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.
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.
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’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:
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.
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 
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