how online visits can support knowledge construction

On the first topic of the open networked learning ONL201 course we are ask to think about our engagements online. Nowadays, almost everyone uses online services, e.g. look up information or buy products. Thereby we use online services differently, depending on our intention, motivation and context. The “Visitors and Residents” model developed by White and Cornu (2011) seeks to point out the personal use of the internet in a context-related way. The model works with the metaphor “space” and “tool”, according to which online services are used as a digital tool (visitor mode) or as a virtual place (resident mode).

mage: Finestre by Paolo Campioni under license CC BY-SA 2.0

In terms of education my understanding of the model is influenced by a special linguistic feature of the german language. From the learners perspective the verb visit is used to express attendance or participation, it is common to say “visit a lesson” or “visit an evening course”. This visitor mode also mainly applies to how I encounter online learning in this course. As mentioned in my previous post the online course takes place at different digital places, thus making it difficult to find a residence.

A central element are the online meetings of my PBL group, where we exchange ideas and experiences on the topic, discuss how to approach the problem and how we want to create the final product. Online meetings can be seen as real-time visits. As such, they are transient, they exist for a short time, in which I can share and take with me what I think is relevant for my learning or the group work, but afterwards this digital place is inexistent. Capturing the online meeting (provided that all participants agree) would be way to overcome the transience of such a live event. The recording allows to certain extent to revisit the content or discussion and possibly get new insights or connecting points.

Other places I visit regularly are GoogleDoc, Padlet and other participants blogs to find or to post information. Unlike the online meetings, contributions posted on those places are permanent, they reside here. As David and Cornu states, when we log off or go offline our postings are still available (2011). This is also true for my personal blog. The benefit of those digital places, which can be seen as a knowledge network, is, that I can visit them without any advance notice and in a non-linear manner (Ike/Meder 2010), just when I need information or I feel I am ready to share my contribution.

Both, meeting online on the same time as well visiting sources of information can help exchange thoughts with others and clarify questions, however in order to process knowledge, further steps of elaboration and discussion are needed, as well time to think about, which mostly happens offline (David/Cornu 2011).

From my point of view, the visitor mode conceptualization corresponds to the constructivist view of learning, according to which everyone constructs their own knowledge (Arnold/Nolda/Nuissl 2010). My personal notes and thoughts that I take with me from the various “visits” of the digital places supports these knowledge construction process.

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Recources

Arnold, R./Nolda, S./Nuissl, E. (2010): Wörterbuch Erwachsenenbildung. 1. Aufl. Stuttgart: UTB GmbH.

Iske, S./Meder, N. (2010): Lernprozesse als Performanz von Bildung in den Neuen Medien. In: Hugger, K.-U./Walber, M. (Hrsg.): Digitale Lernwelten: Konzepte, Beispiele und Perspektiven. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, S. 21–37.

Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement
by David S. White and Alison Le Cornu.
First Monday, Volume 16, Number 9 – 5 September 2011
http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3171/3049

time and place matter in online networked learning

I participate in the open networked learning ONL201 course as an open learner. In this post I share my thoughts about the starting weeks.

One of the most common benefits told about online learning is, that learning is independent of place and time. However, what do we mean when we talk about online learning? And what about networked learning and learning in small groups? If you want to bring topics and people together, time and place matter. Let me go trough these two elements, that have guided my first two weeks.

Image: Wendeltreppe by Alexander Johmann under license CC-BY-SA

places

The first week ‘getting started’ was about exploring the “learning places”. The online course takes place at different digital places. The main entry point is the the public webpage holding most of the content and information about the course, and, providing  closed discussion spaces, one for all ONL participants, the community, and one for each PBL groups. Outside this central place a meeting room and a document repository is provided for each groups. In addition each participant is supposed to run his own personal space, the blog, to reflect on what has been learned and optionally participate on social media platforms such as Twitter. These learning spaces are represented by different platforms and tools, some are public, some not.

This raises the question, why would having multiple digital places be useful for learning? The course makers see the ideas of networked learning helpful to design PBL online. Moving between different places can help building connections, open up new perspectives and insights. Why should I learn within a small PBL group and a network on the same time? I’m not sure yet how to connect these three learning spaces network, group and individual and what my role will be in these different places. Hope to find answers during the upcoming weeks.

time

The second element, time, is key for learning in groups. We need an exact time to meet online, we need a time span to prepare, investigate and learn individually, we also need time to understand and maybe translate the readings, or time to think about other group members views and suggestions. Time does not only give structure to our learning process, is also essential for social interaction. Take the time to listen to others in the group or the network, to read posts or contribution of group members and to give feedback or suggestions. In contrast to presence time, such as during an online meeting, this time is invisible but, in my opinion, more valuable.

As experienced in the last two weeks, my learning activities so far were not independent of time and place at all. It is important that we rethink space and time when we, both as learner and teacher, try to move our learning or teaching online.

Finally, managing space and time for this course will be a challenge.

Digital artefact for #edcmooc

Back to the MOOC  E-Learning and Digital Cultures from the University of Edinburgh. The first time in March 2013 I have learned how to participate in a MOOC this time I have explored different views on technology and humanity in relation to digital education.

As final assignement we are required to create a digital artefact on any theme from the course. I have been thinking about the view of the teenagers. How to they look at the role of technology in education? Today and the future? My digital artefact is a compilation of statements about the future of education, taken from three different video reports. It is a very utopian view.

Additionally I wanted to experiment with a new tool  Zeega is great for telling visual stories, I like very much how you can combine different media. Enjoy.

http://zeega.com/170170
zeega – conversations with teenagers about the future of learning

rhizo14 get started

This week i have joined Rhizomatic Learning – The community is the curriculum MOOC directed by Dave Cormier, and as usual for open online courses this course takes places at different online places. For week 1 Dave suggested to just start somewhere. Informal learning is one of my main interest, so following the ideas of rhizomatic learning i have started thinking about knowledge in general. Have come across this experiment, Evidence: How Do We Know What We Know? They looked at where information comes from to form knowledge and try to visualize in a playful way. Have a look.

 

Activity 25: how open online education works

For the final activity i have created a video animation showing the most interesting aspects of openess in education that i have learnt in this course. Here is the updated version with music by Luis López-Cano.

At this point i want to say …

i have enjoyed the course very much,
thanks to martin weller at OU openlearn for facilitating the course and being present,
thanks to all co-learners of the google+ group for sharing, commenting and inspiration,
it was a great learning experience with you.

And special thanks to Luis for composing (entirely on iPad!) the wonderful music to my presentation. This is a great cooperative open work!

And of course,  its also about open resources, here is the source file (Adobe Flash) of the presentation, feel free to change and reuse.

Activity 22: Open education technology – standard web technology

Which technology is important for open education? For me its simply, standard web technology.

When speaking about standard web technology in this context i mean the open languages of the web, such as html, css, php, xml and many more. This technologies are not owned by someone or by a company, they are created, maintained and standardized by the community or by organizations such as the W3C. In my view this is important as this open standard model will best ensure future development.

All the 5 suggested technology tools such as Blog, RSS, Links and embed, Social Networks and VLEs are based on standard web technology. And also the additional technologies suggested by the colleagues,
Mobile Technology (Sukaina and Inger-Marie),
Dropbox (Colin),
Hangout other live sessions (Nuala),
the cloud (Jim),
are all based on standard web technology.
Maybe we will see new tools and content type in future.

The standard web technology let us develop applications and tools to create and deliver different type of content, make it viewable on different devices, bring learners together and include learners with disabilities to participate, and much more. All these is significant for shaping open education and open educational resources.

Activity 17: Abundance of content – filtering

With the Web 2.0 it is easy to create and share content, everybody can be a content producer, this lead to an abundance of content. What does it mean for teaching and learning?

In the conclusion of A pedagogy of abundance, Martin Weller asks two questions.

How can educator take advantage in their own teaching practice?

I think the the abundance of content is of great value for both teacher and learners. I have been teaching multimedia and web programming in adult training. In  this context i appreciate the diversity of resources. Especially in the field of computer technology that change rapidly its important to have access to new and/or updated resources. The ease of producing and delivering digital content over the internet comes in very practical as we are able to provide new content more quickly. It can happen that i can’t use the same resources in the next course, it could be already outdated. That’s why i prefer working with open resources, and i support learners to make use of it too.

How do educators best equip learners to make use of it?

When dealing with a large choice of content you need meta-skills, such as evaluating and comparing resources, and verifing the source. As teacher we can promote the use of open resources by integrating resource-finding-evaluating tasks in our teaching.

By Thiemo Schuff (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

To give an example relating to my course:

Everybody is talking about html5 and the nice animations. There are lots of code libraries to use for creating animation effects. So the task would be to find a suitable animation library. Learners should work in group and find 3 libraries within a given time. They should evaluate and then share with others. Then they can start programming the animation.

My suggestion is based a little on a Problem-Based-Learning approach, here the cooperative process of understanding the problem is more important than the solution to the problem. The given fixed number of resources and time is important, so the group is forced to filter resources and i think this restriction should ensure that learners don’t get lost in time and endless resources.

This approach is quite different than typical programming courses where the teacher would introduce the code library and then go on with step-by-step exercises. But that is not how it works in the practice.

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Weller, M. (2011) ‘A pedagogy of abundance’, Spanish Journal of Pedagogy, vol. 249, pp. 223–36. Also available online at http://oro.open.ac.uk/ 28774/

Activity 15: My definiton of PLN – people are the network

In online learning we often find the term personal learning network (PLN), see Wikipedia’s entry. In this activity we should try to  formulate our own definition. I started searching in local resources and came across this post at the  edutechwiki of University of Geneva describing PLN as:

Personal learning networks (PLN) are the connections and communications made with others to question, reflect and evaluate information in order to create new knowledge (Attwell) (2007)

This definition seems quite suitable to me but there are questions.
Are connections and communications tools, channels or people?
The definition also miss a little the contributing and sharing activitiy.

After finding the  What is a PLN? Or, PLE vs. PLN? twitter discussion summary including this wonderful tweet by @BlancheMaynard which makes clear to me what PLN and PLE is about …

PLN is organic; PLE is mechanic. You can use ‘tools’ like Twitter
within your PLE to access your network, but the tool isn’t the
network.

I change the above definiton to:

A personal learning network (PLN) consists of people we connect  to question, reflect, discuss, contribute and share information in order to create new knowledge.

Now, the channel we choose to communicate with those people can vary from E-Mail, social media tools, google hangout  or even phone.  Each of these tools has its own advantages and can offer new possibilities. But as  @BlancheMaynard writes, tools are not the network, people are the network.

Flock of Jackdaws in Tuira, Oulu, Finland
By Estormiz (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Activity 11: big OER and little OER are friends

We are asked to write on the benefits and drawbacks of big and little OER approaches.
In the issue The openness-creativity cycle in education Martin Weller classify and defines big and little OERs as:

Big OERs are institutionally generated ones that arise from projects such asOpen Courseware and OpenLearn. These are usually of high quality, contain explicit teaching aims, are presented in a uniform style and form part of a time-limited, focused project with portal and associated research and data.
Little OERs are individually produced, low cost resources. They are produced by anyone, not just educators, may not have explicit educational aims, have low production quality and are shared through a range of third party sites and services.

I have setup my text as a discussion between ‘humanized versions’ of big and little OER. Imagine littleOER is an image, a presentation or a piece of text and it has been mixed with part of bigOER, so they meet and start talking.

littleOER: Hi bigOER, nice to host me, tell me how did you get here?

bigOER: Its a long story, i have been created by the staff at OpenLearn for the online course H817 Open Education. After a long period of planing, design, reviewing and testing i was put online on March 16, 2013. And you?

littleOER: Oh that was quite different, my creator put me together within a couple of hours and then posted me on his blog. After a short time, i got lots of visitors from around the world. Apparently those visitors and my third-party friends twitter and google+ are talking about me. What about you big OER?

bigOER: I am not so widespread like you. I know most of my visitors well, they return often to my place and browse, download and write comments. Sometimes I have new visitors coming around. You know, i am made for educational purpose, this means i have been carefully produced with quality, pedagogy and sustainability in mind. My function here is to assist  teacher and make learning happen. What can you tell me about your  educational purpose?

littleOER: Well, i am not explicitly created for educational purpose. But teachers can use me within an educational setting as part of a reading or activity, informal learner can use me to find quickly information they need to complete a task. Furthermore, visitors can make copies of me, so i can travel around the world. Sometimes i live on another server, sometimes i am mixed with other interesting OER and put back on the Internet. That’s the way i have met you here.

bigOER: Yes we wouldn’t be friends if you could travel around. This is my place and i like it, because my creators care about me, they review, refine and change me. So this makes me future-proof and ready for the next challenge, this way i can have a long life.

littleOER: My creator does not care about me any more, but he let me take around.
Honestly, i don’t know how many copies and shares of me exists.

and the talk could go on …
feel free to add your comments.

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Weller, M. (2012) ‘The openness–creativity cycle in education’, Special issue on Open Educational Resources, JIME, Spring 2012 [online]. Available at http://jime.open.ac.uk/ jime/ article/ view/ 2012-02

Weller, M. (2011b) ‘Public engagement as collateral damage’ in The Digital Scholar, London, Bloomsbury Academic. Also available online at http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/ view/ DigitalScholar_9781849666275/ chapter-ba-9781849666275-chapter-007.xml

Images:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/officedesignberlin/7012544193/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/officedesignberlin/7012542879/

Activity 10: Sustainability models for OER – its about people’s involvement

In this OEDC 2007  report David Wiley defined sustainability as ‘an open educational resource project’s ongoing ability to meet its goals‘ (p. 5). Wiley describes 3 models of sustainability for open educational resources: MIT model, USU model and Rice model. We are asked to have a look at the following 4 open education initiatives and think about what model of sustainability they could operate.

ChangeMOOC

• single open online course
• run by 3 facilitators, think on a voluntary basis
• course is terminated, seems not to be updated
  (there may be some activities within communities, for example on twitter still see hashtag #change11)

I see ChangeMooc as a one-time initiative without any further follow-up. None of the 3 models apply.

Coursera

• does not create courses or resources they provide platform and marketing for open courses
• institutions (universities) can offer online courses/resources
• funded by the universities
• managed by team (technology, management, marketing)
• learners are not allowed to reuse course resources

From my point of view, coursera provides services not content. The content created and published by third-parties on coursera cant be reused. Don’t think this fall into Wileys definition of sustainability in relation to OER.

Jorum

• does not create online courses or resources
• provides service: repository for resources
• funded by JISC
• managed by team (technology, management, coordination)
• resources created and shared by staff in UK Further and Higher Education

Mix of MIT model (jorum as platform) and Rice model (creators)

OpenLearn

• creates and publish online courses / resource
• part-funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
• probably run and managed by staff at OU
• resources can be reused

Similar to Jorum, mix of all models

Just by quickly browsing information available on their websites i can’t see behind the scene how a project is really sustained. Sustainability is mainly about people’s involvement. I like the jorum user stories, they tell me more about.

Resource:
Wiley (2007), On the Sustainability of Open Educational Resource Initiatives in Higher Education