PLEs

making it personal – 7th annual @greenwich conference

Yesterday I attended the 7th annual eLearning @greenwich conference “Making IT Personal“, which focused on the practical and theoretical, technical and pedagogical issues surrounding the notion of “self-regulated learning”, summarised by the key notion of “personalisation”. How can optimal (pedagogically beneficial) personalisation be achieved using eLearning tools? I missed the first ten minutes of the keynote by Professor Jonathan Drori: “Personalisation – the good, the bad, and the ugly”. The first thing I learnt today was to remember never to underestimate Deptford traffic gridlock. Leaving the house at eight to arrive at ten for a journey that would have taken me only 30 minutes to cycle is one of those valuable offline lessons life insists on throwing at me. I bat them away.

The morning keynote set the tone very gently. Learning is (obviously) an experience, but unlike personal pleasurable ones to which we return on our own accord, learning experiences are often imposed; worse, they are generally ill defined, their relevance to the students left unclear. Asking the audience to shout out some pleasurable personal activities, Jonathan used the answers to illustrate key adjectives that explain why theses activities are engaging. (I was one of the few to participate and shouted “having a political discussion in the pub”, which earned me an “aw, how sweet!” and giggles from the audience. An outrage! ). Pleasurable, personal experiences can be characterised as being:

1. Defined

2. Fresh

3. Accessible

4. Immersive

5. Significant

6. Transformative.

This is an assertion by Jonathan, but judging by the tweets, many in the audience agreed that this was a useful list. Learning experiences however often don’t fit any of those adjectives, they can be imposed, badly designed, irrelevant, indifferently presented, repetitive. They are not personal, they lack the personable. (So far, so fairly obvious. The ideal of personalisation is old and almost intuitively right: better teachers are engaging, performing, personable and pay attention to each individual student. They are also rare – what can we do to improve the situation?)

Professor Drori maintained that “the harder the concept, the more personal the learning experience needs to be.” If you want learning to be effective, or indeed at the very least to “actually take place”, then the best teaching emulates what we now know good experiences to be about. Thus, any tool, particularly eLearning tools need to be chosen according to how much they support this ideal of personalisation. Finishing on ‘the good, bad and downright ugly use of technologies’, I was struck by his unquestioning allegiance to the common instrumental definition of technology; and he was not above using the dreaded comparison that technologies can be like, say a kitchen knife: it can be good (for chopping onions) and bad (for stabbing people) – in effect employing the tired “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument characteristic of the neutrality view of technology. But issues surrounding technology – including their use in an educational setting – are rarely this simple and need much more critical appreciation. I wasn’t too bowled over by the speech, and found a final almost fatalist note surprising. Commenting on the importance to engage our children from an early age (fair enough), he asserted that if you start a bad habit early enough, be it smoking, disrespect, or indeed a bad attitude towards learning, you will continue to practice this bad habit. Which, I would suggest, does not bode well for any idealist conception of adult education. I will listen to it again, to see if I missed some salient points. I have been told it will be available as a podcast soon.

After coffee I attended a very interesting presentation on eLearning & social inclusion by Alan Clarke, formerly of NIACE. Alan was enthusiastic and almost overwhelmingly positively charged: IT can do so much to support those whom he prefers to call disadvantaged, rather than excluded: prisoners and ex-offenders, adults with almost no formal education, teenage mothers, disabled students… people, aged from 16 to death who have often very poor basic skills, the lowest confidence in their own abitlies and a history of educational failure. Due to the very nature of the learners NIACE supports, the approach can but be personal: these learners have no common learning skills, if they have anything in common it is a deep-seated suspicion of the processes of formal learning. He told us a variety of positive stories to illustrate how elearning, and the adaptive use of technology in a variety of settings has had an enormous impact on bringing disadvantaged learners “back into the fold”, giving them back confidence.
My second chosen presentation, led by Mary Kiernan and Ray Stoneham, both of Greenwich University, considered the dichotomy between socialisation and personalisation: The Danger of Impersonalisation in Mass Personalised Learning: Can Socialisation and Personalisation Co-exist? As an ice-breaker we were asked to write down our names and answer the question “if you had to ask one question about personalisation what would it be and why.” Our neighbour was then to introduce us with that question. Becki, to my left asked why personalisation was such a difficult task to accomplish, and I had her read out “is personalisation only this year’s buzz word to be replaced by a cool new one next year”, which had started to crystallise even before we were asked to perform this little “socialisation task”. We’ll be sent a list of the other questions, most of which were pertinent.Their key thesis in a nutshell: we have a basic human need to socialise but tend no longer to do this on PLEs (VLEs). There may be personalisation, but no socialisation. The question is: what happens when we neglect the social integration? Lack of connection will lead to demotivated students. Of course personalisation is nothing new, denoting the effort to personalise learning for large cohorts of people, whilst aiming for the same goal but with different routes and different starting points. Plato’s Socratic dialogues often embody the principle, the Oxbridge model is another example, and special educational needs another. But within these models, socialisation is implicit. In PLEs, socialisation is often left out, or at most paid lip service to. Further, personalisation itself brings up a set of dichotomies: individuality versus mutuality, social learning versus isolated learning etc. The issue for elearning is therefore to prevent that social learning, community learning falls by the wayside. An interesting discussion followed on from here, with participants sharing their experiences, worries and ideas about how social software can be integrated into PLEs, and what potential hurdles must be overcome. (My thinking is that our focus needs to be on the teachers – they need to understand the use and abuse, the potential and dangers of social software to make informed choices about how to use them in their teaching. I don’t think the burden of choosing tools for learning delivery should lie with the students).

Lunch was edible and fresh fruit abounded, and stimulating chats with colleagues were had, so that was me happy.

After lunch I decided to do a little writing and thinking before I joined the herd again for the final keynote, by Serge Ravet. It was fast and furiously delivered in a heartening French accent, challenging conceptions about personalisation. It touched on a myriad of topics and ideas, flitted from worries about personal data management to social networks, from hosting to aggregating, the concept of the “Internet of Subjects”, individualisation, Jean-Claude Kaufman’s book The invention of the Self (available in French or German…). A key message of his was that not only is there much more to personalisation than many contemporary discussions (in education, for example) will have you believe – data management, regulation, ownership, creation, sharing – but also that it may be the wrong concept to focus on: Ravet emphasises the importance of individualisation, and instead of personalised learning, which he considers old, trite, adaptive, he favours self-regulated learning, which is both individuation and individualisation, and thus a type of identity construction. I liked his challenge to the idea that we all speak of having different identities, an online identity, an offline identity. I do think this is a dangerous metaphor to perpetuate, as it gives rise to the idea that we are becoming fractured, split personalities, schizophrenics, or superheroes (Bruce Wayne/Batman) – and that the source for this clinical “wrong” is our being tied to technology. Our identity may be fragmented, but it is not therefore broken.

He was quick, and touched on various ideas I will have to follow up in the near future. Hopefully there will be a podcast of his talk too.

Google Wave for e-learning

Something that’s come to my attention very recently is Google Wave – Google’s reinvention of e-mail/instant messaging/collaborative editing/blogging/discussion boards etc. into one combined platform. The name still sounds a bit ominous to me, you’ll know what I mean if you’ve seen the film “Die Welle” – I was initially concerned that Google would be trying to route all forms of conversation through its servers for advertising targeting purposes. However, my fears are tempered for now as it seems that Google Wave will be a completely open source platform that can be installed on any server. Apparently no messages need to go near a Google server, but I guess we are still at the early stages of its development and implementation.
Looking at the announcement video (embedded below or available from the Google Wave website), the concept does look very impressive and I can see all sorts of potential benefits for elearning and academic research. Especially, if the server side technology can be hosted in house. The first 30 minutes of the video are enough to get an idea of what it does and how it works. Alternatively, Wilbert at CETIS provides a more thorough description of the technology and its potential applications, advantages and disadvantages.

June 11th, 2009|Blogging, Social Media, Teaching & Learning|Comments Off on Google Wave for e-learning|

Plymouth e-Learning Conference Report

Snorkle a Turtle at the Plymouth AquariumThe 4th Plymouth e-Learning Conference was an excellent event and for once I made good decisions in choosing which of the many parallel sessions to attend. I’ve not had a good track record recently!

The best learning technology tool I discovered was Marginalia.  It’s an open source annotation tool which can be plugged into Moodle discussion forums.  You can try it out – on it’s own or in this Moodle course.  I don’t have an immediate use for it but it’s always good to have an answer when you hear: it would be great if Moodle could… If you [LSE staff!] are interested in finding out about or using Marginalia please let us know.

There was plenty of discussion over home-made flapjacks in the well-planned E-pedagogy: Emperor’s New Clothes or New Directions? and I thought the format of the session worked really well.  Prior to the session the flapjack baker had elicited thoughts from a wider audience (via Twitter) on “What promotes learning?” resulting in 42 responses.  The session itself was a good mix of presenting, discussion and feeding back as we worked towards how (if) technology changes or enhances learning.  Participants were invited to post an answer online afterwards:  “Does ICT really change what good learning looks like? And if so, how”.  Unlike the pre-session task this has not been answered yet!  I suspect it was never tweeted 😉

Shock of the Old 2008 – Instalment 1

The ziggurat (?) of the Said Business School in Oxford, as viewed from the upstairs window. Thanks to dipfan at flickr.comWell, another week another web technology focused conference another broken WiFi network. I managed to get online for a total of 10 minutes so no live blogging from this conference.

Stuart Lee (Oxford) kicked off with a very entertaining introduction to the day with some informed jokes and a healthy dose of web 2.0 scepticism. I guess the main question really was how relevant web 2.0 is to mainstream higher education teaching in the UK. Can we stick our heads in the sand and hope it’ll go away? Do we want to?

In a way this was a very refreshing point of view as I was beginning to beleive I was quite out of step. If I was to believe many of the blogs out there we should be well on the way to planning, if not developing, personal learning environments based on every web 2.0 application site available. Especially if it involves Twitter (Facebook is Old Hat). Anyway, this was an energising start to the day.

The keynote speaker for the day was Professor Ronald Barnett from the Institute of Education. He lent academic weight by looking at what it is to be a student in the digital age and reminding us of the aims of higher education and posing many tough questions regarding the use of digital technologies. His ultimate conclusion is that there are so many unanswered questions that we barely understand the value of digital technologies because we barely understand our educational aims in higher education. We cannot therefore assume that digital technologies will be worthwhile and assessment of them is problematic. This does however mean that there are real opportunities for research. One nice comment that came out of the questions, was that enabling the student to enjoy themselves while attending a course does not necessarily mean that they are effective learners. As educators we sometimes have to take our students to uncomfortable places so that they can potentially transform their knowledge and attitudes to go into the presently unknown.

Niall Sclater from the Open University was next to speak regarding the perceived threat to the VLE from the PLE. He started off with a devil’s advocate approach by questioning whether we should be investing time and energy into developing our use of VLEs when there is all that free Web 2.0 software out there that we could and should be using. He then went on to look at the various PLE models out there. The main arguments against the PLE are the inability to brand, integration difficulties (very important to the Open University), reliability questions, accountability and other questions over the separation of the education and social space. Another query was whether the PLE model will fit the formal learning approach of universities as opposed to a more informal approach. Unsurprisingly, Niall’s conclusion was that we still need the VLE – his preferred model is to use his laptop as a PLE which links all these applications and services together.

More to follow…

‘Said Business School’ photo courtesy of dipfan from Flickr.com (licensed under Creative Commons)

April 4th, 2008|Conferences, Social Media, Teaching & Learning|Comments Off on Shock of the Old 2008 – Instalment 1|

More MoodleMoot

As Steve has comprehensively blogged on this already: day1, day2 I’ll just add a few comments on e-portfoilos and some more stuff coming our way from the OU.

E-Portfolios
These have always been on the edge of my radar but they were highlighted in Martin Dougiamas’ keynote for v2 and again in Niall Sclater’s excellent review of the thinking on the future of VLEs / PLEs. Without really planning to I ended up spending most of day 2 looking at portfolios. The idea with regard to Moodle is that external E-portfolio systems will plugin to Moodle allowing for data to pass from Moodle to the E-portfolio.

So what is an e-portfolio and how might it be used? For me the best starting point is how the OU have named their own home-grown system: MyStuff which is an open source plugin to moodle to be released soon. It is intended as a personal space for students to create, organise & store their ‘stuff’: files, links etc and allows students to make them available to who they wish. The other system featuring highly at the Moot was Mahara (open source from NZ) which seems to go further and includes a CV Builder and social software tools. I liked the way the Mahara team were talking about developing links to other systems such as YouTube & Flickr, so not everything has to be in Mahara.

October 30th, 2007|Conferences|2 Comments|

Terry Anderson on PLEs

I attended a CDE event today delivered by Terry Anderson of athabasca univeristy, canada’s equivalent of the OU. The session had been advertised as blogs and social software but the focus was Personal Learning Environments (based on social software).  He described a PLE as a “web interface into the owners’ digital environment” and spoke about the institutional VLE being replaced by an institutional PLE (such as elgg) as a transitory step to individuals choosing their own PLEs.  This year he has`been teaching a class using Moodle for content, elgg, branded as me2you for blogging and making connections, elluminate for real time stuff and furl for bookmarking and sharing web resources.

Couple of quick things – Athabasca are using moodle, he mentioned some recent data on web2.0 use from the jisc spire project which might be worth a look and a strongly recommended read was Seely Brown new learning environmnts (2006).

March 21st, 2007|Blogging, Social Media|Comments Off on Terry Anderson on PLEs|

Eduspaces

The external hosted version of elgg has been relaunched as eduspaces.  And I think elgg is defintely worth revisiting… I’ll certainly be having a more detailed look soon.  Just need a project  / interested academic…  Since I last looked at it, with a group of PhDs about a year ago, and decided it wasn’t quite there, the following things have changed:

  • Look and feel
  • Much improved navigation – links to your own profile, blog, files, resources (RSS feeds) are always visible
  • Your profile is more configurable
  • Community blogs can be viewed as a Forum as well as a blog
  • Messaging system introduced
  • Browse users / communities as well as search & tag cloud
  • WYSIWYG editor for blog posts and messages

All in all, much improved…

Update: In today’s seminar Terry Anderson reminded me of one of key features of elgg which we identified when looking at it previously and that’s the permissions side of things.  When posting to an elgg blog, adding a file or completing your profile you have complete control over who can see it – your content can be public, only seen by logged in users, completely private or restricted to an elgg community or a group of elgg contacts that you specify.

March 21st, 2007|Blogging, Social Media|Comments Off on Eduspaces|

Personalisation of Learning

On 8 Dec 2006 I attended a workshop on “Personalisation of Learning” in Manchester, organised by the HEA’s Supporting Sustainable e-Learning Forum (SSeLF).

The day consisted of presentations by Oleg Liber (Bolton) and Mike Halm (Penn State), seeking to define what “personalisation” means and how it might be implemented in e-learning.

The workshop was much better than I had expected. Both presentations were thought-provoking, and the quality of discussion amongst the participants was high. The structure was good, with the two knowledgeable presenters using their presentations to stimulate discussion amongst the audience.

Oleg Liber’s talk investigated what we mean by “personalisation”, and sought to define what a “personal learning environment” might be. He immediately rearranged the space so that the audience were sitting in groups rather than rows, and his two-hour session was punctuated with a number of discussion periods from which we fed back the outcomes. After exploring questions such as “what is personalisation?”, “what is the difference between personal and personalised?” and “what is a PLE, and what is it not?”, he moved on to demonstrate his own vision of a PLE, a prototype system called Plex.

Mike Halm’s presentation started with an overview of the state of university teaching, using quotes from various books, especially Declining by Degrees, which looks interesting. However, there were also some rather dubious quotes, for example an assertion that “85% of learning takes place in informal contexts” which I suspect belongs in the “97% of statistics are made up” category. Later in the talk, Mike attempted to bring learning styles into the picture, which prompted a discussion about the validity of such things that went on for some time and was quite interesting, even if it did use up most of Mike’s remaining time. Finally, he demonstrated his own model of a PLE – a system called LionShare.

More detailed Personalisation workshop notes

December 11th, 2006|Conferences, Teaching & Learning|Comments Off on Personalisation of Learning|