E. rubecula's Blog Stuff

OK, so like those of the H800 students that are still trying to keep their blog alive, I am joining your ranks in positing an entry on the last push to get the ECA out the way. Given that my last assignment wasn't that crash hot, I really had better get this write. My two topics are:

1. Blogs and blogging.
2. Learning Design.

Including my and experiences of others in these two technologies. I must confess that I'm still a bit mystified as to why I chose the second topic. This is one of those 'gut feelings' that I can't see the way through this wood, but hopefully it'll turn out fine once I start to grapple with it more.

We've been discussing in our group the value of sharing our writing processes with other members in our tutor groups (or even across the course), but that seems like a 'bridge too far' for the OU at the moment. Put it this way, no-one is saying anything officially from OU on this except that 'joint work' is not permitted, and nor is 'publishing one's assignments' online.

However, we are allowed to publish our structure and thoughts and so here's a synopsis so that if anyone can get something out of this, then great. If they can see a glaring ommission then even better if they leave a comment. Right here goes:

Blogging

There's no shortage of papers to choose from on the phenomena of blogs and blogging. This is quite a straight forward piece. However, the glaring omission that most of this research makes (imho) is that there's no empirical evidence to suggest that blogging actually DOES make a learner a better learner. In other words there's no controlled studies to show either (i) that blogging makes a better learning experience and (ii) assuming that it does, what aspect about the blogging experience is the ingredient that seems to make for a better learner.

Note that I'm not suggesting that loads of very academic folks haven't thought or written about this - lots of conjecture - but not much empirical research.

So I guess you can see where my…

OK, so here's a great example of the power of blogs and RSS readers. I found this article via another ed-tech blog and I think it's brilliant. Mr. Bowden of the Meadows School of the Arts at the Southern Methodist University (Texas for y'all) has boldly gone the other way of education and technology and tried to take out the computers from the classrooms. However, if you look at the interview (hopefully comes out below) you'll see that he's advocating the smart use of technology. In particular it seems he's trying (correctly imho) to rail against the use of powerpoint as a crutch to teaching. The result - death by powerpoint.

Here's an idea that I thought was great. He is suggesting that already students are finding equivalent or better quality online courses that campuse, brick and mortar universities cannot compete with. His suggestion is that why waste a lecture time giving a death by powerpoint presentation and then giving 2 minutes for some inane question that won't be answered satisfactory.

Instead Mr. Bowden asks why not record the actual 'talking head' lecture as a podcast, or even go to another university where they've done it 'right' and then come to your actual lecture with questions for discussion. He's suggesting that what the campus experience will have to offer is in fact something more than lectures delivered in a boring talking head, lecturn-with-computer-&-death-by-powerpoint-as-barrier format. Why not come to the 'lecture' having watched it already and then have 50 mins of discussion?

Why not indeed.

Specifically relating my learning to H800.

I guess, the thing about my learning on H800 is the journey that I typically take as a student in any discipline: first excitement; then bewilderment; then minor breakthroughs; more bewilderment; realisation that I know it all; realisation that I was wrong and i know nothing; finally feel like a 'groove' is developing just at the end of the course.

One thing that H800 has done for me is to (rip) open my eyes to the whole Web2.0 phenomena. I can see how this could be the 'genuine' disruptive technology that revolutionises educational practice. On the other hand I also see significant danger in being seduced by technology and not focussing on the content of the issues being taught.

I'm most excited about

I'm most excited about the personal learning environment that Web2.0 technology affords. Blogs, social tagging, rss feeds, micro-blogging & mobile devices are all fantastic ways of not just accessing but also publishing information. Modern computers and hand held devices are able to significantly make many of us able to publish more than just text, but also photos and videos, podcasts, videocasts etc.

The technology that has made the biggest change

Of the tech that I've encountered on H800, I guess it's this - the blog - that has made the most difference. The fact that it can be used to allow commentary and a (potentially) easy way to allow others to be updated on any posts (or comments to the posts) via RSS (or Atom) feeds. In a way blogs allows the ultimate freedom because it 'can' be made public, or it can be made so private that it can have an audience of none, bar the author, and all it takes is a few clicks. Try doing this with a text based journal. On the face of it blogs are nothing more than self-reflective journals. However, perhaps this self reflection via the power of friend/peer/public commentary is more than just 'self' reflective but allows multiple reflections to occur.

The technology(ies) that have…

So far in our course, we've been asked to comment on the potential to use technology for educational innovation. I guess what I am finding hard to understand is where the rubber meets the road and demonstrable effects that the web 2.0 technology is in fact creating a positive educational effect - as in where can we see that the web 2.0 tech is actually providing a better teaching/learning environment compared to the luddite equivalent?

Mobile Tech

Here's one eg. that I can think of, it's the iPodTouch. As an owner of an iPhone I have until now been stumped to think what possible educational value such as beautiful machine could offer. Here's one example which I like because it's (apparently) been produced by a 17 year old student with a strong argument for not only being an easy to use system BUT has strong green credentials because it does not have to produce so many paper based resources.

Organisational Impact

At the University of the South Pacific where I taught for almost a decade, we had an almost obscene amount of technology particularly for a university placed in a developing region. This was in part probably because it was (and remains) a favoured place for a donor organisations to donate money and expertise towards. Sadly (warning, cynical content to follow) the donors didn't really understand about learning – and sadly most of our academic staff at USP didn't have a real clue either. Take for instance, the hair brained idea of the Japanese aid organisation (JICA), to kit out the university with a new satellite network technology that would span almost all the countries that it represents (11 of the 12 countries, spanning an area that is more than 4 times the area of western Europe). The satellite technology would integrate telephone communications (I could call a colleague from Fiji in Western Samoa and it would 'cost' the same as calling my colleague down the corridor from me), internet and the brand new video conferencing facilities that we had read and heard about or seen on US TV shows.

Given that it was 'free' the USP didn't blink in accepting this generous gift. However, it has since been abandoned principally because it served NO significant advantage to the existing (meagre) mechanisms in either teaching or learning activities. What it did do however, was gobble up enormous quantities of technical time having the technicians trying to implement the scheme. It closed down the existing (audio alone) satellite tutorial studio and replaced it with a studio that had more limitations, for instance we could only have two way talk with two other campuses, whereas the old system could link up to theoretically 6 other stations (certainly more than two). It chewed up time with lecturers desperately trying to utilise the technology to please their departmental and school heads but with a realisation that it didn't work. I can't resist setting…

The Observatory Report for Web 2.0 for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, makes for interesting reading with regard to how particularly tertiary institutions are trying to handle the incorporation of Web 2.0 into their teaching & learning and many suggestions of how it could be used, and potential thorny issues in it's whole scale usage are summarised.

Firstly there is a startling statistic (maybe out of date) that the vast majority of users are not 'creators' of content in the Web 2.0 experience. The statistic for YouTube or Flickr content uploading for all the visits to the site was about than 0.2%. For Wikipedia the (surprisingly for me) is about 5% of the visits are to edit entries.

Which again seems counter intuitive to me. It does suggest that for the moment most people are still 'consuming' the information which the authors cite as being a Web 1.0 activity. Having said that I don't know why I'm surprised given that I've not really encountered this technology until this course and most people think that I'm technically savvy (ha!).

This report does suggest that at least a certain number of universities are trying to NOT incorporate Web 2.0 technologies as part of a formalised 'top-down' approach. Warwick, Leeds, Edinburgh, Brighton and Klagenfurt Universities appear to be adopting a complimentary approach to making Web 2.0 technologies avaiable but not necessarily a forced requirement to use. They've allowed the students to decide themselves if, when and how to use them.

The rest of the report is interesting because it highlighted concerns about the use of Web 2.0 technologies that I hadn't thought of before. Such as when and how, to lock down information in a way that is considered a part of the historical archiving of material. The whole…

All the readings that focus on the use of computers as the panacea to the educational woes and ills of the last millenium reminded me of a personal journey that I had in terms of the use of computers, specifically to write assignments (as an undergraduate) and papers (as a post-grad an beyond).

My first year undergraduate essays were (when done diligently) works of organised chaos. I had hand written outlines, i had photocopies, I had yellow stick-its and highlighter markers seemingly thrown over all this material. All strewn across every surface (including the floor) in a 2m circumference around my writing desk. I'd hand write a draft, and then add that to the highlighted notes around me before I wrote my final draft. I didn't get 100% (or even close) for these assignments but at least I was on top of the writing process.

And then I was introduced to the word processor in a computer along with associated dot-matrix printer. We had labs of BBC Acorn computers. I did the same process as above but at the stage of my final copy I'd type my assignment up. I immediately found that my grades when up between 5-10% - I swear simply because it was typed and not hand written. I know this sounds bizzare today but the majority of assignments were hand written. When I became a postgraduate student, and had my own tutorial classes, I used to implore my tutees to have their assignments (for the lecturer not me) typed up just to pick up 5-10% 'free' marks. Many did and commented that I was right about the power of the presented work.

Meanwhile my own writing process had by now progressed to be able to type up my outline on a computer and then my notes, and then I didn't even have to bother with the highlighter marker because I could simply cut and paste paragraphs to different locations in my text - marvellous! Finally i was at the stage where I was writing the whole document from scratch on the computer with only one document, that would be edited on the screen - by this time I…

Kennedy et al (2008) review their findings of a study that started in 2006 on the internet savvyness of the so called 'Net Generation' of students entering into their first year of study. I guess what surprised me about this study (and it's precursors) was that apparently first year students in Australian universities appear to be techno-competent but are not 'Web2.0' savvy so they are not leveraging this to their educational advantage. However, now that I've read the studies I don't know why I thought that today's students ought to be able to do this? 

It is still the case that (for me) the main uses students in Fiji use the internet for are

(i) do email,

(ii) surf the web to plaguerise for their assignments and 

(iii) 'acquire' music & films. 

What has changed though recently is seeing that many students are now using social networking sites to remain in contact with each other. This is perhaps more sigificant in Fiji where many citizens work abroad and send remittances back home, or they study abroad. Facebook and MySpace are ways of maintaining that contact. I've become acutely aware of this in about the last 18 months.

Having said that, I continue to maintain that it's 'smart' content that is more important than the technology used. Technology should be employed because it is somehow able to deliver the same or better learning experience. The value associated with the quality of teaching/learning might be the actual learning that takes place, vs. the convenience of administration of the course (electronic submissions, and hand out pick up), or the additional social dimension, or any combination of these and other factors.

References

Kennedy, G.E. et al. (2008) First year students' experiences with technology: Are they really digital natives? Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 24, 108-122.

It seems to me that having a joint writing space sometimes called a 'Write Board' is a technology that is currently being used in a number of contexts. 'Wikis' are a good example. I have come across 'write boards' in project management contexts. Specifically a (brilliant imho) web 2.0 application called 'Basecamp'. This is really nothing more than a re-working of one of the oldest social internet technologies the 'bulletin board'. In principle this is exactly what they are but their layout and their accessibility is becoming far friendlier. My friends who studied and worked in HCI all seemed to suggest that technology works best the more and more transparent it becomes. That is no extra cognitive overlay is required to understand and implement the information.

Take for instance the contrast between the word processors of old (WordStar and WordPerfect) prior ot the 'graphical user interface'. If you wanted to embolden a word the word had to be encapsulated by a code (much like today's html and xml code for those that programme 'raw')  and this is not the easiest thing in the world to read. Once the concept of reading and emboldened word was signified by the 'what you see is what you get' approach, the technology became more transparent in terms of reading the text.

So too the 'write-board' becomes more transparent with the ultimate being a cross referenced graphical equivalent of a 'white board' that contain text, doodles, sketches, further web links and so on. What would students of the near future think of such technologies once they are adopted on a larger scale? Hopefully they would not see the 'technology' and focus more on using the tool for the purpose of learning. Joint work becomes more meaningful because there's an electronic media rich 'pin-board' which allows collaborative work to be done in a more intuitive way. Teachers too would be able to concentrate on the actual design of their teaching aims, rather than concentrating on how to use the technology…