DFLP08 Week 8 networked education on the net

Yes I believe open and networked e-learning undermines formal education because I have more questions than answers about open and networked learning.

Steve Downes provides answers with three main principles; interactivity, relevance, useability as the nitty gritty of online networking. In this presentation he highlights how these impact our use of social networking software.

The first aspect of a personal network is interactivity. Pushing or pulling; Steve Downes advocates to pull your audiences is a more favourable approach and others will be more receptive than to someone pushing their point. People (he explains patiently) participate in a personal learning network as individuals - to do so they need to communicate the ways they learn, delineate what is relevant and appropriate, and be willing to document their own activities, offering sequential accounts regularly, either in email groups, in weblogs, bebo, myspace or facebook to name just a few. He recommends that the best way to pull the reader, communicating in an authentic voice, which makes others more receptive. The building of a social identity, given the dynamics of an online network requires giving and taking and ongoing maintenance, it is delivered by a narrator with a context, – who often includes personal details, specific experience involving personal or educational gains. A networked collaboration is an explicit objective and the desired outcome of interaction.

These new electronic  pathways bring benefits like feeling connected and becoming more readily informed can be very rewarding. They bring us into direct contact with many more teachers and other people from other professions with a passion to communicate their vision, to debate, to teach and to collaborate. To me Steve Downes demonstrates the effectiveness of online networking. His dynamic commitment to leadership is inspiring and I can see how his influence would reach communities and organisations.

For Mark Prensky there is no debate: today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach. Requiring in addition, that students are to be more critically reflective in their self assessments and of their formal learning imposes more demands on digital natives time. Which should challenge teachers as digital immigrants to carefully consider informal network learning is where less output from them can mean more input from the learner. Wikieducator is a dynamic open entry that as a collaborative educational platform for publishing open learning resources, is just one innovative network that invites student to have an input.

The internet can readily blend a deep learning in a variety of ways. The following equivalency theorem of Anderson (2003, p.5) posits that:

deep and meaningful formal learning is supported as long as one of the three forms of interaction (student–teacher; student-student; student-content) is at a high level, although more than one of these three modes will likely provide a more satisfying educational experience.

Formal learning demands a personal response and yet there are many instances learning is internalised and will never communicate, somethings are illogicall, unknowable i.e. we can all attest to the shelf life of paradigms and the fallibility of the scientific model. Knowing has always been a collaborative process, not as settled, sure, and certifiable by authorities as we were once led to believe. Formal education just happens to be one way to learn. Where we an grow individuals it is in combination of ways.

Its supporting all three of the deep and meaningful interactive educational modes. Formal learning historically has often been regarded as objective. With the advent of what Peters (2004) describes as ‘network-based distance education’ formal teaching provides access to digital media and the Internet, allows alternative forms of engaging in learning interactively. Navigating the web covers a raft of responses to online material: searching, evaluating, storing managing, and copying material across an online public forums provided by the digital delivery software (closed and open learning).

Network learning is done by both defining boundaries and crossing them. Forming and revisiting connections, relationships, dialogues and collaborations with others, some of whom are defenders of their disciplines and their familiar organising tools.

The network asks for another learning theory, one being advanced by George Siemens claiming that it is consistent with the needs of the digital age is connectivism. Connectivism is a learning theory for the digital age redefining learning so that it is reflective of social environments in which formal learning no longer comprisies the majority of learning across web 2.0, though communities of practice personal networks ane through completion of work-related tasks. Knowing -what is supplemented with knowing how to find and evaluate, in order share our expereince with each other.

Networked education promises to augment and already proves to enhance learning outcomes that will increase access to other formal education opportunities. There are important additional characteristics to critique an environmental aspects of learning. Note: there are self paced, self assessed and when theory doesn’t always give rise to practice, there are open-ended interactive forums to sound things out, get support, advice. The student, can bring a “seeing with new eyes” that serves to refresh the subjective, revise the objective and re-invigorate the collaborative pursuit of knowledge and its applications.

I have more questions than answers about open and networked learning and I believe none of us have ever been the people our education system was designed to teach.

How do I leave out the evaluation, the critic and the editor out of the authentic voice? There are publishing authors who claim that an authentic narrator should not confuse the creative muse (our first thoughts) and our editor. This is not easy as I can attest from countless attempts only to find, it is those first thoughts that inspire a censoring editor. If the objective is to evaluate and discuss academic articles, is it realsitic to have an authentic voice. Not always.

I try to imagine the addition online didactic learning networks for teachers must be like. So many have already involved email networks with members corresponding about topical subjects can involve long threads that are time consuming to follow and other social contracts like it or not need to be taken seriously like students, colleages, managers, friends, family and tall dark strangers.

In reflection one of the many challenges to optimise formal learning is to bring a focus as wide as possible when writing and also focus widely in the effort to prioritise when the online network impinges the offline networks and the day to day demands to attend to. I find this is a very tricky balancing act. Somethings got to give.

 

DFLP08 flexible learning – who really wants it ?

An innovative proposition on collaborative teaching design with so much potential. Whats happened to flexible learning design re-volution and these authors, their peers and those implementations of flexible learning design … ? in the intervening years

What we now know that they couldn’t know back then -The failure of e-learning to deliver equal access and learner centered designs. – who wants what ? …. (Collis and Moonen, 2001, p 10)

Why should we now use a learner centred design is a central question in article on application in Journal of knowledge and E-learning and Knowledge Society . These other authors , (Maria Pertonilla Penna et al 2007) are arguing the design of an e-learning interface, while it is one solution to spatial and temporal constraints, falls short of enabling more students to learn more effectively than in traditional environments. Learner centred design requires adapting the design to suit the individual learner.

This can be exhaustive, as you can imagine, and include both the environment around the work station and the day to day pressures personal preferences, learner styles and self and peer motivation to engage in the interface of online learning. Learner profile can include educational background; academic/ conceptual/cognitive/ profile, our experience base, attitudes both toward application of both the technology and attitudes to content, our expectations, our thinking and cultural socioeconomic stereotypes. That is even before determining literacy, numeracy needs, digital information literacy, technical skills and and last but not least our cultural influences. Such things, interrogated as learner centred design, provides evidence that the design promotes accurate assessment and the student outcomes are fair! Social justice issues are explicit throughout this list: people of all ages and ethnicities with literacy, numeracy needs are failing to step up to the digital information literacy plate to access educational opportunities.

Taking learner profiles to heart is a big ask. Logisitically speaking how realistic is the task to adapt learner centred profiles to course content and blended delivery … seems this could account for just how slow tertiary teachers seem to be to implement learner centred designs.

Today application of network learning across the www needs revisit the basic literacy and numeracy issues via educational planning, their software, hardware interface, web digital publication, syndicated reading services, social networks, multimdedia course design, open course delivery platforms net and the amassing of (open and electronic) access to survey evidence of the application online-learning.

For teaching professionals it could be beneficial to collaborate with the programme designers and to trial information technology design critically evaluating integration of literacy and numeracy needs. Professionally it could be disingenuous not to measure outcomes for students with literacy and numeracy needs; where we are not interrogating these mechanisms of social engineering across the internet we’re maintaining that the right to education is only for some.

What do we now know that they couldn’t know back then –so that’s it… the benefits of hindsight is really where learning begins (and ends). Every day can begin with evaluation, reflection and collaboration.

 

DFLP08 Week 6 in the virtual classroom

Every attempt I have made to compose a comment to leave on a weblog has expanded my consciousness and mushroomed into something bigger than I could have anticipated. Although there will always be the tension involved in divvying up ones course work time been individual interests and collective interests, peer to peer networks are one great resource. I would claim I am one of those …”students who are helping to build a professional network”, however many of my comments to DFLP blogs and others for that matter beyond never arrived. This, due to the course workload digital literacy technical issues, were either lost enroute wordverificationnavigationloopsusernamepasswordID, social fears of demonstrating my lack of mastery of these tools not to mention unfamiliarity with the course content and the particular subject at hand. …. I would be the first to admit it; there are such tangible benefits from commenting (insight derived from the becoming a collective member collaborating in a consciousness raising exercise) and the valuable questions that arrise some of which I should simply just answer in my head, and others which I will continue to interrogate, investigate and will inform my blogs about my teaching design. Considering that when I go through the motions of writing, don’t post it immediately and then and don’t come back to it, I am either giving in to my fears- or procrastination. Or trying to make more than one (?) comment …

Granted that any interactive features of the course design bring a bunch of unknowns such as commenting on course blogs has proved, can you then have prescriptive teaching gulidelines that assess a range of quality learning experiences and so include collaboration? My concern is where to be flexible and where not to be considering the amount that is unknown (include RPL in there) during the planning stages of a flexible e-learning course. Revisiting Athena’s post about reconnecting with consciousness and  with a reference to a short quote from the (Ellis, Applebee,2006) scrolls

“It (blended teaching) means getting them to do some sort of valuable learning activities without me being there in the room with them.”

Take the digital literacy across a social network environment required for participating in a DFLP blended course design. despited being valuable learning activities, can account for different levels of participation. The digital skills required to interact with peers and facilitators, keep up to date with prescriptive assignment guidelines, publish weekly in blogs and collaborate via comments, when these are also the documentaion for assessment schedules, does suggest a teachers’ still in the room with us!

 

Week 5 DFLP08 – Blended Design & Learning

For me this weeks assignment brought home to me the importance of evaluating the proportionate weighting of content delivery and student interactivity in flexible learning design. This type of analysis is appropriate to a blended teaching design in which technical media is embed in the content delivery, interactivity and assessment mechanisms.

Although limited by its size, a qualitative study into blended learning (Ellis, Steed, Applebee, 2006) analyses and discusses two distinct teacher conceptions framing their blended teaching designs and students learning outcomes

“… conceptions of blended learning focusing on critical investigation of the environment that students find themselves in, and those that see technological media as one way of helping students to achieve the intended learning outcomes of course design, tend to be associated with helping students to develop new ideas and understanding. In contrast, conceptions of blended learning that emphasize technological media at the expense of student learning, tend to be associated with using media to deliver information or to even replace some responsibilities of being a teacher. Significantly, the former categories of blended learning and teaching are associated with approaches to design that influence the way teachers teach, and the latter categories of blended learning and teaching are associated with approaches to design which are not related to approaches to teaching.” (Ellis, Steed, and Applebee, 2006)

Applying their analysis to the DFLP course design raises some issues for course designs which emphasize digital information literacy- an implication being the weblog interactive interface assumes the student has the scaffolding of access, interpretation and creation.

How do the facilitators think they teach through the emphasis on technological media in their design?

Do we think we interact and are supported sufficiently through their blended technological media design?

Are participants encouraged to conduct their own critical examination of the environmental design?

Yes, DFLP does seem to favour the weighting of online delivery and assessment – but is this at the expense of hands on teaching and learning of the content?

So far so good, although there have been instances when interactivity is measured as technical digital media publication – weblogs. But is blogging a substitute for the value of debate, feedback in a classroom or 1-1 discussion.

This may be also be a question of learning styles. For me assimilating, processing academic content and communicating thoughts is a proirity as “the social physical and artifactual surrounding in which human cognition and human endeavor takes place.” (Fischer 2006) can be frustrated by having to multi-task – critically examing learning materials and navigating the digital technical media interface.

The digital information literacy is in its own right a discrete and challenging arena as much as it is interwoven into the interactive social networking, collaborative and assessment of flexible learning design.

My own experience of the pace of weekly course readings, postings and eluminate meetings can be at the expense of learning.

I am resolved to explore the flexibility of the DFLP assessment schedule, find out a bit more about my particular learning styles and hopefully learn to modify my objectives so my writing process becomes more manageable.

Ellis, R. A., Steed, A. F. and Applebee, A. C. (2006). Teacher conceptions of blended learning, blended teaching and associations with approaches to design. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 22(3), 312-335.

Fischer, 2006

 

Otago Polytechnic and the history of flexible learning

the -past

the – present

I don’t know much detail about the history of Otago Polytechnic organisational support before 2007. This is what I understand has happened with flexible learning recently. Therre has been a web baased e-learning intiative at Otago Polytechnic from 2007. Leigh Blackall when he advertised and hosted one week per month of informal lunchtime seminars on for flexible delivery elearning – and could see this as a chance to shape history – document professional practice across Web2.0 through staff weblogs. Every month one week of lunchtimes was dedicated to , e-groups, Blogs, Wikis, Web Feeds, audio podcasting, Open source software, digital copyright/referencing, tagging, recording and editing digital video, Vlogging, Networked Learning and general discussion, … with only a core group of staff taking the opportunity to learn blogging, and Network Learning, open source resources including learning and technical support. Some of these staff were distance teaching some were staff program developers from Travel and tourism massage therapy, and others were staff enroled in Design for Flexible Learning at Otago Polytechnic. All were at this the time key players supporting each other with resources via network learning groups and blog posts.

the – future ?

tomorrow will be shaped by the hands of today – the progress of collaboration between groups of teachers and students, staff training in open source course development, free education initiatives and training. There is always cautionary tale to be told. Any organisation has to set in place the right expectations of their staff development and training, networking, designing and teaching flexible innovations to learning.- staff are supposed to use what they’re being taught. No matter how enthusiastic encouraging you might be these performance objectives have to the same as staff trainers objectives. The reality in an organisation the size of OP practitioners responses will vary wildly- ranging from individuals defensive and over protective of their patch, to over committed, teachers under acknowledged by their peers and their organisation in general, to collaborative networks between teachers and students inside and across different organisations. The bottom line is that when staff performance is rewarded that in the longer term has more positive outcomes and brings benefits to new generation teachers- and learners

and what is the logical conclusion – mm I wonder

Was it ever simple. … Before flexible design open access to education can bridge the digital divide, it at least have to begin to be effective and if staff are not rewarded for structually implementing their digital/technical skills, then it’s unlikely that they will actually continue to build on the skills and continue to explore any applications of these in their practice. Digital literacy training is part of the package of implementation and is ongoing and is already transforming our conventional student and staff teaching and learning roles.

 

Flexible learning is for life is a …. beach on a rainy day

What is distributed learning? -its practical and coherent objectives for implementing variety into learning activities and materials and technologies

-involves individual and collaborative learning provision of academic theory alongwith practical although this can vary from topic to topic.

but is it flexible?

what would make a learning design plan flexible.

For now a scenario could be teaching an music on-line music theory, collaboration and composition.

My first strategy could be to design some content for a range of distributed audio delivery ( streaming downloading and posting DVD/CD) based on some projections and determined by the location of participants, their access to computers and the differences in dial up and broadband access. i.e.

a) low-end platforms eg. television, telephone, radio, low fi audio players and offline computers.

b) a computer-network platform with access to an internet/ intranet.

c) high-end broadband width platforms: live interviews concerts presentations video streaming, podcasting, realtime collaboration.

Some of these considerations along with the level of instruction, musical genres, instumentation and background/ previous experience, skill and training in music composition and software technologies, I will fine tune once I know who wants to participate. Now doesn’t this present a chicken and egg question; which comes first the course or the participants.

Who is it that really wants it ! the employers, their designers and facilitators or the participants.

in the course reading (Collis and Moonen 2001) “the key idea of flexibility is learner choice in different aspects of the learning experience.” So a component of my practice of Flexible design for music learning could be an incremental continuous movement over reviewing and reshaping the content etc. away from key decisions by the instructor and institution about a range learning dimensions (which were made in advance in order to design a course) towards student choice and student contribution to specify content to course providers.

 

Sorry folks -different strokes for different browsers !

I know I shouldn’t complicate life and use two browsers (unless I have to) – and sure it takes time practising but isn’t it better than stumbling on in the dark trying the wrong thing over and over- the more I systematically repeat the steps the more likely I an to recall them particularly when I am busy. Practise is a big advantage.

I have been using Firefox and find there are small differences between this and our  default Polytechnic Internet Explorer browser. This did confuse me when it came to embeding and referencing (copyright) images with hyperlinks.

To post and reference an image in a blog it is necessary to embed (upload) it. When it come to referencing the author and an image source this is done either by hyperlinking the image as an object with the URL address or by publishing (hyperlinking or copying) the url of an image in your post.

with Internet Explorer the URL can be found by right clicking on the image and selecting the properties and Select All & Copy this address then paste this in the image link window back in wordpress insert/edit image window.

Firefox has removed this step. So instead, a right click on the image on the flickr creative commons page and select copy image location then paste this in the image link window back into wordpress. Even though this is easier I kept forgetting the crucial step.

Then next step to hyperlink a page is the same in both internet browsers. Copy the url of a flickr image page and paste this in the hyperlink window along with the title that pops up as text below the cursor.

 

The incomprehensibleness of lifelong learning

- learning like living is becoming academic.. categorising analysing in order to comprehend and theorise about the world we live in, seems as if life is learned about as much as it is lived …

and if our forebears could they would’ve shown disbelief and made light of these buzzwords and the academic theory of learning for life!
Then neither did they know about a personal computer …. and a digital revolution

 

Researching and shopping for audio recorder

So to recap I have over the previous posts been searching for some audio recording equipment for recording editing embeding and archiving multimedia presentation, publication and podcasting, and that is suitable and basically for EDC staff to use.

I haven’t been shopping yet but found an Olympus audio recorder that has most of the facility to deliver and stream 16 bit 44.1 khz Mp3 podcasts of lectures, meetings, slidecasts, audiovisuals, music etc . The hardware uses flash drives SD cards. The two minus’s are the price and the proprietry WMA (windowsmediaudio) format of the audio recorder.

Roland has an audio recorder – Edirol Wave and MP3 digital recorder R-09 which records up to broadcast quality (32.0 bit) with on board stereo mic, a mic in /line in and ac power supply. This would be a very good machine for field recordings, music for original sound tracks for av and promotional materials. However, it is not as affordable, depending on the bit rates wave files can be up to 10 times larger to process, embed and podcast. . .

For just voice, interview, lecture, conference and meeting recordings, a 16 bit 44,100 htz audio MP3 recorder with a line in (gives the option of powered extention wire/wireless microphone. Although these wee machines have fiddly functions and mini screens you can format MP3 to WAV files required for audio/visual editing.

In the last year IRiver have deleted a model which for our purposes was an ideal portable MP3 recorder.. now there is an cowan iaudio u3 model…

As an aside, I wonder about the ways product development is being shaped by the emerging hardware and softwares (which are converging) and how much it is driven by consummer demand for multimedia devices being portable.

 

I prefer to try before I buy

whats what?

I have decided against the mp3 recorder option for the following reasons. Instead of recording with an wave or MP3 format, the audio is encoded to Windows media audio WMA. This has its limitations, obviously I have to own and have installed the software to upload the encoded audio files to my computer and in addition

• to convert the data file into wave format for editing with proprietry software
• export this into MP3 before embedding or streaming audio via the wiki.