When 'good enough' is actually 'best'

At Cardiff we've had a long-running 'pilot' of persistent group chat (PGC). Chris Graves has been instrumental in this. PGC is like a chat room but a history is kept in the room of previous conversations so the experience is in between synchronous and asynchronous. There is also an element of presence awareness.

We've used the free Pidgin software to access XMPP 'rooms'

Yesterday a colleague was telling me about a time when they had spoken about the use of persistent group chat for tutorials at a conference for Welsh Further Education staff. Another colleague was explaining how they had found that holding tutorials in Second Life helped students to express themselves. If education is fundamentally conversational then conversations are useful to that end. However if education is fundamentally about collaboration (I think Andy Blunden makes this point but need to read more!) then evidently you need to be building something together, a conversation can certainly be supportive of that, wherever/however it happens but talking will only get you so far.
Our PGC advocate explained how their live demo did not start well when they were unable to connect with the student that they'd planned to. However, coincidentally, a colleague was online and doing a tutorial at the time. All agreed to help with the live demo and the audience watched as the live conversation continued. As the remote tutor was signing off, literally just triggered by the text displayed on the screen, members of the audience at the presentation instinctively voiced their goodbyes. Some of them then caught themselves doing that and felt daft realising that they were waving at some text on a screen. This demonstrated very much how vivid the experience of humble text-based communication can be, especially synchronous or near-synchronous.
Where the academic practices of the given discipline or field are primarily text-based, that is really where the focus should be, around developing confidence, style and sophistication (even epistemic fluency!) with that mode of communication. When 'voice-to-voice', it is easy to enter into almost a therapeutic relationship with students and talk with them and to them for hours, whereby they may indeed reveal all manner of interesting details and walk away having had a lovely time. But that is very different to developing writing skills by practising them. Writing is very difficult. Focusing on writing, even deliberately limiting students to writing, may not be very glamorous but it cuts right to the beating heart of an apprenticeship in knowledge work. Second Life, second best IMHO.

Contextualising information fluency

It was time again to deliver my 'collaboration lecture' morning. I blogged about this previously in July 2011 in terms of the activity I set students upon as part of it. This time I went in with a discussion about digital literacies still buzzing around my mind. Joe was probing about the ways in which, for example, presentations, happen in clinical areas, giving the 'digital' practice a compelling context that students could see themselves participating in when joining the workforce. Conveniently, the students were just back off placement, returning for the final theory block of their second year - they were chatty, especially with each other!
The module assessment requires them to work in groups towards a summative group presentation (which has 10% of the marks awarded by their peers for their contributions towards the groupwork). In order to build a case for learning about and through collaboration I decided to ask them what had they seen of presentations, broadly defined, out in practice areas. Out of 80 or so students, I had about four or five responses. Here is a flavour:

• Mufti-Disciplinary Team meetings, where the patient's notes and scans support case reviews.
• A doctor leading a session for patients about their condition.
• A nurse, leading a small group teaching session

That last example was the only one featuring a nurse actually doing the presenting. So I called upon the fact that nurses have a professional commitment to the continuing development of themselves and those around them. They could expect to be responsible for the practice-based learning of their own students one day. More than that, on qualification and registration, all nurses are duty-bound to act as 'Stage 1 Mentors', meeting the requirements set for that role by the national regulatory body, the NMC, "you must facilitate students and others to develop their competence" and that could well imply the development or use of an online resource.
In another context, it is a real possibility that they would deliver a conference presentation at some point in the future. I tell the students that working alone is 'easy'. You can be as lazy about the way you work as you like on your own. Once you involve others in a collaboration, it becomes vital that they make some key decisions about how they are going to work together. Part of that must include how the group will curate artifacts of the collaboration (agreed search strategies, articles found, summaries compiled, ideas noted, the presentation itself, etc.) and communication, including discussion, either face-to-face or online. Of course, these methods are useful when working alone but collaboration opens up the potential for a richer, perhaps riskier learning experience.
So the students get some ideas about how to manage the artifacts of collaboration, but little or nothing about the act of parleying with the knowledge acquired or presented by them or their collaborators. This is where epistemic fluency comes in, a key transferable skill - but a rare and shy 'animal'. Goodyear et al only capture a glimpse of it in their study... If it is so scarce, is it too difficult, too ambitious to expect to be able to conceptualise and present to students (or staff, come to that) as something really vital? And yet, have the students really got the most out of collaborative learning projects without actively trying to leverage the opportunity to maximise gains in epistemic fluency?

Goodyear P, Ellis R, Brew A and Sachs J (2007) The development of epistemic fluency: Learning to think for a living. In: Transforming a university: The scholarship of teaching and learning in practice. Sydney: Sydney University Press. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/2123/2115

Collaboration tools and securing engagement

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

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...