I blog therefore I/we learn

Jigsaw learning – a way to get collaborative work working!

Emma Nugent — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 11:07:45 +0000

Sarah Honeychurch, University of Glasgow. Based on Aronson’s jigsaw classroom learning design but converted to online learning in Higher Ed. The jigsaw model was made to tackle the problems of how to get desegregated students working together – the answer was to make them depend on one another. The had to depend on other students to provide them with the knowledge they needed to complete the task – students teaching students. In the model Aronson split the class into groups, with each group researching different topics of one overall topic and to prepare a presentation to share with the rest – which made the work even better as they saw more of a purpose in it as it has a clear end user. Students are then “tested” on what they’ve learnt by the fellow students.

In this example at University of Glasgow, students were grouped into 15s, and each 15 split into 3 groups of 5 A, B and C- randomly. Each A, B and C group had their own wiki space on the VLE (Moodle) to build up their research and prepare it to feedback/present to the rest of their group. Each week a tutorial topic was posted in the VLE, with sub topics and questions to the whole cohort.

My question, to the courses I support, is whether the collaborative work we set lends itself to this idea and could we employ it here. I wold say that we probably wouldn’t use a wiki, but let students use their own way to compile the information, such a Google Docs as the more technology you introduce to learn the more they won’t use it. I guess the other thing is we often ask the students to write reports in an online group, so there is the next stage would be making sure the three parts of research lie side by side, rather than one being dependent on the other so perhaps the question would be on the same topic, but in different contexts eg an analysis of the marketing strategy of pepsi in 3 different countries, compare and contrast, etc

This could be used for online induction to build up critical friendship groups and an understanding of how students can learn from each other using CMC.

Critical Friendship Groups in Blended Learning

Emma Nugent — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 10:00:55 +0000

Jane Womald from the University of Huddersfield, The Value of Soft Skills in Blended Learning.

In the transition of a course from face to face to blended learning the presenters wanted to make sure they didn’t lose the social aspects of f2f learning. The students were mature students, part time and working full time in education. Previously the course was a weekly evening course that established groups and critical friendships that developed through weekly contact. The course is typically over 3 years with 18 day schools. The primary principles of this project was to find away to create these create critical friendship groups and communities of inquiry (Vaughn and Garrison 2008) now that they didn’t meet as often. Basing their work on the assumption that mature learners have experience to share to help all of them wiht their self development and problem solving, they adopted the idea of interactive and cooperative peer learning (Bambino, 2002) and that social presence + social interaction = social learning (Tu, 2002).

In the first module each student was involved in a round of introductions (name, job, a positive aspect of their work) as soon as possible so each had a voice, each heard and shown to be willing to share. Then in groups of 3 students considered some principles and prepared to communicate this to others and others were prompted to ask questions about what was being said (eg what does it mean? How does that work? How will you use that in your work?). Between sessions students were encouraged to communicate (however they wished). Later on students had to write an assignment based on a critical incident at work (IE a problem) and people in their CFG gave them feedback on what they did. Plagiarism was not an issue as the essays were about personal incidents but people could learn from each other about different situations and double-loop learning occurred as the student got more advise and feedback about how to handle their problem.

The presenters identified that there is a “lack of evidence of building and supporting informal opportunities for similar spaces for dialogue when developing online learning courses. Much effort is given to the design and structure of courses and the methods of delivery, yet there is an assumption that the social aspects of learning will happen independently.”

Things to read

Bambino, D. (2002) ‘Critical friends’ Educational Leadership. 59 (6) pp.25-27
Garrison, D.R. and Vaughan, N. (2008) Blended learning in higher education: framework, principles and guidelines.San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Reynolds, A. (2009) ‘Why every student needs critical friends’ Educational Leadership. Vol. 67 (3) November 2009. pp.54-57
Rovai, A. & Jordan, H. (2004) ‘Blended Learning and sense of community: a comparative analysis with traditional and fully online graduate courses’. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning 5 (2).
Selwyn, N. (2009). ‘Faceworking: exploring student’s education-related use of ‘Facebook’. Learning Media and Technology.34 (2) June 2009. pp. 157-174.
Tu, C.H. (2002) The measurement of social presence in an online learning environment. International Journal of Educational Communications. 16 (3) pp.34-55.

The teachers’ role changing from “wiki” to “motivator” (in Uruguary) Plan Ceibal

Emma Nugent — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 09:23:12 +0000

The ALT C 2011 - The education and social impacts of Plan Ceibal – a new approach to the use of technology in education, Miguel Brechner – Uruguay

This was the first keynote about a Prime Minster lead government initiative in Uruguay, support the social policies of inclusion and growth, it as a social policy, real equal opportunities – both rich and poor families have the same opportunities and as children had to have their ID papers to get the laptop, all children now have a sense of formal identity as many children didn’t have a birth certicificate , learning and education – not only are the laptops enabling learning and teaching to improve but the security system locks the laptop up if a child does not go to school .

Feedback from teachers, parents and children are that kids are more motivated to go to school and watching less TV.

Miguel described the shift in the role of the teacher as being from wiki to motivator – a very clever line. A teacher who is a wiki just holds information and passes it on (the learning as acquisition metaphor (Sfard)) and a teacher who has children with this technology is now responsible for motivating children to learn by themselves.

What learnt from Miguel is that, as always of course, pedagogy should lead and the objectives of improving the social economies chances of being internationally competitive are improved through the affordances that the laptop gives the children to learn, enjoy learning and learn from each other. Whatever you do needs to make the teachers’ lives easier. ” The reminder me that we must make our choices about technology in learning to solve a problem or improve a service, not just for their sake.

Looking forward, he said that the universities in Uruguay are not at all ready for this generation, currently the laptops are with children up to age 13/14, in a few years we’ll see the impact on how many children go to university but also how universities will react to their perceptions of learning (the learning as participation metaphor). It it’s not about learning with technology, technology is normal thing now, it’s about how technology has changed the way people want to learn.

Steve Wheeler summed this up well in his blog “Miguel Brechner demonstrated how giving a free laptop to each child has liberated them to learn in their own way and in their own time.”

Instant Messaging – not yet!

Emma Nugent — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 11:14:19 +0000

I’ve just completed my report on the use of IM for enhancing the support for distance learners on the programmes I work on. II have suggested in the report that we do it on a trial basis for peer support and admin support and for academic support but I think we need to be cautious in integrating another way to communicate when the other ways aren’t working effectively yet. I think the motivation for using it is technologically driven, not pedagogically driven.

I was asked to do this report because the supplier of our virtual classroom also has an Enterprise Instant Messaging tool. I had to scope out how we could use it and I feel that instead of throwing another computer mediated communication technology at the students we need first to find a better way to entice them into the VLE, to discuss things with each, to want to share their learning experience.

As it stands, just under 20% of the cohort get involved in asynchronous discussion and about the same, or less, in synchronous online seminars. If people felt the desire through the design of effective e-tivities to come and engage with each other than I can see the purpose of more ways to communicate.

I do, however, very much agree the benefits of using a communication medium which heightens your sense of social presence. The benefits of a sense of increased social presence are hard to put into words but when I did my OU course, when it used FirstClass for communications, I enjoyed seeing who else was there but I didn’t always chat with them. It was nice to know someone else was working at the same time as you. When the next module decided to use Moodle for communication we lost the IM service, this was disappointing. In my report I use the analogy of walking into the library on a Sunday morning and seeing someone else there from your class working on the same assignment. You might not interact but it’s nice to know you are not the only one doing it at that time.

So I am suggesting that we proceed with caution, we trial it with small groups first to really be able to gauge the impact on both staff and students but we should not forget to focus on the bigger picture of getting students engaging in the first place.

IM – Instant Messaging or Interruption Management

Emma Nugent — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 14:03:38 +0000

I’m writing a report for work and potentially for submission for publication on the potential for using IM on the course I work on higher education, particularly for mature part-time and distance learners. There are several ways we can use it and I need to present the arguments for each and obviously some recommendations for adoption.

One potential use that I’ve started with is for customer services, for students to be able to communicate with support staff, and for faculty and e-tutors. I know, from what I hear people saying, that they fear that IM will cause too many interruptions.

I’ve come across this article in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication (who would know there was a journal called this!)

Garrett, R. K. and Danziger, J. N. (2007), IM = Interruption Management? Instant Messaging and Disruption in the Workplace. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13: 23–42. doi: 10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00384.x

This paper shows the results of a survey of adults in the USA on their use and perceptions of IM. They argue that managed correctly IM can reduce interruptions.

The view of many people is that IM will increase the amount of communications they have to deal with but should we be stopping people from communicating with us. If they need to communicate with the, lets say, suppliers of their education, they should be allowed to. Isn’t that what we are there for, especially the programme admin teams. I appreciate that for academics they have to allocate time carefully for teaching and research so this complaint is a little more solid but from admin or customer support staff I don’t think you can use that as I excuse. What I need to do, though, is find proof of how IM will not just provide “yet another” communication tool but improve the service to students and reduce their workload in other ways. It is likely that IM would be used as a substitute to email, just in the way that email has become a substitute for the telephone.

When IM is used badly the chances of its disruptiveness is heightened, things such as users forgetting to change their availability status leaving themselves available for uncontrolled interruptions, or holding more than one IM conversation at a time reducing the individual’s focus on each task.

However not all forms of interruption are disruptive and in a customer service environment, isn’t that what the staff are there for? Interruptions which pertain to what you are currently working on or providing critically information are also valuable.

IM systems can help you to control interruptions.

What do you think? Have you got IM in your HE course – what were the barriers to introducing it, what solutions did you find? How is it working now?

Blended Learning Perceptions in Business Education

Emma Nugent — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 14:19:49 +0000

Vladlena Benson, Deborah Anderson & Ann Ooms (2011): Educators’ perceptions, attitudes and practices: blended learning in business and management education, Research in Learning Technology, 19:2, 143-154 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21567069.2011.586676

In this article the researchers wanted to explore the perceptions and attitudes of academic staff towards blended learning. the study took place at Kingston University, one of the post 92 universities.

They defined BL as the integration of online and f2f class activities where there should be a significant amount of online learning activities which requires a rethinking of the whole pedagogy for the course not just bolt-ons.

Q1 was What are academic staff perceptions of BL?

They found an encouraging number of responses were in favour of offering a range of learning resources but a misunderstanding that blended learning meant different teaching methods not the integration of technology.

Q2 was What are academic staff attitudes to BL?

Many people appreciated the benefits of BL, that it makes things more engaging, covers more learning styles but that however good the technology, it’s no good if the teaching is poor. There is a negative perception that it takes a long time to prepare online learning activities and academics need to see obvious benefits to use it.

Q3 What are the academic staff current practices of BL?

The levels of experience varied greatly and f2f teaching still, mostly, seen as the most effective way to teach.

Adoption of BL was found to be influenced by the positive impacts on T&L in terms of differentiation, quality, efficiency and performance; the availability of resources and support; proven resources with a significant amount of use to support this evidence and familiarity of the technology for learners/teachers.

They identified 3 types of attitudes towards BL

1. Technology is all – driven by their enthusiasm for trying out new technologies in their teaching. A small group of people fitted in here.

2. Bolt ons – the largest group of individual who see technology as a bolt on to improve T&L but there is a reluctance to spend time thinking about or finding out about the tools. These people are pedagogically driven and do not see technology as a substitute for teaching.

3. Purely pedagogical – a small group of people who make decisions about use of technology through purely pedagogical means.

Comment:

My role is to support the academics who are reluctant to embrace technology in their blended learning approaches. This is very difficult as they do have the concerns and time constraints found in this report. I am pedagogically driven, I’m not an academic but do rein in my colleagues sometimes when they get excited about the latest technology and I see how it is important to want to know that the use of technology in T&L should be proven and we should have experience in them in order to persuade others. However the challenge is getting faculty to listen to us non-academics but experts in the field.

I would like to know more about the latter two types, how they differ and how do I identify who the people in type 3 are!

elearning blog highlights

Emma Nugent — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 11:57:08 +0000

Here’s some key points form my not really weekly catch up with some key elearning bloggers blogs today it’s mostly Steve Wheeler!

Steve Wheeler, Product or Process? 17 Feb 2011.

Strangely I can’t link to this, the blog post appeared in Google reader but isn’t showing within Steve’s blog.

I’ve included this quote as I’ve been talking about this for a while now with colleagues, we are so stuck in a mindset of thinking about assessment that we forget about the learning process.

If we are only interested in production of knowledge, then we will apply summative forms of assessment – exams and essays designed to test what students have remembered. If on the other hand we are more interested in the process of learning, we will design assessment methods that feed forward as well as back, showing students what they have done well and what they need to improve upon in their next pieces of work. Standardised testing does not prepare learners for the real world, nor does it provide teachers with anything more than a snapshot of where the student is at that point in time. On the other hand, process based assessment represents a long term plan, which supports learning over a period of time, a lot more effective than simply taking superficial and ultimately, meaningless measurements.

Steve Wheeler, Everyone has one, 12 Jul 2011

Included this as it’s a useful definition of PLEs

Personal learning environments or PLEs, are the collection of tools (not just online) that enable us to connect, create and share content with our own communities of interest and practice.

Steve Wheeler, Digital Age Learning 8 July 2011

An interesting term I’ve never heard before which seems to describe our study groups model so I need to follow up on this.

Paragogy is an extension of the concept of scaffolding (proposed by Jerome Bruner), where knowledgeable others (teachers or peers) can create optimal learning environments in which students can learn more than they would if they were studying on their own. Paragogy takes scaffolding farther though, because peers are in an equal relationship

Steve Wheeler, Seven reasons teachers should blog, 5 July 2011

A useful description of how writing helps you learn

In the act of writing, said Daniel Chandler, we are written. As we write, we invest a part of ourselves into the medium. The provisionality of the medium makes blogging conducive to drafting and redrafting. The act of composing and recomposing ideas can enable abstract thoughts to become more concrete. Your ideas are now on the screen in front of you; they can be stored, retrieved and reconstructed as your ideas become clearer. You don’t have to publish if you want to keep those thoughts private. Save them and come back to them later. The blog can act as a kind of mirror to show you what you are thinking. Sometimes we don’t really know what we are thinking until we actually write it down in a physical format.

Weaving

Emma Nugent — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 19:36:12 +0000

Weaving is an e-tutors technique for helping to build an online community. Weaving can be used to highlight common interests, suggest connections between students and encourage students to start socialising with each other and developing an online community.

A definition of weaving is: To use quotes from a number of different messages during an online discussion and weave them together in a message.

An example of what you could focus on when weaving a set of introductions is who are the experts, who can help the others, what experience can we draw upon.

The weaver’s aim is to connect individuals who can collaborate or assist one another in some way. The weaver aims to build relationships and to learn how to facilitate collaborations for mutual benefit.

As an assignment we have been given a set of 10 introductions from students in a generic online course and to weave them into a 250 word message. From what I have read about weaving I want to point out similiarites but also show how the community will benefit from the differences. For example 1 student is very scared of online learning, others are experienced in it. Rather than highlight these as differences I would like to highlight the opportunity for these people to help each other.

I can see how weaving could be really hard though for a tutor to do, and to do regularly if the forum is very busy. To be honest I don’t think I’ve ever seen an online tutor employing this technique and I’ve been tutored by some effective tutors in my time.

I’ve tried searching for more information other than the Gilly Salmon book this stems from and the 5-stages of emoderation but infact there is little out there. The best information I found was in a document reporting on building business networks by weaving the community together. I need to do some more thinking about this and then once the students start participating, advising my tutors on how to do it. Giving them examples. I will probably share this assignment with them too so they can see my attempt – but only after I’ve had my feedback! Here is a list of some of the things weaving should aim to do:

Synthesising
Drawing threads together
Watching for and correcting conversational drift
Identifying good ideas
Pulling ideas together
Opening up new avenues for development in the groups
Making links between students and ideas
Identifying holes in the arguments and discussions
Separating opinions from facts
Challenging
Encourage further exploration
Creating and summarising new learning
Directing the thinking, building patterns

Effective online tutoring – week 3

Emma Nugent — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 19:52:31 +0000

Communicating with Students

This week was about communicating with students. It highlighted the fact that most of the communication with students online will be by text and will lack the visual clues of f2f communcation and instant feedback from the “listener” and you would need good written communication skills.

The course tells us that students tend to reflect the kind of communication they get from their tutor, they look to the tutor for guidance on protocol. My experience of 3 online tutors as a student certainly agrees with this.

Icebreakers

In the discussions forums we then shared some icebreaker ideas. Kate Chilley made a good observation on what makes a good icebreaker:

It was relevant to most people in the room irrespective of cultural, geographical and economic backgrounds.
Answers given were reasonably brief, so the activity did not take too long.
However, answers were evocative and created energetic discussion and points of commonality and interest
It was light-hearted, and unrelated to the course syllabus so most participants could share an immediate contribution.
It was a subject that the facilitator clearly felt comfortable with too, and he provided the first answer to model the type and length of reponse he was looking for.

Student retention

Some reading for later if I ever get round to it

Tyler-Smith, K., 2006 ‘Early Attrition among First Time eLearners: A Review of Factors that Contribute to Drop-out, Withdrawal and Non-completion Rates of Adult Learners undertaking eLearning Programmes’, Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, vol. 2, no. 2, June (available online at: http://jolt.merlot.org/Vol2_No2_TylerSmith.htm).

Feedback

As an online tutor we can expect to give 4 types of feedback: individual, general (whole group), formative assignments, summative assignments.

Feedback should be timely, enable students to improve their performance and meet their learning goals. Postitive feedback to maintain motivation and to help them to understgand what they need to improve.

“The feedback you provide needs to:

acknowledge and value achievement
explain pass/fail (and any evaluative descriptors used) or the grade
offer constructive advice
highlight areas for improvement
encourage further development

When providing scripted comments on essays or other written work you should:

correct mistakes and misunderstandings
query use or lack of evidence
provide alternative interpretation or proof
identify irrelevance and structural weaknesses
refer student to additional information etc.
acknowledge achievement
establish dialogue with student”

Quotes all taken from the Oxford University, Effective Online Tutoring Course. 2011

Disadvantages of Online learning

Emma Nugent — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 18:54:23 +0000

When the course website is down and you have a few hours to fit in some studying and your downloaded copies of the website are at work!

Anyone following my blog on the same course as me, the twitter feed says that the whole of the Oxford site is down and might not be back on til Tuesday morning – see http://twitter.com/#!/contedit

I also hear there was a power cut in Oxford Town Centre (again via Twitter) so that might not be helping matters.