Confessions of an elearning skeptic

This is my last post for this class and its seems appropriate to look back on what I have got out of the experience:

• I’ve become an avatar four or five times over.
• I’ve strutted my stuff in second life (and walked into a lot of walls in the process).
• I’ve seen elearning from the outside and elearning from the inside.
• I’ve seen what’s been, what’s here, what’s to come and what’s really out there!
• I’ve caught the del.icio.us bug and even learned how to type del.icio.us without having to concentrate really hard
• I’ve sold JuJu beans (but I haven’t mastered typing JuJu with making at least one mistake - practice makes perfect!)
• I’ve had more emails in my home email than my work email (and that’s saying something!)
• I’ve posted essays in a pubic space (now that is nerve wracking!)
• I’ve seen the good the bad and the ugly of elearning
• I’ve felt old (there’s nothing like new technology to do that!)

Am I still an elearning skeptic? Sure, but I’m a much more enthusiastic, informed, experienced and even a little evangelical skeptic.  A little skepticism is a healthy thing I think. 

Thanks Anne, the JuJus and all my EMT 1 coleagues, its been fun.

The elearning skeptic.

I have been pondering the many advantages of elearning this week and stumbled across one I hadn’t considered before. Elearning is green learning. Given that its world environment day today, it seems appropriate to make this the topic of a blog entry. When selling elearning within an organisation the focus is on efficiency and effectiveness. What about the environment? Think of all the paper that an organisation can save by not priniting out class manuals and handouts. Think of all the greenhouse gasses that are saved by staff not having to travel to and from training. In an organisation like mine this could be huge.

This got me digging around and I came across an great UK site called www.learningfootprint.com.  On it you can determine your organisation’s ‘learning emissions’ and how to reduce your learning footprint.

In May 2008 the NSW government announced that it would be carbon neutral by 2020.  This is the way of the future for all organisations and elearning is another tool to make it happen.  But how many of us think about our learning footprint and what we can do the reduced carbon emissions?

We can all do our part.  Go forth and eGreen!

Just when I felt that I was strting to get my head around most of the current social networking technology along comes the idea of microblogging. Microblogging is like blogging, but the entries are restricted in length (no more then 140 characters in total).The main microblogging site is Twitter and I have included a great video overview of Twitter below:

So what’s the deal with twitter? I must admit that, being the skeptic that I am, my initial reaction was ‘here’s more of that quantity over quality that I spoke about in my last ponderings’. However, given my new open-mindedness to new technology, I thought I would give it a go and look a little more deeply to see if this can be put to some greater use than finding out my friends are have a coffee in front of the TV.

Well, after some digging around I did start to unearth some early uses of twitter for education, such the one shown below:

I also located this interesting video about when to use microblogging and when to use normal blogging in an educational setting:

There also an interesting site which oveviews the whole idea of microblogging that you might want to check out:

http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/2007/10/30/microblogging-what-is-it-good-for

Given my initial diggings microblogging certainly seems to be gathering momentum and, given that it has generation Y written all over it, will need to be a consideration in the educational context when dealing with this audience. I will continue to resaerch and keep you all posted.

Do we live in a world where quantity is more important than quality?  This is something that I have been pondering this week, sparked mainly by the fact that I have started reading Ben Elton’s new book, ‘Blind Faith‘.  In this novel, Elton creates an Orwellian world where privacy is looked on as unnatural and all people are encourgaed to shared their every thought and action online with the rest of the community.  Meanwhile, the novel’s main character, Trafford, works for the government, gathering totally useless information about people to fill the national databanks.  Its hyperbole I know, but it does make you wonder where all this is headed.

Every day we hear or see things about how much more information is available on the internet, but what sort of information is it and is our life any better for its existence?  To quote a passage from Blind Faith, “The Internet was supposed to liberate knowledge, but in fact it buried it, first under a vast sewer of ignorance, laziness, bigotry, superstition and fith, and then beneath the cloak of police surveillance.”  Im not suggesting that we are headed towards the ‘police state’ laid out by Elton, but the obsession we seem to have with quantity over quality is concerning and something to bear in mind when taking students into the dark corners of the internet.  Its not all about how many comments you have, or how many hits you got, or even how many friends you have on Facebook.  It about quality too.  To quote the old proverb, “A man with two watches never knows what time it is!”

As part of my study of online communities I came across a journal article by Alexandre Ardichvili, Martin Maurer and Tim Wentling entitled “Knowledge Sharing Through Online Communities of Practice: The Impact of Cultural Variations”.  The article explores a side of online communities that I had not considered before, that of the impact of culture on participation in virtual communities of practice.  This is particulalry relevant to my study as both the community that I participated in, and the community my group is designing for assignment two, span international borders.  Why is culture important?

The research conducted by Ardichvili et al indicted that, for some cultures, the way participants engage with an online community will be quite different.  Their study points out that common design is based around the individualistic culture (eg most western cultures) that “place personal goals ahead of the goals of a larger social group”.  This style of design tends to disadvantage participants from more collectivist cultures (eg China, Brazil and Russia) who tend to ”give priority to the goals of the larger collective or group”. 

How does this impact design?

(1) Expectations in relation to participation in online discussion may need to be modified for different countries as participants from some cultures will not be as forward with their ideas as those from other cultures.

(2) One size does not necessarily fit all and the look and feel of a site may need to be varied from one country to the next.

(3) Guidelines for usage, netiquette etc need to be very clear and not make any assumptions about the users underlying knowledge of the rule for social interaction as these may not be consistent across countries.

(4) In some countries it may be necessary to run a local community beside the global community and use ‘knowledge intermediaries’ to bridge the gap between the two.

In my researching this week I came across an interesting paper by Nick Bostrom, the Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.  The paper, entitled “Are you living in a computer simulation“, puts forward the argument that there is a good possibility that we are already living in a matrix-like computer simulated reality! So forget Second Life, you’re already living it!  There is a wealth of other thought-provoking reading on Nick’s web site, www.nickbostrom.com.  Enjoy, though it might freak you out a bit!

Continuing on from my previous post: Reflecting on learning community design (one), I now turn my attention to how my reading of the Wenger Article will affect the way I go about designing my own community.  The key considerations I take from the Wenger article are:

(1) That it is vital that I consider the perspective of the participants because this prespective(s) will have a distinct affect on how they interact with the community and, as a result, what learning actually occurs.

(2) It is vital that the participants in the community engage with that community.  This engagement needs to be encouraged through the creation of value in the mind of the participant, both that they value the learning that is occurring and that their knowledge and expertise is valued by the other participants.

(3) That any chosen design must support the flow of information to all participants that could benefit from it.  This includes ensuring that separate discussion on the same topic cannot occur without some form of linkage between them.

(4) The learners must be able to shape the direction of the community and that this ability must be fairly shared between experienced participants and those who are less experienced.  Structures that allow ‘experts’ to dominate will have a tendancy to focus too much on the preservation of knowledge, to the detriment of the challenge of this knowedge and the creation of new knowledge.  On the opposite side, neither should the community be dominated soley by ‘novices’ as this will have a tendency to bog the community down.  A good design will spread the experts evenly across it and provide a good mix of experts and novices.

(5) A good design should give all users equal power in relation to the ability to contibute and to create new groups, forums etc.

(6) A good design should encourge the community members to be members of other communtities and should faciliate access to information from outside the community.  By doing this it will avoid the community becoming too isolated from the broader world and ensure that ideas can flow from outside.

After the success of my presentation to staff in relation to Web 2.0, I was invited to conduct the same presentation to a broader forum, comprising staff from learning and development functions across the organisation.  Due to this broader audience I took the oppportunity to present my ‘bold vision’ for elearning within our context, giving a practical example of how everyday events would be be ‘better’ once elearning was implemented. This presentation went well and has generated a lot of interest in elearning and how it can benefit the entire organisation. There is also still a lot of apprehension about how educators will engage with the technology and whether or not they have the skills to be able to create elearning.  This is something that will have to feature strongly in the future selling of this concept and in implementation plans. 

 The seend continues to grow and all indications are that a broad range of areas are looking to capitalise on this new opportunity which will make the process of gaining organisational commitment that much easier. 

The next reading I have been tackling relates to the design of learning and comes from Etienne Wenger’s “Communities of Practice” (Wenger, E. 1999, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, Cambridge University Press, USA).  This reading makes the key point that ‘learning cannot be designed: it can only be designed for - that is, facilitated or frustrated”.  How is this accomplished through the online community that I have been participating in (The Content Wrangler Community)? Wenger suggests that learning architecture needs to reflect four key dimensions, and I will use these dimensions to evaluate the effectiveness of the Content Wrangler Community:

(1) Participation vs reification

Participation deals directly with the concept of providing a structure and processes for learning, whereas reification is more about giving learners the ’space’ to negotiate thier own meaning.   Good design will balance these two.  I believe that The Content Wrangler does this well, because it provides a rigid structure of clearly divided groups and forums but, within these, provide a space where the participants can direct their own learning and collaborate to negotiate meaning as well as draw upon past learning, and interpretation.

(2) Preservation and creation of knowledge:

This dimensation is about balancing the preservation of meaning and the need to direct future learning towards emerging needs.  Once again, I feel that the Content Wrangler does this well (or will do once it has been around for a longer period) as its structure allows for the easy access and recording of past knowledge, learning and interpretations, but has the flexibility to allow the groups and/or forums to go off on a tangent it the need arises without the treat of losing all that has happened in the past.  The ability for all participants to contribute to the collaborative processes also means that there is always the ability to challenge past interpretations and knowledge and, by doing so, create new knowledge and interpretations.

(3) Spreading of Information:

This is about a design’s ability to faciliate the spreading of information.  The Content Wrangler does this well, in most cases, as its groups and forums are based around the principle of sharing and collabroation.  One issue with the design, though, is that the division of participants into groups is not necessarily conducive to the spread of information across groups and it is possible to have mutilple versions of the same information present without any linking threads.

 (4) Home for identities:

A group learning environment is one where each learner can have an identity.  The Content Wrangler certainly meets this need by allowing the participants within the community to create, and shape the direction and definition of, the individual groups and forums.   As such it is not a rigid, pre-defined environment.  Instead it is an environment that can be shaped and directed by the individials within it, but in a consistent and pre-deinfed way that allow all users to participate in this process.

The next step is to examine how my understanding of this reading will inform my work of designing a learning community for assignment 2.  This will be the focus of a separate post.  Watch this space!

As I have got into blogging one question has crossed my mind on a number of occasions: does the time that you do a post have any impact on how many people read it?  Jake Luciani took a particular interest in this very question  has undertaken an analsyis to determine the answer.  According to Luciani’s analysis Tues - Friday between 10am - 2pm (Pacific Standard Time) are the “hot times” for popular blog posts.   This means that to maximise the readership of my posts I need to post between 3am and 7am Wednesday to Saturday (thanks to www.timeconverter.com for your assistance with this calculation).  I’m not totally convinced that the added readership justifies staying up all night for, but it is yet another thing to consider when operating in the global commnity that is web 2.0. You can read the full analysis on Luciani’s site, 3rd rail.