Confessions of an elearning skeptic

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.

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!

Just a quick update on the presentation I gave to my colleagues in relation to the elearning and web 2.0 technologies (see Ponderings Eight).  Despite the small audience the presentation has started a lot of healthy discussion within my workplace, with people starting to think about how they can use elearning and web 2.0 to broaden the impact of their training.  There is also a great deal of support for the del.icio.us trial.  So, all told, things are progressing very well.  The next step will be to broaden the audience for my presentation and get some individual areas coming up with some concrete ideas for how they are exploit the benefits on offer with web 2.0.  As always, watch this space.

As promised in Ponderings Nine here is my report on day two of the Australian Institute of Training and Development (AITD) conference in Sydney.

The second day was certainly focussed more on ‘convential’ types of classroom/face-to-face learning with the key session of the day a presentation by Dr Michael Marquardt on Action Learning. With my current focus on elearning I spent a lot of time pondering the significance of Action Learning to the elearning sphere, as most information about Action Learning implied a face-to-face activity rather than something done digitally. During my trip home on the train I started to draw some threads between Action Learning and Learning Communities that I think are valuable in my study of online Learning Communities. Like Action Learning, online Learning Communities:

• Place more value on the questions than on the answers. Most threads start with a question and the better the question the better the outcome of the thread.
• Place learning as a key outcome of the process. True learning communities are not about showing-up your knowledge, but on contributing and learning from others.
• Require participants to ‘listen’ and treat each other with respect.

With this in mind I’m keen to read further about action learning and see how it can inform my study of learning communities.  I bought Dr Marquardt’s book ‘Leading with questions‘ so I will be studing that closely too to see how I can apply it to my learning and my context.

Well, the conference is over for another year and I’m keen to exploit my post-conference enthusiasm and try and implement a few of the key things I have learned. Fingers crossed.

Just a quick update on my learning community participation.  I joined a couple of intresting new groups this week, one about blogging and one about leading and managing change.  The blogging group had some interesting forums in relation to the platforms people used for their blogging and how people managed their time in relation to regular blogging.  Having got a little blogging under my belt I felt comfortable putting my ten cents worth in on both these counts.   The managing change group is in its infancy, but included an intresting article in relation to change which struck a real cord with me as it mirrored my own past experiences in relation to the inability of many plans to realise that change is largely a human activity and is as much about people as it is about processes and infrastrucutre.  Being on the verge of preparing to introduce elearning into my workplace this was a valuable reminder of this important issue.

In the spirit of my own continuous learning I attended the Australian Institute of Training and Development (AITD) national conference in Sydney today.  Given this I thought I would dedicare a couple of posts to sharing my learning with you all.

Given my study of elearning, and my desire to introduce it into my workplace, my selection of workshops for today was focussed on elearning and its effective use and introduction.  Here is a summary of the key things that I learned today:

• It is important to distinguish between elearning as a product and learning as a process and to not confuse the two.  Good elearning creates learning but not all elearning does this.
• The importance of informal learning cannot be downplayed and we, as learning and development professionals, must learn how to harness it.  This requires us to move from being learning deliverers to being learning enablers (hence the title of this post).
• Elearning can assit us to be learning enablers when it is used to make knowledge accessible and encourage the creation of knowledge.  Many web 2.0 technologies are directed towards these aims.

Thanks to conference presenters Martyn Wild and Cheryle Walker for sharing their knowledge and expertise in relation to the above points.

A couple of interesting resources were also used during the conference that I thought would be worth sharing.  The first is an excellent presentation about change and preparing people for the world of the future.  The presentation is called Shift Happens and I highly recommend it if you haven’t seen it:

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The second resource comes from Jane McGonigal a games designer and researcher who has defined the “10 collaborative Superpowers“.  This is an interesting set of new skills that will be vital in the world of the learning enabler:

That’s enough food for thought for one day. The conference is on again tomorrow so I’ll post again then.  I better make sure I give an accurate account as my lecturer is one of the workshop presenters (g’day Anne ;-)).

This week I will be presenting an item to our monthly staff information session about technology in education.  Why?  Well we are embarking on the introduction of elearning within my workplace and, as part of the planning process, it think that it is vital that staff start thinking about how they want to ‘deploy’ elearning within their particular training unit. To kick this whole process off I want to provide some food for thought.  My presentation will focus on learning communities, wikis and social bookmarking (via del.icio.us).  Why these technologies?  Well I wanted to use technologies that were a little outside the square but not technologically impossible and these seemed to fit the bill.  All of them offer great scope for new ways of learning without fear to hitting too great an IT wall! My inclusion of del.icio.us was also guided by my desire (see Ponderings Four) to get staff to centrally capture the online learning that many of them do.  Hopefully my planting will bear a bountiful harvest, only time will tell!

An item from the news links within my learning community caught my eye today. It concerned students from the University of Texas and their recent development of an anti-plagarism honour code. Under this code students would pledge to not commit acts of plagarism. All very honourable sentiments I hear you say. Indeed, except that sections of the code were copied directly from the honour code of Bringham Young University! On the surface this seems a clear cut case of irony in its purest form but, as the comments that follow the article point out, this is not as simple as it appears. You can read the full article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. 

As well as giving me a great laugh, the article has got me thinking about plagarism. Its a word you hear a lot in the world of education and something that I have already been pondering this week, largely because my workplace is in the process of developing its own plagarism policy. As well as reinforcing the fact that we need to reference any plagarism policy that we draw inspriation from, this got me thinking about the issue of plagarism in the on-line setting and how easy it is to take the ideas of others as pass them off as your own. Clearly the use of online media in education needs to have strict guidelines and I will be working to ensure that any plagarism policy that we develop is future-proofed by factoring in plagarism in all forms and all media. My studies in this area will prove invaluable in informing this process and the guidelines set down by my university will be a vital starting point.