One of the posts that I made to my on-line community, The Content Wrangler has led to real benefits for me. As part of one of my posts I mentioned that I was in the process of introducing elearning and looking for some ideas about good elearning design. Almost immediately I got a reply from a community member, Jenise Cook, with a number of fantastic links. Chief amongst these was a link to a fantastic blog about elearning designed by Cathy Moore called Making Change. If you haven’t seem this blog, and you want to learn more about elearning design, then its something you need to check out.
I was particulalry taken with one of her posts, “5 ways to make linear navigation more interesting“. The included PowerPoint show is fantastic and I will be using it in my workplace to demonstrate best practice in elearning design.
Thanks Jenise for sharing this excellent resource!
I have started dipping my toe into my chosen learning community, www.thecontentwrangler.ning.com. The site has lost a little of its initial momemtum and the focus has shifted from general discussions into a series of focussed groups. My initial focus is the Training Development Group which most closely fits my needs and context, though I have also joined the Content Manager’s Group and contributed to some of the more general discussions.
I am a little disappointed with the downturn in activity on the site, though this was always going to happen after its frenetic first couple of weeks. Probably more concerning is the shift away from contributions and information sharing towards product marketing and touting for work. This nows seems to represent the bulk of current activity, though this is contained within specific parts of the community. Hopefully this trend doesn’t continue. Regardless it is an excellent case study in the early days of a learning community and how its members shape it.
I’m sure a big part of the reason why I am such a skeptic when it comes to elearning is the poor design I have seen used time after time. My journey though the internet today took me into areas concerning good instructional and interface design which I found invaluable in ensuring I don’t make the same mistakes others have made.
A great starting point for looking at instructional design is the Content Wrangler Community. Its only new but its already got links to some good resources on the effective design of learning content. I like this site so much I think I am going to use it as the focus for my first assignment.
On the lighter side I also found a great movie on how not to design a PowerPoint that, apart from being very funny, has some key design messages for elearning content makers:
This week’s readings focussed on the social aspects of adult learning. In my context of looking at learning ‘communities’ social psychology certainly offers a wealth of information and guidence. I was particularly interested in the negatives associated with this type of learning that the reading stressed, such as:
Individuals ‘complying’ with the group to avoid rejection
The use and focus of power within learning communities being used improperly
The notion of ‘group think’ actually reducing the learning that is occurring
All these negatives really stress the importance of the leading role that we, as educators, play in the creation and ongoing maintenance of learning communities and I can see this role being played in the learning communities that I am a member of, particularly the role of the educator to:
make explicit the ‘rules’ of such communities so that all members are aware of them
manage the leadership role and ensure power is evenly shared
set the level and range of ‘disclosure’ through the disclosures that they make themselves ( based around social penetration theory)
From my perspectives the key points from these reading are:
that it is important to avoid getting caught up in the ‘excitement’ of new technology for learning and to view this technology objectively as something with both pros and cons that need to be managed.
that, like all things to do with adult learning, there is no single approach to learning communities that will meet all individual needs or all groups and that it is important to monitor the group and adjust the strategy, rules or behaviour as required.
A scan of the internet identified an interesting article about the use of social psychology to increase user contributions to on-line learning communities. The study can be found here http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue4/ling.html. I found this particularly interesting as I am also studying research perspective and this experiment reinforced the limitations of scientific method in the study of human behaviour.
I feel like I am making some progress here. Having read both Horizon reports I now know what I don’t know. My plan now is to begin to understand what I don’t know about emerging technologies by immersing myself within each of them (I think that makes sense!!). Coming from a very ‘conventional’ adult learning background I’d thought I’d start with a technology that is about as unconventional as it gets, Second Life. In preparation for my journey I looked around for some quick information about learning in Second Life and I come up with some very good, and short, YouTube videos:
(Hey, I’m learning from Grassroots Video, maybe I’m not such a skeptic after all!!)
After watching the above videos I was ready to get my avatar’s feet wet inside Second Life so, after a brief registration and set-up process, I was off and running through the wonders of Orientation Island.My initial thoughts:
The learning curve is a little step at first, but it gets easier fairly quickly (though I still can’t figure out why my avatar keeps veering to the left!!)
Second Life offers some great possibilities for learning such as:
a unique combination of fun and learning
the ability to observe others as well as be an active participant
the ability to interact with a vast array of other people
the ability to create a unique learning environment tailored to the needs of the student; and
the ability to link into formal tertiary pathways though TAFE and university
Within my learning context, I see the key benefit of Second Life is its capacity for rich simulation. Many of the skills that my organisation deals with are hard to teach in the real environment and we often rely on simulation to assist us, but these never give us the full range of experience. Second Life offers the potential to simulate a range of scenarios with real-life consequences but in a safe and supportive manner. The use of simulation in Second Life will now become the focus of my further explorations. I will give you a full update in the coming week or so. In the mean time if you are interested in further reading I recommend the Second Life Education Wiki “SimTeach” as a good starting point for a study of learning in Second Life.
A lot of technological trends mentiond by the Horizon Report and John Seely Brown concern the idea of community and social networking, so it seems prudent to examine what these actually mean to me (to give you a starting point I have linked each term to its Wikipedia definition):
Community: To me, the term community refers to a group of people who share one or more common characteristic. Our most fundamental concept of community being a group of people whose common characteristic is geographical location. With the rise of the web this concept has blossomed, to say the least, with many communities rising up bringing people with shared common interests together.
Community of practice: Simply because something is a community does not necessarily infer a common goal or purpose. People who live in the same suburb are a community, but it is highly unlikely that they all share a common purpose or goal. From my perspective, the community of practice takes the concept of community one step futher to introduce a shared purpose or goal to which all members are contributing.
Network: For me, a network is a series of links that joins communities together. For example, an elearning network could act as a link between a number of communities such as elearning developers, elearning practitioners, elearning users. These groups can be distinct communities in their own right. The network creates a thread that links them all together.
Social network: For me, a social network is a specialist form of community where the defining characteristic is the desire to ‘network’, or create links with others based around common characteristics. The interests of people on Facebook are incredibley diverse, but they all shared the desire to create links between themselves and others.
One of the posts that I made to my on-line community, The Content Wrangler has led to real benefits for me. As part of one of my posts I mentioned that I was in the process of introducing elearning and looking for some ideas about good elearning design. Almost immediately I got a reply from a community member, Jenise Cook, with a number of fantastic links. Chief amongst these was a link to a fantastic blog about elearning designed by Cathy Moore called Making Change. If you haven’t seem this blog, and you want to learn more about elearning design, then its something you need to check out.
I have started dipping my toe into my chosen learning community, 
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