E-flections

As part of my PG cert in teaching and learning in art and design at CLTAD, I am carrying out an action research project, so here is the proposal….

Live online research seminar

For some time I have been aware that in most of  my teaching practice I am emphasising collaboration and student centred learning, but that in most of my lecture presentations I am still delivering a relatively traditional lecture using slides etc with me as the ‘expert’ interlocutor, in both online and f2f contexts.

I have been thinking about how to adapt this format so that the necessary ground can still be covered on the course, but that the students can be empowered to learn themselves during the class, with me acting more as a lead researcher, or mentor, to them in real time.

On my online course, during lectures the participants use the text messaging box within the web conferencing software we use to provide a constant stream of feedback, questions, weblinks, analysis etc about the presentation, allowing me to answer their questions and elaborate on points they are unsure of without having to break the flow of the presentation by asking for verbal questions. Of course, due to the virtual nature of the class, this kind of multitasking is a given, as they are all using computers from the onset. However, the idea of students using their laptops or mobile devices during traditional f2f lectures is often met with considerable scepticism and even hostility, with the usual response being ‘they will be just texting their friends or playing games or on facebook’. However, such comments are potentially answered by my experience in the online space.  I therefore would like to experiment with using real time messaging within an f2f class using twitter. Here is an example of Cole Camplese using twitter during a session at Penn State University in the US

My proposal then is to carry out a series of live online research seminars, each lasting for 2 hours, where we will seek to collectively research a particular subject relevant to our practice area, and then build a publically accessible digital artefact using web 2.0 collaborative tools – e.g. wikis, rss feeds, Ning, twitter, Diigo etc.

This will serve as an action research into how to make a typical 2-hour class session more collaborative and meaningful, empowering the students to research a subject that is authentic to them and generating new insights.

The sessions will be evaluated on how effectively they enhance collaboration, research skills, understanding of the Internet and sources, understanding of how to reference Internet sources and plagiarism, etc etc

We will carry out an initial survey of the classes’ web research skills and then a further evaluation after the sessions to see to what extent these have been enhanced.
A record will be kept of the interactions during the sessions by using the digital artefact itself and video recording the project is inspired particularly by the teaching methods of Michael Wesch, Ass Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas University,  in particular the video ‘A portal to media literacy’ and the paper ‘From knowledgeable to knowledge-able’.

A large part of my time over the next year and a half is going to be devoted to a JISC funded project to trial how online collaborative tools can be used to enhance the relationship between the academic world and that of business and the community - known as BCE for short. My project is one of 9 that JISC have funded as part of their BCE programme, and will concentrate on building an online community of practice around photojournalism. The project outline is as follows:

1.    INTRODUCTION
This proposal outlines how an online community of practice for the professional photojournalism industry can be established, using web 2.0 social networking tools and live web conferencing to provide an arena to encourage serious debate about the direction of the profession. This would bring together professionals, stakeholders and interested parties ranging from individual photographers, photo agencies, large-scale news operations like the wire services, editors, consumers of images, galleries, academics and critics, educators and aspiring entrants to the profession in the form of postgraduate students and early career photographers. A global network of institutions and individuals from a range of backgrounds and interests would thus be created, which would give unparalled access for students to the highest levels of debate from industry professionals. Our experience in delivering a fully online Masters Programme in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London (UAL) has convinced us that successful communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) can be built online that link industry professionals with students and other stakeholders, but this requires leveraging the synergies between the engagement of real time live webinars with the more reflective, analytical spaces of asynchronous tools like blogs, social networks, wikis and forums. In the initial phase, such networks need support to maintain and develop them until they gain the critical mass within an industry to become self-sustaining, ideally through the role of a community co-ordinator (Wenger etc). The development and evaluation of such a network would provide an excellent case study for the BCE programme in how to build an online community of practice around a specialised area that combines freelance practitioners, industry contacts, companies, academics and students.
The proposal presents plans to establish a virtual network centred around a series of live webinars and discussion sessions presented by leading industry professionals to an invited audience of peers, academics involved in the critical debate around images, aspiring photojournalists from the majority world, and masters level students of photography. The webinars will be delivered using the Wimba live classroom web conferencing platform, a tried and tested delivery system that is ideal for the discussion and analysis of images in an online environment. Wimba has been used by UAL as well as by hundreds of other programs in education worldwide to successfully deliver online programmes. This will be supported by a blog, shared bookmarks on Diigo, and a social networking group run on Ning, which has proven to be a stable and easy to use platform for the building of online communities, especially in education. Together, these various tools will create an open research network. Debates will take place monthly over a one-year trial period, and will seek to ask challenging questions about the future development of the industry. All the presentations will be archived and available for later viewing online. Also, as Wimba is available 24/7, rooms can be easily made available online at short notice for any other debates, discussions or working groups that might emerge organically from the network. The network will thus grow and develop over a one year period, initially under the guidance of an editorial board but then increasingly by the network itself.

Industry Context
The landscape of professional news photography and photojournalism has been transformed in the last decade by a combination of technological changes, economic developments and ethical challenges, creating an overwhelming need for the industry as a whole to debate, discuss and open dialogue both within itself but also with interested parties who engage with visual news media, a process that is difficult to undertake conventionally because of the disparate nature of the profession, spread out geographically and economically with a large number of freelance practitioners.. A discourse between the industry and the academic world is essential to both for critical engagement with the issues facing the media but also to involve those studying photography in debates about its future role in society. One need that is absolutely key is to make the forum for debate global, and to involve practitioners from the majority world as well as from the West. What follows from this is the potential of peer and collaborative learning amongst the student group, staff and external agents and industry contacts, collectively generating a ‘community of practice’ with much learning involving ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (Lave and Wenger 1991) as those aspiring to join the profession interact and debate with established professionals.

Initial partners
The project will begin with a trial period involving a limited number of partners who already have established a ‘real world’ network, based around already established links between the UAL, the World Press Photo’s educational programme and the Drik photographic education programme in Bangladesh. This network has worked over the last 10 years to develop the skills of photojournalists in the Majority world; a programme that has brought together highly regarded and experienced practitioners with photojournalists from countries from all over the developing world. WPP has delivered training and development to hundreds of professionals in these areas, greatly building their capacity for independent journalism and enhancing the contribution they can make to civic democratic discourse in their respective countries. Together UAL, Drik and WPP have an extensive range of contacts in the industry and related areas, ranging from academics to editors, photographers to NGO’s, critics to photographic agencies. This initial network of approximately 400 students and professionals will be the starting point for the online community, and will seek to link industry, students and academics in the West with those in the Majority world, so that an interactive collaborative dialogue can be established.

One of the big themes that came out of Wimba Connect 09 which has just finished in Phoenix AZ was that of how live web conferencing can move out of the classroom and into the world outside, both in terms of the internal communications of the academic institution, but also in terms of the relationship to the outside world, especially 2 main stakeholders, prospective students and potential employers.
There was a growing sense that live interactive communication can be used to bring the world into the university and bring the university into the world.

There were several really good examples of how Wimba can be used to bring the world of business and work into the institution. On my course, we regularly bring practitioners in to talk about their work, but the focus from some of the other universities was different, and more clearly focused on employer engagement and enhancing the employability of graduates.

Alice Bird and Alex Spiers of Liverpool John Moores University LJM introduced Wimba in 08, and have trialled it out in a variety of ways, on which more later, but specifically in employer engagement they have a programme called WoW (World of Work), and are starting to use various Wimba tools to enhance this. They are creating employer podcasts using Wimba voice, where they get someone in business or industry to describe a typical day in their life, to give students a better idea of the realities of work.
They are also using live classroom to bring in industry professionals talk directly to students in a Q&A format. There was a great idea from the floor where one institution  sends a headset/mic combo, webcam and a small present to everyone who presents instead of the travel expenses they would otherwise have paid, which makes the industry professional feel valued and respected.

Ideas came thru as well of how to use Wimba to run open days for prospective students, and for outreach to the parents of K12 children to help them understand how to help their children.

The other main theme in this regard was in how Wimba products can be used internally for communication within the institution. Ivy Tech Community  College has rolled out pronto to an impressive number of students and staff, with some 17k students and 1400 professors signed up. They use pronto for helpdesk support, with library, blackboard, tech, admin and financial service desks at both a global and local level, many open 7 days a week from 8am -10pm.

LJM also demonstrated how they used voice tools for formative feedback, describing it as their ‘killer app’, for me the real insight was how the same 2 minutes of staff time could be used to write 150 words of feedback or say around 500, so giving the student much more in depth feedback for the same amount of effort, and feedback that was sent back to the student immediately. They felt that audio feedback gave  flexible delivery of feedback in an authentic voice. They also used the Wimba podcast feature for revision, subject expert debates, community building and employer Q&A’s. They saw some barriers, however, in that its non searchable, the length of recording vs engagement needs to be monitored, its not suitable for large group discussions, and accessibility is a major concern.

Finally they had some good stats on student feedback to Wimba, 25% responded that Wimba was much better than other distance learning software they had used, 100% said it had a positive impact on their learning,100% would choose to study on a wimba enabled course again,  and it had an overall 8.75 /10 satisfaction rating as learning tool

Wesch just gave a keynote at the Wimba connect 09 conference in Phoenix AZ, and it was great to see him deliver in the flesh. Having seen most of his material online, there wasn’t much new here (in the sense of new to me, because of course everything about his research is new!!), but he really holds the stage with a great delivery style, funny yet profound, simple yet deep, great visuals but also great words. For me there were a couple of genuinely emotional moments, once with the one world project which is so simple, so naive yet so powerful, and once in his closing slide of an image of the earth from space with the sentence ‘What do we need to know for this test’

So many good lines it’s almost impossible to list them all, but I’ll note a few highlights for me. Firstly, his title, the need to shift from knowing facts and figures to knowing how to find facts and figures, how to analyse them, and how to collaboratively create new knowledge: knowledgeable to knowledge-able.

He started with a great analogy that there was something different to the classroom of today from that he studied in as an undergrad, that there is ‘literally something in the air’ between the students, that being the ‘digital artefacts of 1.5 billion people’, part of the staggering figure of 70 Exabyte’s of information that will be produced this year, less than 0.1% on paper. The pace of change is now so fast that concepts like digital natives become irrelevant; there is no native to something that is less than 5 years old and nobody will ever be native again. His survey of futurist writers gave him his ’20 second vision of the future

‘ubiquitous networks ubiquitous  computing ubiquitous  information at unlimited speed about everything from everywhere  and anywhere on al kinds of  devices,’

One thing that really resonated with me from this presentation was the idea that the way media is generated by the smart people, and appears to be targeted at you, the individual, it’s very flattering to one, it makes you feel special. The real world, however, say mountains and deserts has the opposite effect, it is humbling, because it’s not made just for you.

He weaved into the presentation a wonderful analysis of the changing meaning of a phrase in his
“A brief history of ‘whatever’”, following its shifting emphasis from:

1960s: that’s what I meant
Late 60’s: I don’t care, whatever
1990s: MTV gen the indifferent ‘meh’ of the Simpsons
1992: The of nirvana, there are so many huge issues out there in the world that the response becomes ‘whatever’; I can’t do anything about it.

This culminated in his ending takeaway, an invitation to rescue the word, and to transform it into the clarion call of

‘A new future of whatever – I care! Lets do whatever it takes to change the world by whatever means necessary’

here are the links to online references for my presentation ‘Surfing the long tail of education” at Wimba connect 2009

http://www.diigo.com/user/mapjdlinks/wimbaconnect

and here are the references

Boud D, Cohen R and Walker D (1985) Reflection: turning experience into learning. London: Kogan Page
Brockbank, A., & McGill, I. (2007). Facilitating Reflective Learning in Higher Education. Maidenhead: OU Press.Eskow, S, and Trevitte, C. (2007) Reschooling Society and the Promise of ee-Learning: An Interview with Steve Eskow. Innovate 3(6) http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=502. Retrieved June 9, 2008.
Moon, J. (2004). A Handbook of Reflective and Experiential Learning,  London: Routledge.Moon, J. (2006). Learning Journals: A handbook for reflective practice and professional development. London: Routledge.Nonnecke, B. & Preece, J. (2001). Why lurkers lurk. AMCIS Conference, Boston, June. http://snowhite.cis.uoguelph.ca/~nonnecke/research/whylurk.pdf . Retrieved May 21 2008
Schon, D. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner. New York: Basic Books.
Schon, D. (1987). Educating the Reflective Practitioner. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice:Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wenger, E, McDermott, R, Snyder, W, Cultivating communities of practice, Harvard business school press, Boston, 2002

I’m not the first and certainly wont be the last, but this blog took a back seat for a long time as i was just so busy with work

but now it is coming back to life again for 2 very specific reasons, one that i have just stated a pg cert in teaching and learning in art and design at cltad, the other that i have been awarded funding from jisc to develop an online community of practice around photojournalism.

So this blog will become a space for me to write about both of these new journeys.

Last week I went to the annual conference of the  Practice based Professional learning unit at the Open University; mainly to see David Boud, whose research I’ve quoted from extensively in my work on reflective practice and experiential learning. David’s paper was on assessment, experience and reflection, and was very provocative and challenging in terms of his interpretation of the role of assessment. He posed a simple question to the audience:

‘If we were going to modify assessment as if making a contribution to their ability to learn after their course rather than during it was the primary need, how would it be different?’

His focus was then on how to reshape assessment policies so that their main intention was to help the learner build their capacity for self and peer judgment to further their lifelong learning.

David went on  to define current approaches to assessment in HE, which he saw as broadly to certify achievement (summative) and aid learning (formative). This often leads to too much emphasis  on current learning to meet requirements of a specific module at a specific time. He argued that we should be fostering the learning needed beyond end of a course –what he defined as sustainable assessment- which should serve to build their capacity to do something over and above an immediate task.

He suggested that we need to change  from:
Norm referenced to standards based
Testing what has been taught to assessing learning outcomes From exams to diverse approaches
Unilateral to active involvement of students
Separate domain to aligned with learning

His argument developed by describing what he called the Practice turn which has followed the reflective turn of recent years, which has these key features;
Practice is necessarily contextualised, embodied and  involves whole people with motives feelings and intentions; and it cannot be discussed independently of practitioners. It is co-constructed in relationships to others and their views of practice construct it –client and professional co-construct their practice together, and therefore only has meaning in light of its social location/construct.

He described the changing context of work, with a shift from the individual to the collective, and that it is becoming increasingly multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary, which involves the  co-production of practice and co-construction of knowledge.
This has created a serious clash of cultures between the complex collaborative culture of work vs. the individual character of educational assessment.

What this means is that we have to build capacity for learning in the future, essentially enhancing  a Judgement developing capacity. This then generates this question for any assessment exercise, ‘What are the consequences of this assessment for learning – does it build capacity for judgements about learning beyond this  course?’
The focus should then be on fostering reflexivity and self-regulation throughout the course, exposing and revealing the processes of judgement, not just thru assessment tasks. This demands that we recognise the variety of contexts in which learning occurs – and that judgement is not independent of context.

One major failing of many attempts to introduce new assessment models is that they fail to stage opportunities for developing informed judgement throughout programmes – there is almost always a failing  to be consistent across modules and programmes

What does all this mean? Well for Boud, students need to be involved in all aspects of assessment processes especially in practising judgements – they must be active agents in assessment rather than passive recipients of it.

Essentially then assessment becomes the  calibration of judgement – learners act on basis of belief in their own judgements need to know that they don’t know – identifying  knowledge gaps is more important than identifying knowledge.

He made a fantastic point about why students often resist new assessment models because students are behaving rationally in resenting changes in assessment because they have learnt how to behave in traditional assessment environments, and then we capriciously change the rules on them. So we need to be able to persuade them why it will be beneficial to them, and how this will aid them in meeting the formal requirements of the course, that we are doing it because its for real, the single most important and valuable thing we could imagine doing with you now in this module.

All assessment activities need to equip students for future leaning – we must ask in what ways is this particular task building their capacity for future learning, how does this help them make judgements.

His advice to achieve this is to:
Actively engage students
Let students give and receive feedback
Develop authentic activities that reflect real world practice
Raise awareness of learning and judgement
Integrative activities across modules and programs
Let students design assessment activities
Realise that the potential for developing capacity for informed judgment is central to all practice
Plan programs and course units to scaffold students to become increasingly sophisticated judges of their own learning
Make the design and selection of assessment tasks a key part of T&L

And consistency is important, we must think about all of the tasks and run the argument for them all – not just one innovative bit and everything else reinforcing old ways.

I gave my presentation of blogs and the eflective practitioner as a webinar again last night if you want to see it it’s archived by wimba, its about an hour long. There was a great discussion at the end, particularly with Harold Jarche who picked up on 2 ideas in particular; the idea of blogs as the glue that holds together your e-life, and the other the idea of using a ‘gentle hand’ as the tutor with the blogs of students. He made some great comments on the session on his blog.  I’ll write more on the ‘gentle hand’ idea  shortly, but for now I want to return tot he idea of gluey blogs.

This started out as a metaphor for how the blog in our teaching  sits at the centre of the various  synchronous and asynchronous spaces we use, binding them together into a coherent whole. The  blogs act as the glue connecting the synchronous spaces for lectures and tutorials with the asynchronous spaces such as the discussion boards and students’ photographs in a real-time environment where posts can be quickly read and reacted upon individually or collectively.

But last night’s discussion, in addition to some other comments by Harold  on how blogs serve as a kind of repository for one’s thoughts or by  Michele Martin as an aid to reflection, and as a kind of ‘back up brain’ in Amy Gahran’s terminology, got me thinking that they effectively act as as the glue that binds together the e world and the tangible world, acting as a bridge between the two, and as a sace to think about how they relate to each other. Harold talked in a post on the work literacy workshop about how his blog is

‘a key component of personally managing my knowledge and that the act of blogging forces me to move from implicit ideas to explicit descriptions of these ideas. The discipline of blogging hones my thoughts and helps me to learn, while exposing these thoughts to others makes it more social, and human. I still believe that the blog is the most powerful social media tool available.’

and Amy talks about how to use a blog for 3 main reasons; to blog your initial brainstorming, to blog your research & discovery  and to blog your interactions. she goes on to say

‘The clincher to all this is to use your blog as your backup brain — or at least as a public notebook. Why not get more mileage out of work you would have done anyway by changing your habits toward managing information and communication publicly? Instead of keeping your thoughts, notes, and conversations to yourself, post them……this information will probably become more findable and useful to yourself as well as to others. Ever tried to find that old notebook where you stored conference notes from three years ago? See what I mean?’

So the blog is sticky, gathering up all of those thoughts, interactions, ideas, research, half finished concepts and glueing them together into a one place, that can then be searched, researched, edited and reedited at any point in the future.

Kind of like having an ‘open brain’ out there in the world for both the blogger and the audience to use, transparent, searchable and open source!

The new 360 report by the e learning guild on e learning 2.0 has some fantastic data on what and who is driving the adoption of web 2.0 tools in e learning. I’ve been trying to make sense of the data, especially in relation to other reports that have just come out like the BECTA report on web 2.0 in UK schools I wrote about yesterday, and the Technorati survey of the blogosphere from a few weeks ago, which suggested that there were a significant number of older bloggers, with more than 50% of those in the USA and Europe over 35. All these reports make significant issues of the age issue, and made me question who is driving e learning 2.0, younger workers coming into industry with facebook accounts or older e learning specialists who have been using email and macs since before many of these digital natives were born??

The E learning 2.0 report was authored by some big names in the industry, including Tony Karrer, Michele Martin, Jane Hart, Steve Wexler and Brent Schlenker; and is based on almost 3,000 replies from e learning professionals who are members of the guild. Overall, the whole membership is completely sold on the idea that e learning 2.0 works, with almost unanimous feeling that it had delivered substantial benefits to their organisation. Europe, Middle East and Africa are significantly further down the web 2.0 line than the rest of the world, with 57% reporting some use of e learning 2.0 compared with 39% in the US and 40% overall. (I have to say it would ahve been much more useful if europe had been separated from the middle east and africa to get a more nuanced view of adoption)
One key set of conclusions that seems to be buried at the back of the report if the ranking of web 2.0 tools in use by sector, which is topped by business e learning training providers followed by universities. However, if you look at this data a bit more carefully, you see that in the key areas of growth in web 2.0, blogs, wikis and, universities are way ahead and leading the pack by a substantial margin, with Europe and Asia/rest of world leading  the way by a significant margin over the USA.  Corporate e learning providers make massive use of electronic performance systems, learning games  and simulations, which greatly increases their overall score.

So this got me thinking, who is driving the adoption of e learning 2.0? To me it seems that universities and higher education, especially in outside of the USA, are playing a key role as the transitional zone between the workforce and companies, and are effectively giving the students who are coming from schools with a good grasp of the social networking tools that are out there but as the BECTA report noted, no real critical awareness of what these tools can do to enhance understanding and knowledge, and without the ability to evaluate and assess them effectively. Businesses, according to the guilds report, see the pressure from new younger staff to adopt web 2.0 as a major driver of the need for e learning 2.0, with 66% of respondents citing this as a major factor for them. 57% felt that Using web would allow their organisation to attract more and better talent. However, half felt that their staff didn’t have either the skills or the infrastructure to enable web 2.0 activities, and half felt that there want any real demand from staff to adopt them anyway. so there is a misfit between schools an industry, a misfit that higher education perhaps needs to bridge.

In terms of what guild members saw as the engines of adoption, 52% felt that their own personal use of tools was the most important factor, with only a third claiming that Learners or staff are requesting it, and just 25% that it was management driven.

Where it gets very interesting is in examining what members felt were the most effective strategies to drive forward the implementation of successful projects, with half citing engaging content as being the most important, and just less than half seeing management backing and tutoring as vital. Things like reward systems, helpdesk and internal advertising showed a poorer response, with less than 20% seeing them as significant. However, when the figures are broken down by length of e learning experience, a different picture emerges, with 44% of older, more senior specialists maintaining that effective change management was the most important thing.
One very interesting and slightly counter intuitive point is that the more experience a member has the more likely he or she is to embrace new approaches to education, with older members of the guild showing a higher propensity to use things like blogs, wikis, social networking and communities of practice.
So trying to make sense of this it seems to me that the real driving force behind e learning 2.0 is the e leaning community, especially its’ older, more established members, people like the team that put together the guild’s report, people with the significant important blogs, people like my fellow participants in the work literacy workshop, people who are in high enough positions within their organisations to effect change but not so high that they don’t have the time to experiment with web 2.0, to try it themselves and as Jane Hart maintains, lead by example. Within this, higher education is playing a key role in helping workers navigate the transition from using facebook and myspace as predominantly for entertainment, to using them for learning, understanding, knowledge production and analysis.

This certainly fits with my experiences of trying to move my institution forward, most of the growth has been grassroots, driven by individuals at course director level who are in their late 30’s to 50’s, and who have always used technology in their lives. They are now in positions where they can influence eat least the courses around them and drive forward the adoption of new ways of thinking, teaching and learning; management tend to be the generation above who haven’t the time nor the incentive to grapple with the tools, but are more than happy and supportive for us to do so. Slowly we are shifting though out of the e learning pocket into an e culture, where the tools that seem so new today will merge into our lives as seamlessly and ubiquitously as the internal combustion engine, the book, cell phones and the internet itself.

I’m giving my talk on blogs and educating the eflective practitioner again on tuesday oct 14th at 19.00 BST online via WIMBA. You can register here