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!

The ideal VLE

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:

1. 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.
2. Integrate with GradeMark and QuestionmarkPerception
3. Allow easy and quick organisation of content (I spend half my day waiting for the browser to refresh)
4. Allow easy dissemination of information - via announcements and bulk email
5. Allow interaction, perhaps via discussion list, blog, wiki-type activity, with reasonably fine-grained permissions
6. 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...

1. 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...
2. 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.
3. 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...

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

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:

1. 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.
   
2. Jill has regular and easy access to class with computers.
3. While the students are under Jill's pedagogic control, she gets them writing.
4. 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
5. She integrates blogging tightly with her teaching (online out of class and in lectures)
6. 'The most important thing' was when she modelled 'good' networked learning activity.
7. A critical mass of students engage with the concept and each other.
8. '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...)