grussend

About Sonja Grussendorf

A learning technologist and very happy member of the Learning Technology and Innovation team at the London School of Economics (LSE). Main professional interests: social media, interactive classrooms (esp Electronic Voting Systems), theories of technology.

Social media

Earlier this afternoon Prime Minister David Cameron made a statement regarding ‘the disorder in England’, in which he suggested that the government will be working towards the feasibility of controlling social media at times of unrest. Specifically, he said

“Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them. So we are working with the Police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.”

The full text is available from the number10 website. Leaving aside that any such targeted control might not be technically possible, Cameron’s statement effectively demonises tools which many of us have been promoting for their collaborative, immediate, and social nature. Social media aren’t only about organising one’s social/ antisocial life. They are about and bring about the free flow of information, and because of this, they are intrinsically linked to the idea of education. As one of our LSE bloggers put it today “In a sense the rioters using social media were only doing what we celebrated when it happened in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab Uprisings”. Surely it is important to emphasise and to focus on the second part of that comparison. Finally, it is important to remember what social media are: they are defined by their openness. Somehow it strikes me as a bad idea to want to fight a technology which embodies the principle of openness, of opening up, collaboration and sharing with a gesture that is all about shutting down.

For a quick overview of social web tools, visit our CLT page.

Finally, for reasons: “Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it…” (MH, 1949)

August 11th, 2011|Open Education, Uncategorized|Comments Off on Social media|

CLT Survey 2011

We had 165 responses to our call to take the annual CLT Staff Survey and while we always appreciate the the praise, the gratitude, the pure love, we usually concentrate on the constructive criticism to make sure we improve accordingly! Staff continue to use Moodle and are starting to make it change the ways they teach. That’s a positive result. However, the big lesson we take away from this year’s survey is that need to communicate more effectively with our academic staff and students, especially with regards to who we are and what we do. We revel in the comment that said “you guys are fantastic! Best part of IT at LSE.” The sentiment is great, but CLT aren’t actually part of IT Services, though we work closely with them. CLT support staff in the use of technologies to enhance teaching and learning. We aim to promote the integration and use of technology in teaching through staff development, advice and guidance, research, collaboration and networking. As several more respondents complained about technical hiccups in the past academic year, we realise we must make clear who we are in our next survey. Of course we will pass on these comments to the relevant departments.  What does fall into our remit is Moodle – technical support, training to use it, and advising on best practice. Since one respondent suggested they would like to be able to have blog feeds appear on Moodle, we have great news! Moodle is indeed flexible enough to do this and if you follow this link it tells you how to: http://docs.moodle.org/20/en/RSS_feeds_block! For more help with Moodle or how to use technologies to support your teaching, get in touch with us – clt-support@lse.ac.uk. To find out a bit more about what we do, who we are and which technologies we support and advise on, why not visit our webpages: http://clt.lse.ac.uk/ . We’re here over the summer and the doors are always open, so why don’t you send us an email or just pop in if you have any queries we can help you with.

plasticine models of CLT team on elephant

We are CLT

August 10th, 2011|Surveys|Comments Off on CLT Survey 2011|

Accessibility Event 5th July 2011

The Centre for Learning Technology, Disability & Well-being Service and IT Services would like to invite you to an awareness raising event to inform you of disability services and assistive technologies at LSE and help you reflect on how to embed inclusive practice.

For more information, to view the programme and to book a place online (first come first base, limited spaces available, so book soon!) visit http://clt.lse.ac.uk/technology-and-inclusion/make-your-teaching-accessible-and-inclusive.php

June 20th, 2011|Announcements, Events & Workshops (LTI)|Comments Off on Accessibility Event 5th July 2011|

Ask the audience – again and again

Asking students (or any audience) questions breaks up the monotony of unidirectional lecturing/ presenting, keeps minds from wandering, turns them into active, reciprocal participants, engages them beyond listening.

At large or online events, which lack the intimacy of small seminars, there are a variety of online tools or classroom technologies that can be used to help enable this.

At LSE we use TurningPoint as our PRS (Personal Response System) or EVS (electronic voting system) – a software/ hardware combination that allows lots of participants (500+) to respond. Questions are created in PowerPoint (the software works as a plugin, and question slides are created as easily as PowerPoint slides), and students vote with little remote controls (officially called “response cards”, but everyone refers to them as clickers.) The LSE100 course uses this system extensively, and students are asked to borrow a clicker for the year from the library to bring to all their LSE100 lectures.

dIsfluEncY

Last week, we were sent this article by a colleague in the philosophy department, entitled “Fortune favors the BOLD (and the Italicized ): Effects of disfluency on educational outcomes”. It’s an interesting short paper that describes the outcome of two experiments which support earlier research claims about the educational benefits of using disfluent, i.e.“slightly difficult to read”, fonts.

The motivation for these studies stems from earlier research into fluency, the feeling of ease we associate with a particular thinking operation. Apparently, we tend to have a bias in favour of fluency, so much so that it affects our judgment, e.g. to the extent that “stocks from fluently named companies are judged to have higher value, [driving] purchasing decisions, which inflates the actual value of stocks” (Oppenheimer, 2008).

January 14th, 2011|Reports & Papers|5 Comments|

on reading

Last night on Radio4’s Front Row novelist Susan Hill, talking to Mark Lawson about her new book (which charts a year in which she resisted buying new books, instead finally reading or re-reading those from her own  collection), revealed that she had also used that year to restrict her use of the internet, in particular her internet reading.

She had previously become aware that her concentration was not what it used to be and  suggested that “if you use the internet a lot you notice your concentration begins to become fragmented and you don’t have that complete concentration for two or three hours.”

With these comments she was not making a moral judgment, she was not condemning the internet for its pernicious, ruinous effects on the human ability to read; rather she was explaining how reading on the internet can embed the habit of skim-reading, of flitting from hyperlink to hyperlink, as most web pages encourage sound-bite (or rather: vision-bite) reading.

eLearning 2020

On our last away day, the very (!) talented Athina, Jane & Steve came up with a novel way to present their take on the future of elearning: they created a 5 minute sci-fi video.The brief was to come up with a technology which might become the technology that will revolutionise… education, our lives, our society. They chose to explode the premise (& temporality) by offering a historical glance backwards, from a very distant future (in which, intriguingly, Lt. Uhura, and Mr. Spock have teamed up with Princess Leia) addressing the 2020 past. video still with Steve & JaneWhat I liked best was the underlying suggestion that in the distant future in which Stars Trek and Wars conjoin, the concept of learning has given way to (mere) data accumulation and information exchange. Spock, unable to escape his Vulcan psychological make-up, finds it illogical that humans might learn for the sheer enjoyment of understanding, applying and analysing concepts. To us humans (at least of today), information is that about which we will at a final stage be able to make judgments; we learn (by rote) “information”in order to apply our critical thinking in an informed way, ultimately to make sense of the world and us in it. Information has no value for its own sake, and learning is more than merely the acquisition of knowledge. Poor Spock overvalues rationality (or rather: logic) at the cost of creativity. Who’d be a Vulcan, eh…* Watch the video, it’s nicely provocative and entertaining.

*yes, I know he’s half-human.

October 2nd, 2009|Images, Audio & Video, Teaching & Learning, Tools & Technologies|Comments Off on eLearning 2020|

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.