'right' clutch of the 'right' kind of connections that can be 'activated' (all inverted comma concepts in need of unpacking!) in a timely way - not just to people but to resources (of course). Is that a good measure of networked learningness? (am I a good example of having been 'networked learned' since I'm foisting this on your inbox via this jiscmail list?!) Assuming it should, can that be bottled and taught? Can it then be factored in to assessment leading to accreditation? As I said before, all of this might 'just' mean the kinds of things we already hope to see in 'good' students...

Thoughts anyone?