On chosing not to 'promote connections'

I am working up a project evaluation and, as ever, with networked learning in mind, I have a strange feeling that something is not quite right. The project in question relies on a finely balanced set of access rights and priviledges - who can see and edit, who can alter the access settings...? On the one hand, we have the students. For this project, we do not want students viewing another student's private online discourse. We also do not want 'just anyone' to have access, although Blackboard makes us lean towards giving admin staff more access than we would like, simply because otherwise they are prevented from doing their work. This leaves the academic staff who should all be able to access every students' writing. While there are a multitude of ways of doing exactly this, finding the most efficient way in the long term is more tricky, but not impossible. But the point of this message is to make the point that the 2001 definition of networked learning does not account for learning which happens under the kind of access constraints I've detailed. It seems obvious to say that not everything a student types should be made available to everyone, just in case a serendipitous learning connection can be established, or activated if such a connection already exists. If connections are being deliberately fenced off, instead of being 'promoted', does this still equate to 'networked learning', or am I simply driving too hard at the definition? Yet the definition is designed to encourage productive, 'high-quality' learning (as opposed to the less pedagogically, more technologically oriented definitions you can find for 'e-learning': see http://csalt.lancs.ac.uk/esrc/ )
The question that arises in my mind is therefore: in a given planned learning intervention, what connections are being promoted, by whom, and, in particular, which ones stymied?

Something else that occurs to me along these lines is the presentation at Networked Learning 2012 by John Dron and Terry Anderson about https://landing.athabascau.ca
This system gives students full control of what they post and how public to make it. I made the point to Terry that one slip of the permissions could land healthcare students in big trouble with their governing body. But this is also a problem for anyone working with sensitive information. I have to think twice about how much intellectual property to put on show in this blog. This is another one of those implicit skills or aspects of knowledge that we can easily overlook in the rush to get everyone working and learning online.

Evaluations and other articles in JIHE

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

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...

Openness

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

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.