Where to put this wiki...

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...

When is learning not networked learning?

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!

Do lecture capture systems promote connections?

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.

too rare, but great when it happens

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.

My first book chapter

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.

emergent

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.