Hybrid ecosystem of narratives

Many (that i refer below) have already assumed that learning through developing and discussing narratives in social web spaces has become a new innovative form of learning.

We have developed and tested the course Hybrid ecosystem of narratives in Tallinn University as one approach to understand how narratives appear in hybrid (real + virtual + social) Web 2.0 space.

When we started this course we had no answer to the students’ questions about “what is this space that we (me and Anatole-Pierre Fuksas) have named the hybrid ecosystem of narratives. How it emerges, and how it develops through the interplay of various interactions, was to be investigated through the participatory design with these same students.

In the end of 2008 Bryan Alexander and Alan Levine summarized in the whitepaper: Web 2.0 storytelling: emergence of the new genre – web 2.0 storytelling in education serves as composition platform and as curricular object.

First, Web 2.0 storytelling is a useful composition platform whenever storytelling is appropriate. The second possible application for Web 2.0 storytelling in higher education is its use as curricular object.

They encouraged educators as follows: the best approach for educators is simply to give Web 2.0 storytelling a try and see what happens. We invite you to jump down the rabbit hole.

I refer only one interesting aspect what they mention about what web 2.0 storytelling: It is a distributed art form that can range beyond the immediate control of a creator.

So it is clear that the web 2.0 narrative courses are emergent and cannot be precisely planned using some clear design what people should do (because then we will violate the nature of the system itself). The courses must follow certain participatory and design-based approaches to capture what is true.

From the Learncom study “Pedagogical innovations in new ICT-facilitated learning communities” draft report ” Review of lifelong learning” by Kirsti Ala-Mutka (2009) i picked three innovative aspects of online communities:

- ICT­enabled communities are enabling different ways for learning (narratives, discovery, experimentation, observing, reflection),
- social support for learning (peer support, apprenticeship and situated learning, social acknowledgement of learning, social knowledge management),
- new ways to access and organize learning (applying community models for courses, organizations, linking communities to learning and education in new ways).

The report mentions Bruner’s (1996) cultural­phychological approach to education that emphasises narratives as vehicles for meaning making. He suggests that education should help those growing up in a culture find an identity within that culture, in order to be able to make meaning.

Narratives are essential in constructing an identity and finding a place in one’s culture.

Narratives are a powerful way of learning, providing means to situated oneself in the culture and make meaning.

Bruner, J.S. (1996). The culture of education. Harward Univesity Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The report refers to Mayer (2003) who found that conversational narratives combined with animations contributed to a personalization effect, where the students developed significantly more creative solutions than through conventional instruction and explanations. Secondly, Carbonaro et al. (2008) showed that multimedia storytelling allowed students to engage in learning by design.

Mayer, R. (2003). The promise of multimedia learning: using the same instructional design methods across different media. Learning and Instruction, 13, 125- 139.

Carbonaro, M., Cutumisu, M., Duff, H., Gillis, S., Onuczko, C., Siegel, J., Scheffer, J., Schumacher, A., Szafron, D & Waugh, K. (2008). Interactive story authoring: a viable form of creative expression for the classroom. Computers and Education, 15, 687-707.

The study points out that narratives serve as the mediators for externalizing tacit knowledge without writer’s full consciousness.

Recently i found an interesting paper to the same direction, where tacit knowledge was automatically collected from work narratives and used for composing certain more suitable narratives (community suggestions) that could be used in decision-making:

A computational narrative construction method with applications in organizational learning of social service organizations
W.M. Wang, C.F. Cheung, W.B. Lee, S.K. Kwok
Expert Systems with Applications 36 (2009) 8093–8102

Anyway, the boom of various narrative centred learning environments is evident and there is not enough information how people naturally use such environments.

I believe that if there is narrative ecosystem, there must exist something (narratives itself) that the communities will use as a feedback from these ecologies to adjust themselves to their ecosystem parametres.

How narratives function in the ecosystem as the ecosystem feedback and can the community have some analysis means to enhance this feedback within ecosystem?

After analyzing the course data I would say that storytelling has become part of our new way of sensing in hybrid environments.

Storytelling is a new form of hybrid sensing. Web 2.0 storytellers are extending themselves beyond their body borders and using this extended self as the tool. The hybrid stories enable to be more adjusted with the real and virtual hybridized surroundings, extracting dimensions for personal activity and emotions within which they can operate. People are constantly embodying themselves, entangling and detangling themselves to the hybrid systems, while enacting with it.

And at certain moments collaboration appears over the narratives binding persons in the ecosystem, forming certain food-chains, consumerism and other nice ecological phenomena that needs to be brought to light in new systems.

Some ideas are apparent in the dataset that we collected and extracted with the students:

iCamp project results

I have been part of iCamp Europaean 6th Framework project pedagogical workpackage team from 2006. In this project we conducted three trials of teaching with web 2.0 tools in cross-institutional settings.

Our final pedagogical deliverable provides the new model how to support self-directing, collaborating and networking competences with new media environments in institutional settings.

Fiedler, S., Kieslinger, B., Pata, K., & Ehms, K. (2009). Camp Educational Intervention Model. iCamp IST 6th Framework Project Deliverable 1.3. URL: http://www.icamp.eu/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/d13_icamp_final.pdf

Intervention model components in eLearning

Analysis of iCamp project’s three cross-institutional case studies enabled to model the necessary components of an intervention model at institution, facilitator and student levels:

Intervention model: institutional level

Intervention model: facilitator level

Intervention model: learner level

In the application of an intervention model, facilitators and students have a crucial role in changing institutionally accepted practices.

Book chapter in “Handbook of Research on Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies”

Our chapter “Distributed learning environments and social software: in search for a framework of design” by Sebastian Fiedler, (Zentrum für Soziale Innovation, Vienna) and Dr. Kai Pata (Center of Educational Technology, Tallinn University) will appear as a chapter of the “Handbook of Research on Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies” edited by Dr. Stylianos Hatzipanagos and Dr. Steven Warburton, King’s College, UK.

session about activity patterns and affordances when learning in web 2.0

There will be the session “Activity patterns and affordances” during the “e-Uni 08 conference” in Tallinn (03.04.08 17.00–18.30). Conference video: Mis on tegevusmustrid ja lubavused.

1. Tegevusmustrid ja õpimaastikud e-õppes
Kai Pata, Kairit Tammets, Terje Väljataga

1. Activity patterns and learning landscapes in e-learning

Tutvustame tegevusmustrite elemente /tegevuste rühmi/ (nii LMS süsteemidest kui ka sotsiaalsets tarkvarast pärit näited). Kaks vaadet õpitegevusele: õpimaastik ja tegevusmuster. Miks on vaja õppijatele sotsiaalse tarkvara keskkonnas õpetada õpimaastiku koostamist ja seal tegevusmustrite planeerimist, näited kuidas õppijad muudavad oma vaadet õpitegevuse vahenditele, õpimaastikule. Tarkvara lubavused on õppijate jaoks erinevad, näited. Kuidas mõjutab õppijakeskne lubavuste erinevuse arvestamine õpikeskkonna ja õpitegevuse disaini.

The elements of activity patterns (activity types) will be introduced, using examples from LMS systems, as well as, social software. Two views to the learning activities: learning landscape and activity pattern will be discussed. Why learners need conceptual tools to construct their activity pattern and learning landscape diagrams, examples from e-learning courses. What are learning affordances and how they are integrated with the learning landscapes and activity patterns, examples from learner-perceived affordances at social-software based e-learning course. Considering learner-defined affordances calls for new Learning environment and activity design model in e-learning.

2. Töövookeelte kasutamine õppimise ja õpetamise protsesside kirjeldamiseks
Priit Tammets

Using the workflow language to describe learning and teaching processes

Tegevusmustrite kirjeldamiseks on vaja formaliseeritud töövookeelt. Tutvustatakse varasemaid töövookeeli ja nende eesmärke (IMSLD, LAMS jt.). Miks on vaja luua uus pedagoogiline töövookeel ja kuidas seda saab rakendada õpikeskkonna ja õpitegevuste disainis. Töövookeele elemendid ja konkreetsed kasutusnäited sotsiaalse tarkvara keskkonnas.

To describe activity patterns, the formalized workflow language could be used. Some attempts to establish the language elements and standards for describing workflows (IMSLD, LAMS etc.), and the aims of using such languages in e-learning will be discussed. Why new pedagogical workflow language is needed and how could it be used as the tool in the learning environment and learning activity design? What are the elements of pedagogical workflow language, examples of using workflow language for describing learning activities in social software environment.

3. Narrative encoding of Activity Patterns in New Media (ingliskeelne)
Narratiivsete tegevusmustrite kodeerimine uus-meedia keskkonnas
Anatole Fuksas
University of Cassino

Lubavused uus-meedia tekstides võimaldavad lugejal luua enda jaoks teksti lugemisel erinevaid tegevusmustreid. Tutvustatakse mitmeid uusmeedia narratiivseid hübriidses keskkonnas toimuvaid tegevusmustreid, mida algatavad näiteks mikroblogimine kui raamatu kirjutamine, reisiraamatud blogides koos geograafilise kohaga seotud artifaktidega jt. näited.

The reader-specific activation of affordances in new-media texts enables people to trigger different activity patterns. Some narrative-related activity patterns in new-media environments will be discussed (eg. writing books in micro-blogging environment, locatively embedded travel itineraries etc.)

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/

new pageflakes…worse

Last term I tested Pageflakes as my course environment – mostly for monitoring. Part of the activity was to add the rss feeds of my students’ blogs.

Ok..autumn is coming closer and i started preparations for the web 2.0 simple course for vocational trainers.

To my big disappointment i had to literally search how to add rss in Pageflakes about 30 min. It used to be so nice and simple, from front page..and now i need to do at least 3 clicks and know where to look at. It seems Pageflakes intention is to be a ready-made bookshop of feeds rather than promoting ecological information-environment creation.
I was able to complete the task only after i read ‘how to’ from Help.

Maybe i am just too critical.. but in the bug-forum i saw several people complaining the same.
Maybe after i get accommodated with all the new, Pageflakes would give some positive impressions too..but

web2.0 symposium ideas edmedia 2007

Getting beyond centralized technologies in higher education

Centralized learning management systems still characterize the predominant institutional approach to computational support for teaching and studying in higher education. This approach contrasts sharply with the growing dissemination of decentralized, loosely coupled, and networked tools and services that provide increasingly powerful means to augment a wide variety of activities and practices outside of institutional boundaries. Recently, notions of personal learning environments (PLEs) have been brought forward and discussed as a viable alternative to the centralized approach to technological support for teaching and studying that most educational institutions employ. This symposium brings together a diverse group of international researchers to explore the current demarcation lines, potentials, limitations, and possible developmental paths of centralized, institutional approaches to technology support for teaching and learning on one side, and of networked, loosely-coupled tools and services and their surrounding practices on the other side.

Edmedia symposium brainstorming

Sebastian Fiedler – Centre for Social Innovation – Zentrum für Soziale Innovation, Austria
Paper: If youth but know, if age but could: the power of timeworn concepts in technological support for teaching and learning

Robert Fitzgerald – Divisions of Communication and Education & Information
University of Canberra, Australia
Paper: Beyond the LMS: What’s the big idea?

Brian Lamb – Office of Learning Technology
The University of British Columbia, Canada
Paper: How will higher education mash it up?

Bryan Alexander – National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, USA
Paper: VLE and Web 2.0: the era of the Great Divide

Scott Wilson & Johnson, M., Griffiths, D., and Liber, O. – Centre for Educational Technology & Interoperability Standards
The University of Bolton, United Kingdom
Paper: Preparing for disruption: developing institutional capability for decentralized education technologies

Kai Pata & Terje Väljataga – Tallinn University
Paper: Collaborating across national and institutional boundaries in higher education – the decentralized iCamp approach

George Siemens – Learning Technologies Centre University of Manitoba, Canada
Paper: Knowledge Deluge – Sense making and understanding in environments of abundance

The whole event started with short paper-introductions while the participants could write their ideas on the stickers. In the second half brainstorming was quite lively.
Unfortunately Bryan Alexander could not make to Vancouver.

Brian’s comments.

social innovations in school library

Tomorrow we will discuss with Ele Priidik of her future master study.
Initial idea is on my opinion very promising – to develop information using strategies based on social bookmarking that would enhance the use of school library in subject lessons. We were talking previously of two ideas:

Literature-suggestions and browsing: this would be the framework in which the compulsory literature books will be tagged in school library first by the librarian, and then in the following lessons the methodology will be worked out in which people should add more tags on the basis of what was relevant for them in these books (eg. in the book Gone with the wind..some might see the love story, the others history of South etc.) and enhance it also with comments. Then the eventual result would be the school library that suggests through the readers. This should develop the new kind of search skills and +

Research literature and storing: in this case the students would start working with their specific research cases in specific subject, collecting social bookmarks, sorting and reorganizing them accordingly into tag-clouds. This should develop new kind of organizing skills and +
It is not that clear yet what exactly we would do. There might be another interesting approach based on tagging the specific domain-related information-books at the library during making reports.

Ele’s task would be working out the methods and trying them out and evaluating in her school at Paide. For this she needs to investigate other similar approaches with social bookmarks, like Martin Sillaots or Riina Vuorikari propose in their weblogs.

Secondly she would need to develop the framework what are information analysis skills and how social software would bring in the need for different type of skills.
Today i read something interesting about telling that:

The efficiency of social tagging is decreasing.

This claim is based on entropy – a measure of the disorder of a system.

Would it mean that the nice social bubble like del.icio.us will be gone soon because of laws of entropy and there will be the next kind of information sorting/storing/analyzing method needed?

Would it mean that in the organization (eg. school library) the smaller closed systems should be used?

I can also think it might be useful to try out some social-bookmarking service that would be like open social school library project also in other schools.

Some comments about entropy in systems:
Entropy in unisolated systems can increase or decrease.
In an isolated systems entropy cannot never decrease…thus in isolates systems it can only increase.

There is also theory of entropy in information systems.

In information theory, entropy is the measure of the amount of information that is missing before reception. The definition of the information entropy is expressed in terms of a discrete set of probabilities. In the case of transmitted messages, these probabilities were the probabilities that a particular message was actually transmitted, and the entropy of the message system was a measure of how much information was in the message. For the case of equal probabilities (i.e. each message is equally probable), the Shannon entropy (in bits) is just the number of yes/no questions needed to determine the content of the message.

This is of course for Ele to decide and find out.
I can imagine that eventually some kind of hierarchy for evaluating the skills might be suggested besides methods. And..why not to introduce in the school library practice (which are usually quite small) the whole concept of folksonomies?

Then thirdly, Ele has to test out how her methods are applicable, describe them as cases and evaluate the cases on the basis of how they developed students’ information processing skills, and how they were effective as the social methods that enhance information access at school libraries.

We have not decided yet, which system to use for this study. On one hand del.icio.us seems to have many good functions and it is belieavable that people would use it anyway. But there are also shelfari and others…

day 3 of affordance-based course

Previously i wrote about the ideas of the affordance-based learning design course in web 2.0 environments. We collected a number of learning landscapes and activity patterns in these from the learners and tried to figure out where the difficulties in understanding the affordance conception are.

Yesterday we had the last day of the course in which students presented their collaborative web 2.0 learning designs which they tested in groups.

One group developed group aggregator page and intends to keep it throughout their master period.

One group wrote about affordances in google-docs which i thought was quite interesting, because they really perceived how the group members start constraining the affordances of tools which they can use as a group.

Two groups presented learnig environments, where they worked together using google.docs and the different instant messaging and VoiP (Skype, gabbly chat, email, msn). And one group used google.docs for istant messaging.

One group combined information search in aggregator for constructing coursework about web 2.0 in google.docs. They argued that they don’t need any messaging or VoiP to communicate, because they meet every day in realtime.

One group integrated the homework of this course with the homework of project learning course, and developed the schemas using Vyew environment. Interesting was that they commented that the collaboration and shared learning environment design and application part where they tried to work in distributed settings was more challenging and fun for them than the project what they developed together.

We also tested the second prototype of iCamp folio in which we changed Betty Collis activities with the list of affordances. It seemed to work nicely (only one commen came what we mean by artifacts).

However, the problems emerged with the tool when all participanst had added their preferences of affordances thinking about their shared collaborative activity.
We suddenly found out that the people and tools were distributed very differently at each computer-screen. I could not explain them why…

Initially we thought that the toold is very good to demonstrate for the participants whether they had perceived affordances within their collaborative work group similarly.

All in all the course was very positively evaluated. Some students commented later that they learned a lot how to work in self-directed manner and that the course arised a lot of new ideas how to use those environments for learning purposes.

I also feel that we (us with the students) did something quite interesting from the theoretical viewpoint – the dataset what we collected is quite usable to understand the affordance conception in we 2.0 environments. I believe that, after i have had some time for analysis i can come up with more general assumptions.

The course is not all over yet, we expect the last homework about the evaluation of perceived affordances, used affordances and pedagogically sound affordances within learners’ self-directed and collaborativel learning environments to clarify some more aspects about the dynamic nature of affordances, affordance-coherence in groups etc.

All the course designs can be viewed from the course aggregator in which we feed together the participants blogs in which they did homework and reflection.