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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

Like most new bloggers I scoured the Internet for inspiration when I started and, like most new bloggers, I soon learned that there are an awfully large number of blogs out there (up to 70 million depending on your source!).  As new bloggers we want our blog to be well designed and attact visitors who want to stay. The best way to do this is to learn from others who have achieved these goals.  So how do you spot one of these??  The simplest way is to locate blogs that have recieved one or more awards, so here are a few award winning sites from the recent 2008 Bloggie awards you might want to visit to get the creative juices flowing:

(1) Dooce.  This site won the ‘best designed weblog’ award. Dooce also picked up the overall award for 2008 too. An interesting piece of trivia about this weblog is that its creator, Heather B Armstong was the first person to be fired from her job for writing ‘unsavoury’ thing about her employer on her blog.  To this day anyone who is fired because of something they said on their weblog is said to have been ‘dooced‘ (true story, check the link!)

(2) loobylu.com.  This site won the ‘lifetime achievement’ award for Australia/New Zealand.  Its a great blog that is very visually engaging and gives some great ideas for using blogs to display artwork.

(3) PostSecret. This site was nominated for the “Weblog of the year award”.  Its a little confronting in places but I was totally hooked by the presentation and content.

(4) Gizmodo Australia.  A great Australian site about gadgets and gizmos.

 Happy browsing.

Deep down I’m a bit of a nerd and this means I really like to know what makes something tick.  If you are like me and ever wondered what happens when you create a blog post, like this one, I found a great resource from Wired Magazine (I told you I was a nerd) which gives you a great visual representation of all the stuff going on below the surface when you make a post.   This is also a great eye-opener if you want to know why your IT department is being so uncooperative in relation to your efforts to introduce blogging into your workplace as it outlines some of the Internet ‘nasties’ lurking out there waiting for an unsuspection post to come along!

An interesting new article appeared in the New York Times today called, “In Web World of 24/7 stress, writers blog till they drop“.  It seems that there is a ugly side to blogging developing which the New York Times refers to as the “digital-era sweatshop” where countless bloggers grind away producing posting as their main source of income.  The article quotes one such blogger, Mark Buchanan, who “sleeps about five hours a night and often does not have time to eat proper meals”.

I’m not for a second saying that using blogs in education will kill our students but its always easy to get caught up in the positives of new technology without looking at the whole picture.  I know, however, from personal experience that it is easy to get caught up in your blog and I think that the above article is an obvious pause for thought for bloggers around the world and for those of us who are encouraging others to engage with this technology. As with all things moderation is the key.

I’ve really taken to del.icio.us and have been madly tagging my little heart out for the last few weeks, but its always been just an extension of the Favorites menu in IE7.  This week, however, I began to see its full potential as a tool for basic knowledge management and sharing and am embarking on a trial to test the viability of centralising all the  bookmarks used for research within my organisation onto del.ico.us using a unique tag to identify them.  I know some of you will be thinking I should be using a wiki, but for an organistion like mine, that is not necessarily used to operating this way, this is a nice first step towards introducing some key technologies into everyday work processes.   I’m planning on introducing this trial soon, and I will keep you updated over the coming weeks.  I’d love to hear from anyone who has done something similar or has some suggestions on maximising the effectiveness of this idea.

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:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOFU9oUF2HA&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJTzNSV8pb0&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFuNFRie8wA 

(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.