Graham Attwell’s talk of PLEs at summerschool

The workshop was a discussion with students and Graham, it was a bit disappointing… I think mostly very general things were brought up by students and Graham’s answers were same general. Anyway, nice experience of how to spend 1,5 hour of making bubbles with some pearls among. Graham’s point of course was that he is not presenting anything but he is here to start the conversation, in the end he said that for those who feel disappointed, there is the slidecast of 20 min is in slideshare and lots of info is under PLE tag in his blog.

Graham: What is a learning environment?

Stein: Learning environment is all my distributed tools
Lauri: it annoys me that the learning environment is considered technology, there is a glass wall between this and more natural learning environment outdoors.

GrahaM: How much our identity, when we are in the computer environment, differs from our identity in real world?
I want my personal learning environment to represent my knowledge - i think most relevant is Matrix film representation of knowledge.

dougsymington:@cristinacost how do learners acquire a “public voice” in online environments? Obvious differences depending on age. Other issues? #scohrid

Graham: What you do and who you share in learning environments gives the public voice.
Does public voice depend on your learning in networked systems - its an interesting question.

Lilian: Personal learning environments - i have three questions, what is personal, what is learning, what is environment. I think education is manipulation, the idea of personal is MINE, how can i disconnect from it time to time? Does environment needs to be integrated, does someone need to help me to manipulate my environment.

Graham: I call it personal LEARNING environment. Lots of our learning is incidental.
We must often log in to institutional systems and adopt, why not can we come with our own learning environments. Learning environment is not a program or site in internet - its a series of tools which individual learners use across multiple devices which are used in different ways and different contexts.
Learning is not how people use technology, we use different things in different context.

xxx: Most students are too lazy to use PLEs, we must force students to use them.

Martin:You also have to control them, without control they don’t do anything.

Linda: i disagree i think it is only easier for us as teachers to control them. With PLE development the teacher must work hard, students become lazy and lost, but you must do this road with them and also do this road as a teacher. For me is difficult to leave the control to the hands of students.

Alev: if you try to change it, students don’t like it.

Lilian: in French business school young students say we know what is learning, we don’t want to change it.

Graham: Do we teach students to be lazy, sit there and let them to be taught? We come here to learn, not to teach ourselves!
I think when we invent new technology we invent it in the previous society paradigms. Our school system comes from factory system - teacher as factory overseer, when we take computer and build virtual classrooms, we take the same paradigm. Of course it does not work.

Ralf: the educational system is getting even stronger, since kindergarten we try to prepare them for labour market.

Graham: I certainly agree that in periods of paradigm shift the contradictions will get stronger in the society.

Lauri: teachers’ experience comes from history, teachers are always old-fashioned for the students. I think future is so unpredictable, we need a new way to teach providing ability to invent.

Linda: We are people from 20th century teaching people of the future.

Graham: Is important that teachers were less trying to teach technology but also use it by themselves.

Graham: Is very interesting that you drag the conversation back to schools, but i think of learning outside the school, facilitation and encouraging learning outside the school, embedding learning in wider hearts of the society than school, it may actually start addressing the problems where real learning takes place.

Google was being widely used for learning - if you want to learn something you google, you dont go to your research environments that look horrible.
Why if you are using google you expect students will do something different?

Graham: Reclaim lurking!
Paper: Searching, lurking in the zone of proximal development.

All communities are interconnected by notes, nodal learning. Are you just accessing information or are you learning? People do contextually purposeful activities, they are sequenced in the terms of their own learning not by curriculum, they are social. A lot of learning is driven through personal interest that people do by themselves. In educational technology we keep sucked back to e-learning classes.

Start help people to manage their personal learning environments for informal learning.

Ralf: life long learning as a punishment never stops.

xxx: Are we replicating in virtual learning environments the ‘prison’?

Graham: no instead we use the term ‘walled garden’

Lilian: what do you think of the tyranny of connection?
Linda: the same tyranny is the books

Two Ed-media08 papers

This year Ed-media 2008 conference takes place in Vienna. Although i am not able to be at EdMedia this year, since i go to iCalt conference, i really regret since there will be a very interesting community meeting.

The Personal Learning Environment PLE issues are discussed at the symposium: How Social is my Personal Learning Environment (PLE)? with the participation of:
1. Sebastian Fiedler
2. Tarmo Toikkanen and Teemu Leinonen
3. Stéphane Sire et al.
4. Liliane Esnault, Denis Gillet and Annick Rossier Morel
5. Colin Milligan
6. Graham Attwell, Margarita Perez Garcia, and Steven Warburton
7. Barbara Kieslinger and Kai Pata
8. Bernadette Charlier and France Henri

Our paper with Barbara Kieslinger is:
Am I alone? The competitive nature of self-reflective activities in groups and individually

Abstract: Although it is not yet common practice, the use of personal learning environments (PLEs) has started to enter formal higher education by a number of early adopters. Some lecturers facilitate their students in making use of social software tools and networked resources for learning activities. In our contribution observations from field research that has been conducted in the context of the European research project iCamp are discussed. On a conceptual level iCamp intends to develop a learning environment design model that provides more autonomy to the learner, in terms of activities tools and resources. In the field trials students were guided towards self-reflection and self-direction activities by making use of their personal learning environments, while at the same time they were prompted to perform collaborative activities in distributed shared learning environments. Thus students and facilitators were challenged by the competitive nature of self-reflection done in single PLEs against the other-directed reflective activities done in distributed shared learning environments. This article elaborates on why collaborative activities might be hindering the individual reflective activities, and how this can be overcome.

Besides symposium, we have another paper where we elaborate the self-directing aspects in social learning environment using the data from the master course of web 2.0 from Tallinn University.

Tammets, K., Väljataga, T., & Pata, K. (2008). Self-directing at social spaces: conceptual framework for course design. Proceedings of Ed-Media 2008. Vienna: AACE, 2008.

Abstract: This paper examines the use of social spaces in order to foster self-directed learning activities in higher educational institutions. It argues that current instructional design models need to be adjusted with respect to self-direction according to the continuously changing processes in post-industrial society. Based on empirical research conducted with master students it attempts to design a conceptual framework for course design with the emphasis on self-direction in social spaces.

Learning experiences from iCamp and beyond

Today i have a talk of iCamp pedagogical trials in Wienna University to the people who organize elearning courses in this university. Its combines some preliminary and older findings. However a deeper insight is yet to come after 3rd trial ends and we can collect the activity patterns.

Call for book chapters

Here is a nice initiative for book chapter calls.

CALL FOR BOOK CHAPTERS & REVIEWERS
Submission Deadline: April 30, 2008

Educational Social Software for Context-Aware Learning:
Collaborative Methods and Human Interaction

A book edited by:
Niki Lambropoulos

Centre for Interactive Systems Engineering, London South Bank University, London, UK
Margarida Romero
Université de Toulouse II, FR

http://www.educationalsocialsoftware.net/

Learning affordances of the blog and aggregator

Finally we have managed to analyse some data related to learning affordances of aggregators and weblogs. The study was conducted as part of the master-level Educational Technology course at Tallinn University in spring term 2007.

We analysed students‘ visual schemes of personal learning landscapes and activity patterns, and the written explanations containing information about the learning affordances of social software.

Affordances were collected from the schemes and initially categorised according to the tools they were related to. Each particular affordance could be listed only once in relation to the certain tool.

Next, the second order categorization of affordances according to the activity pattern types was undertaken. The base of the activity types emerged from the analysis of different students‘ activity patterns in combination of tools‘ use. The list of 9 pedagogical activity types was developed.

The following figure demonstrates the different types of learning affordances related blogs and aggregators.

Weblog affordances and implications to learning design

The main affordances of weblogs that could be categorized as supporting the activities related to assembling the learning environment were: personalization of web-pages, adding and saving data and links, limiting the access rights, and information facilitation. One of the students mentioned the affordance of relating weblogs with other mediating environment, indicating that indeed such affordances are perceived, which are evoked by the interrelations of certain tools, not only by one tool. Some students perceived that they can do a prognosis of certain resources and evaluate the usage of different tools in weblog.

Students did not mention any weblog affordances related community formation activity. This is quite an interesting result, since it is generally believed that weblogs might be a good tool for social networking. It is assumed that the course designs should try to initiate more such activities using new social software functions. Besides community formation, running the community as a creative system is becoming increasingly important.

The most frequent affordances that could be related as supporting the lecturing and presenting activity type were giving tasks and presenting information to the learners. The fact that students could see this pedagogical task-related affordance is promising for the educators who would like to use weblogs primarily as the teaching tools. Some student, however, generalized this affordance and did not mention task-specific actions - affordances what they perceived as creating information and publishing artifacts are the most general function commonly related to the weblogs.

Only one affordance was classified as supporting the information filtering activity type: understanding the information given by the tutor. However, this affordance still indicates towards cognitive information filtering, rather than information retrieval by using various technical features social software offers. The weblogs have several ways of filtering information by tags, keywords, incoming RSS feeds, tag-feeds. From the perspective of course design, it can be concluded that the facilitators need to plan more activities where students could actively try out how to use such social information retrieval methods.

A number of activities could be classified as supporting the self-tutoring activity type. Affordances such as learning, self-study, self-reflection, self-analyzis, and self-evaluation were perceived as part of weblog functionalities. This indicates that weblogs might be used actively in education for self-directed learning. Other affordances students mentioned were creating time-tables and action plans and doing homework.

Student found several affordances that could be classified as supporting the activities related to individual creative assignments. These, that could be related with one student’s learning activities were: getting tasks, browsing thematic information and analyzing information feeds, reading, reflecting on artifacts in the weblog, revising information, presenting, and improving. However, there was high number of affordances, which presumed the interaction with other student’s work, such as commenting the posts, sharing files and giving feedback to peer’s work. This indicates that the the paradigm change is about to happen in what is considered an individual work - commenting and sharing each others’ assignments during the activity shifts the emphasis from the outcome-related assignments, where students must produce a final artifact only, towards increased attention to the learning process in which students develop and dynamically change their knowledge.

A group of affordances were classified as supporting the collaborative creative assignments. Monitoring the other learners and the community reflection, communication with the co-learners and the tutor, sharing and interchange of information with learners, collecting the results from the group activity and coordinating the information among the group of learners were most frequently mentioned affordances. However, it was evident that students did not yet perceive the possibilities social software allowed to do collaborative creative assignments, such as mashing feeds, retrieving information using tags or social browsing etc. Co-construction of knowledge was not perceived as part of the social software affordances.

A small group of affordances were classified as supporting the assessment and evaluation type of activities. These were evaluation of learners knew knowledge, getting feedback and learning from the result of group activities. Notable is that the last two are related to what students can gain from assessment activities. The students were not able of bringing out many different affordances social software might offer for evaluation. This indicates that in the new social-software based course designs the facilitators should develop a bigger variety of assessment methods that originate from the functions social software offers. It is important that assessment and evaluation procedures were used for increasing students’ motivation to learn, and were not merely seen as grading instruments.

A group of affordances were classified as enhancing regulation, monitoring and support activities. Affordances related to the facilitator were monitoring learner’s action and reflection, supervising learners, giving feedback and supporting, recognizing students and giving enthusiasm. Affordance related to the student’s activity was asking the teacher.

Aggregator’s learning affordances

The majority of learning affordances students related with aggregator belonged to three types of activities: assembling the learning environment, filtering information, and regulation, monitoring and support. Activity of assembling the learning environment with the aggregator is favored by the following affordances: creating an aggregator, aggregating personal interest feeds, collaboratively monitoring co-learners blogs, getting feedback and sharing the blog content. Since the aggregator was one of the central tools in the course environment, where students could monitor each other’s weblog feeds and initiate writing feedback, this was influencing strongly students’ perception of aggregators. However, students have not payed much attention to the mashed bookmark feed and bookmark tagcloud which were also accessible from aggregation page. Students noted once the affordance of discussion as supporting community-formation activities with the aggregator. The widgets supporting asynchronous and synchronous discussions were part of the group aggregator. The only affordance supporting lecturing and presenting activity was publishing feeds.

The affordances enhancing information filtering type of activities were: aggregating social tags feeds/artifacts’ information, collecting friends’/community feeds, creating personal filtering for the feeds, monitoring community reflection. Notable is that while some learners perceived information as feeds, the others named it artifacts or information. It may be assumed that this represents two types of thinking: technological (feeds, tags) and information-related (artifacts, blog posts, info). This aspect may be important if aggregators are taught to be used as personal or group learning tools. The affordances related to the aggregator express very clearly students new type of technological understanding of social software - the words feed, social tag, aggregation, and filtering appeared in most of the affordances of this group. Another interesting issue is other-directedness if thinking of the aggregators. Aggregators have commonly introduced as personal tools, while in this master course it was used as a group tool. Thus students perceived mainly the affordances related to monitoring and filtering information from other students and from the community and did not describe the widgets that might be used for mashing personal information.

Affordances belonging to the self-tutoring activity type were missing.

Individual creative assignments were supported by the few affordances like collecting information, reading feeds and selecting information.

Collaborative creative assignments were supported mainly by the affordances of collaborative monitoring the feeds or co-learners. Again the two distinctive perceptions - technological (feed) and learner-related ( co-learner, student, user) can be found when expressing the affordances.

Assessment-related affordances were evaluating feeds and getting feedback. Similarly to weblog affordances for learning, learners see two aspects of evaluation - that of the facilitator who does the evaluation and the other where student benefits from the evaluation. From the perspective of using aggregators in teaching, it is clear that there needs to be developed a new method how to assess students’ personal or group aggregators as their information gateways and activity areas.

Affordances of aggregators related to regulation, monitoring and support type of activities were: getting the instructions, monitoring co-learners or students’ feeds/learners/artifacts, aggregating feeds, sharing personal feeds, and giving feedback to the feed. Interesting was that students named affordances similarly in relation to teacher’s as well as students’ regulation, monitoring and support activities. This indicates that in new type of courses the learning situation is diminishing the difference between the facilitator’s and learners’ roles.

Looking back

It is now 1 year that i am blogging. I started it to try out how it feels to reflect my research openly. It feels good.
Even too good… if publishing in journal was same easy, and gave the same amount of positive feelings…
Best part is finding again my own thoughts, what i totally forgot. Did i write this?
Blogging helps a lot as a research reflection tool! Especially if the memory is getting tired.

Very best part is finding one very good colleague - Anatole Fuksas!

Here is the life of my weblog:
First months in my weblog were quiet, except one big hype thanks to Nancy White friends.

The visitors started to come third month, thank you for keeping eye on me, all my iCamp fans!

Thank you also George, to hype me up several times
Here is Vancouver EdMedia conference hype:

Here are the results of advertising me in your weblog in october:

Statistics:
Total Views: 15,655
Best Day Ever: 174

I think it is amazing, who are all the people coming here to read my research thoughts???

expectations to new social learning tools

Social software is generally recognized as tools, which development is highly dependent of users‘ mutual interaction with the mediation of these tools, involving group processes such as discussion, mutual advice or favors, and play (Shirky, 2002).

Any activity is always mediated by the tools that we create in the process of actualizing certain affordances in our goal-directed and enculturated actions - when making something from the environment into our own or when bringing something of our own ideas into the environment. More than at earlier times, current social tools are the creation of communities. While the artifacts and meanings, created and distributed with social software, obtain in the process of use the community-defined folksonomical dimensions, the activities what are performed and evolve in these systems as a result of community interactions, have yet remained implicit, and are not well observable for the users of social software. Social software still lacks the means how to make activity potentialities of tools, and activity patterns, which emerge in the communities, more observable. What we basically lack, is the soft ontologically defined constraints/possibilities of actions determined by the communities who use social tools.

When using social software for learning at institutional courses, but also for personal self-directed learning attempts with other learners in the Web, the explicit socially defined action potentialities within activity systems would enhance the selection of communal tools for common objectives. Some of the recent developments, such as Friend of a Friend (FOAF) technology that aims at creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do, seem to promise that the action-based automated search of learning partners would soon become possible. The best practice of the tool-use for certain learning activities is, thus, disseminated giving a valuable input for the others and narrowing down their choice of appropriate tools for particular learning goals. For example, it is suggested that the super-peer networks would enable the learners to observe, record and share their activity practices with artifacts through networks (Clematis et al., 2007). If FOAF and similar specifications could read personal action potentialities with certain social software, their communities and artifact types, which we described earlier, the decision processes at constructing collaborative landscapes for learning purposes, could be supported by technological means.

Tools that support the construction of group landscapes from distributed personal tools play an important role in the application of new Learning Environment Design model. The new generation of aggregation and mashup tools is anticipated to support the construction of distributed personal and group learning landscapes, using the affordance-based activity system model. The mashup of the learning environment from distributed feeds will be realised, considering, in one hand, the anticipated affordances for action, and personal activity preferences, which may be described with FOAF kind of scripts, and on the other hand, the socially defined action potentialities of tools would enable the mashup tools to automatically select a suitable set of widgets for certain learners or groups. In these mashup tools learners would pertain full control over the selection of feeds – eventually they can ignore or close some tools and even add new tools. Such user-activity can be, in turn, used to update the semantic models refining the activity-tool relations, improving the tool recommendations.

The critical factor of effective use of distributed social landscapes and scaffolding in such systems is the possibility to monitor the use of landscape elements and the information flows between them in the cause of action. New developments at social software systems enable already to visualise the folksonomy based meaning-building dimensions in the communities (see Klerkx & Duval, 2007). What is yet needed, is the visualisation of activities and learning landscapes for the learners. This may be realised through visualising the mashed learning landscapes as affordance-based activity systems in which the distributed social tools would convey also the socially defined activity potentials. Certainly, this may not indicate, which of these available activity potentialities were put into action. For understanding this, interaction within specific social tools, and the content of feeds between tools must be analyzed (eg. which regulatory, social or content-creation types of action potentialities were put into action). But that seems even more complicated issue.

The joint learning situations would also pertain the use of asynchronous or synchronous interaction tools when working with artifacts. Some of the tools like Gabbly chat can now be easily integrated with different webpages, social software applications and masup tools. Yet, the develoment of tools, which keep the interrelations between the talked content and the productive actions made at artifact, should enhance learning at distributed landscapes. The future of using distributed social software elements for self-directed and collaborative learning purposes is in mashing selectively the evidence from different activities eg. weblog posts and commentaries with certain tags, artifacts purposfully created and stored in different repositories, wiki-contributions, discourse logs etc. In these places (hubs) where our distributed knowledge meets again, we propagate ourselves as the connectors between the communities. If we mix our distributed self with the knowledge of our community members (like in micro-blogging feeds of Jaiku), these mashed feeds may work as triggers for learning. They enable to access knowledge community-wise and transfer it to other community spaces.

Updated iCamp trial 2 scenarios

web 2.0 landscapes - difficult indeed!

We are running our course of selfdirecting with web 2.0 tools vol. 2
This time we have ‘green’ master students, and our course is their first try at master level.
If last year developing the tool landscapes seemed to be moderately difficult, then this year a strange idea is duplicating itself in the web. Personal landscape means for them - ‘my collection of tools’, and not ‘my landscape of information flow’. So, from 23 students we have received around 15 ‘tool collection’ images. I think that the main paradigm shift in web 2.0 thinking is, is starting to see ‘my collection of separate tools’ as ‘my distributed landscape‘ where i can coordinate information flows. Here is a little paradigm shift on its way, but still at half way. Text is describing mostly of what one can do with this tool, which is affordances for this student for performing some actions.
One example can be seen from here

Bruce Sterling keynote ECTEL 2007

ECTEL 07 keynote by Bruce Sterling, a fiction writer and computer science visioneer

About himself:
25 years in front of the computer
technology enhanced learning
technology enhanced literature

manual typerwriting 2 first books
3rd novel Technology enhanced literature

We don’t have technology enhanced literature, we have literature enhanced technology.

Architecture, engineering, industrial design, manufacturing - all technology enhanced…
Why are we doing it digital? Why don’t we do the real things and instead we do it over web. Are we doing actually better?

They all have same problems about software, necessity to educate people.

What it means that technology enhanced learning reaches full potential - then nothing will be left from previous order.

Nightmare scenario is also the ideal scenario, young people do not draw distinction between previous media forms and current. They live in the flow of liquid micromedia. They do not distinguish forms of media.

“I read first part of your books and then i could not get the concept, but then i went to your Flickr account and looked the graphs and i got it!”

Bruce Sterling of his new and unpublished novel:
It is about technology enhanced learning at 2050ies
Action takes place at the institution at small island,
an attention camp web 5.0 technology enhanced learning environment to do just in time learning,
everyone else in the world is horrified.
Most modern people are middle-aged women, these middle aged city women are offered a different life on the island, id-tags and they play the architecture of participation, recording everything what they see, labelling every plant day by day, weed by weed learning botany,
they use glory as the source of the community identity, the reason to be.
The most basic from women refugee camp life - from bad it becomes the real life, if communalities were found, if social networks emerged.
Social software was developed keeping in mind the gender differences, because men were not so successful and the tools became the tools of power. The camp as a search engine, learning machine.

The informal learning strategies of the society will rule.
Nobody have license, diploma in this future technology enhanced informal learning society.

Information society has no democratic patrol over digital revolution.

What will be left in 20 years of what we are doing now? New techniques, artifacts…

Its a compost a fertile soil what we do now..our roots are strong because they are in compost.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/14/sterling_sxsw/