Confessions of an elearning skeptic

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!

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

At the start of my elearning journey it seems wise to take stock of some of the trends in technology and see where my current practice sits, and could sit, in relation to this.  To do this I referred to the Horizon reports for 2007 and 2008 from the Horizon project web site: http://horizon.nmc.org/wiki/Main_Page.

The 2008 report identified the following six emerging technologies:

(1) Grassroots video: Like most internet users, my main experience of this phenomena is through YouTube and, like most people, I am amazed at the way sites like this have taken off over the past few years.  My experience with grassroots video as an educational tool is limited, though I have used some YouTube based videos as part of presentations I have run in relation to incidental learning and knowledge management including the following:

Introduction to wikis

Introduction to peer assist groups 

(2) Collaboration webs: I have a very limited exposure to the concept of collaboration webs, with my recent use of Ning and del.icio.us being my only real venture into this space.  Like many people I have heard of Facebook, MySpace and Filckr but I have had no real interaction with them. I am very keen to explore this area further and get a better handle on how these types of technology can be utilised for adult learning though, like many people, I fear that internal IT constraints may make the use of this type of space problematic, at least in the short term.

(3) Mobile broadband: Part of my time as a learning professional was with a major Australian telecommunications company, so I am very familiar with this type of technology. The technology has certainly come on leaps and bounds, through it can still be very cost prohibitive when compared to ’wired’ broadband.  I am also aware of the trends towards mobile learning (so called ‘mlearning’) but my experience of this type of learning remains theoretical only.

(4) Data mashups: This is another concept I have only a limited experience of.  I am a frequent user of Google Earth and am familiar with the integration of map data and Wikipedia locations that is available within it.  I have no experience of this technology within an educational setting.

(5) Collective intelligence: My main experience of the concept of collective intelligence is with Wikipedia. 

(6) Social operating system: Social operating systems are something with which I am unfamiliar.  Though I am aware of the precursors such as Facebook and MySpace (as discussed above).

My experiences, in the educational context, of the significant trends outlined in the report are limited.  My current context does not significantly utilise technology for learning and much of its IT infrastructure is restrictive to the use on the on-line space for collaboration and learning.  Of all the trends, the most pertinent to me is the final one, concerning the gap between the perception of technology by the user and by the educator.  Being at the forefront of elearning I have experienced this first hand and am all too familiar with the fact that there is a growing segment of our ‘customers’ who embrace what elearning has to offer more than some of our practitioners do.

The Horizon Report 2007 identified the following 6 key technologies:

(1) User-created content: As outlined above, I have some experience with the key user-created content sites, though my use of them in the educational context is still somewhat limited.

(2) Social networking: Online social networking is something I am only new to and, once again, not something that I have not utilised in the educational context.

(3) Mobile phones: Having worked in telecommunications for a number of years I am very familiar with mobile technology. I have read about the use of mobile phones in learning (mlearning), but have not engaged in this type of learning, nor utilised it for the learning of others.

(4) Virtual worlds: I have heard for the phenomenon that is Second Life, but have no direct experience of it in any context.

(5) New scholarship: I am personally familiar with the concept of on-line publication and have read a number of e-books and listened to a number of educationally based podcasts. I have started to dabble in the use of podcast for distribution of learning content.

(6) Massivley Multiplayer Educational Gaming: I am very aware of the huge rise in on-line multiplayer games, chief amongst these being World of Warcraft which has over 10,000,000 players world-wide.  The use of this technology for learning fascinates me and I have read a number of articles in this area, though my direct experience is minimal.

Final word:  There is huge potential out there in relation to the use of technology in learning and, as an educator, I need to start focusing on getting across these technologies if I am to continue to meets the needs of my learners.

The focus of my first set of readings was two papers by John Seely Brown, former director of the XEROX PARC facility:

Seely Brown, J. & Duguid, O. 1999, Learning, Working and playing in the digital age.
Transcript from a conference on Higher Education of the American Association for Higher Education.
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/sci_edu/seelybrown/seelybrown.html

Seely Brown, J. & Adler, Richard P. 2008, Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0, Educause Review, January/February
http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/MindsonFireOpenEducationt/45823 

The thing that struck me the most about these two papers was that the broad concepts proposed by Brown in his 1999 paper are as relevant in 2008 as they were in 1999, and this is certainly a credit to his vision.  From my perspective the key changes since the 1999 paper are:

• The web has become almost ubiquitous and can be accessed from a plethora of devices from mobile phones to fridges making it an even more fundamental part of peoples’ everyday lives.
• The huge growth of online social networking tools such as face book and virtual worlds such as second life have allowed people to create vast networks of like-minded people, no matter how obscure their interests may be.  This provides access to a level of knowledge sharing beyond anything possible in 1999.
• The online collaboration tools outlined in 1999 were cutting edge technology available only to researchers.  Today anyone with a computer has access to powerful, but free, collaboration tools, e.g. my 10 year old son can contribute to one of the world’s most popular encyclopaedias (wikipedia).
• The rise of the ‘open source’ culture has made vast amounts of information and knowledge accessible to everyone who is interested and has broken down the traditional learning pathways by allowing us to learn the bits and pieces we need to perform a task.

To a large extent the core issues raised by Brown are being adapted although, to some extent, this adaptation is occurring more in the public domain than within traditional educational institutions and workplaces.  This gives rise to issues of control over what is being taught and learned and the quality of the interactions that are occurring.  Educational institutions and workplaces need to further embrace new technologies such as Web 2.0, Second Life etc to ensure that the learning they provide compliments and leverages off the learning that occurs in the public domain.  

From my perspective the key challenge is to ensure that access to these new ways of learning is available for all, specifically:

• that we bridge the gap between the information ‘rich’ and the information ‘poor’ by ensuring that all people have affordable access to the internet
• that we address the divide between the digital natives (those that naturally adapt to learning on-line) and the digital immigrants (those to which this type of learning does not come naturally) to ensure that people are not excluded from these exciting learning opportunities

In the past the challenge was to give people the skills to find information.  Now that they have access to an almost unlimited amount of information the challenge is instead to give people the skills to be able to judge the quality of the information that they find and be able to sort though all the information available to find that which is valid.

I found the example Brown cites in relation to Xerox technicians to be a classic example of the type of knowledge management challenge that is facing organisations such as the one I work for.  We have an aging workforce with a vast amount of corporate knowledge stored in its collective heads.  Our challenge is to capture this before this workforce departs, particularly the tacit knowledge which is generally not recorded.  The collaborative tools outlined in the Brown articles offer the means to do this, provided we can overcome the ‘technology barrier’ perceived by our older employees.

The other key challenges I face in my workplace are:

• The lack of ‘bandwidth’ in all locations, meaning the user’s experience varies from site to site.  Some sites do not have broadband access.
• The perception that this type of activity is not ‘learning’ and therefore is not measured as such in the minds of staff
• The perception that there are some things than cannot be learned this way
• The perception that this is the cheap version of learning that you get when it is too expensive to deliver face to face learning.