E-flections

The Learning Studio is a new community of practice that we are forming to support collaboration and peer-to-peer exchange and communication around teaching and learning in art, design and media. Initially it will focus on UAL staff from across the whole institution, but we hope to expand out into the wider community and other institutions in the future. The imitative is borne of some of the same sorts of frustrations that James Clay has voiced in his post on why the traditional model of staff development and e champions has failed to really impact on the use of learning technology and pedagogic innovation. I would echo his words,

‘it’s about practitioner taking responsibility for their own staff development, to seek out a community of practice, to build on their skills, share, collaborate and move forward. It isn’t enough now to rely on a single staff development day, week or event. Staff development is an activity that happens every day.

Community is important, local, regional, national and even international. Sharing practice, ideas and problems is a way of changing culture. Building communities of practice and personal learning networks should be the responsibility of every practitioner’

We plan to meet regularly using live web conferencing on the Wimba platform, and to use other web 2.0 environments to collaborate including the new UAL social networking and staff development platform, myCPD, which is a drupal based environment for personal and collaborative development.

The next step is to being to build the connections between staff at UAL, which as is typical in many other institutions, are doing great work but often in almost isolation. One of the main drivers of the learning studio is to act as a conduit for people to find each other to share their ideas, expertise and to collaborate.

Having worked a lot on both the theory and practice of communities of practice, including with the man himself, Etienne Wenger, I’m both excited and nervous about the project as it has huge potential but is also likely to be difficult and challenging to build, nurture and sustain the community.

We plan to follow Wenger’s advice on developing a CoP by firstly interviewing a group of people, already identified as leaders in teaching and learning, and brainstorming with them what the terrain we should be covering is, what kind of activities we should be developing, and who else to invite initially to the community.

One idea we have had is to carry out a ‘Go to…’ survey to find out who people identify as the ‘go to’ people when they need advice or have a problem, this is a way of using the staff themselves to identify key ‘thought leaders’, innovators, e champions, or just people who get things done. This should also help us to map the current networks of collaboration an information sharing that exist and will hopefully help build the community.

We plan to soft launch it fairly soon, with a series of web conferences and other events that lead up to a university wide launch in the new year.  At present we plan to use some of the approaches we have developed on the Masters program I teach and the OPEN-i network for photojournalism that I’ve been running for the past year or so. These include regular webinars, social bookmarking using diigo, flipbite interviews, twitter as a ‘watercooler’ to share quick bits of information, questions and useful links, as ell as the more established platforms like discussion forums and blogs etc.

(If you are interested in joining the community in the future, especially if you are involved in art, design, photography and media, mail me at p.lowe@lcc.arts.ac.uk and i’ll keep you updated)

What has worked at your institution in developing learning communities, and what hasn’t – tales of success and failure welcome!

I presented at 2 sessions at Wimba connect 2010, one about OPEN-i in a joint presentation with Phil O’Hara entitled ‘reaching over walls’, where we both focused on using Wimba web conferencing to interact with dispersed communities outside of the traditional university. Phil’s project is a continuing professional development program for pharmacists across Canada, and has over 2,000 participants distributed all over the country regularly attending live sessions to maintain the necessary professional qualifications to continue to practice. Our session went well, and there was a good synergy between the presentations, Phil focusing more on the detail of running the web conferences and mine more on the broader picture of how to build and develop a community of practice. There were some good questions, and as I am finding more often at presentations I give, some people who are really engaging with the concepts of communities of practice and many who are not familiar with it at all.

The other session I participated in as a presenter was more informal, there were a group of us who are all on the product advisory board for Wimba and we had been invited to run a session demonstrating good practice in web conferencing. We all met up in Wimbaworld before the conference, and decided – largely at my suggestion – to adopt a more ‘ideas café’ style approach to the session rather than each of us simply talking about our experiences. We therefore chose 4 general questions about the sue fo Wimba, with the idea that we would split the audience up into smaller groups and then give them the chance to decide whether to drill down into one topic for the duration of the session or to explore each question in turn. In the end, the vote was for the latter, so we allocated one member of the advisory board to each group, leaving Phil O’Hara and myself to move around from group to group and to keep the flow of discussion going. In the end this really wasn’t necessary, as each group really engaged with the questions. We got some really great user experiences and suggestions out of the session, and some great feedback on the format; people especially liked that as ours was the last session of the day it kept them engaged and awake by forcing them to interact, as opposed to a more traditional approach that may have left some dozing at the back of the room by the end of the day.

As I’m also on the advisory board for Wimba, I get invited to their ‘executive track’ sessions too, which focus on the more strategic use of the technology, with the main focus on collaboration and how to leverage the existing investment made in web conferencing outside of the obvious one of actually teaching students. There was a great line from Mike Scheuermann, AVP, Instructional Technology Support, Drexel University, who talked about the importance of platforms that are ‘LMS agnostic’, i.e. that work with any propriety or open source platform for managing students.

Again, this session had a more ‘ideas café’ format, where we broke up into groups to discuss ways Wimba can be sued across the range of academic and support areas. The big takeaway for me was that there were lots of great examples of how web conferencing is being used across the whole range of university institutions, not just the obvious ones of delivering classes to students. This was the really emerging theme of the conference, how collaboration in real time over distance is enabling all sorts of activities to be engaged in more efficiently, and often in ways that could not be done in a traditional f2f way. One big driver was the environmental impact of web conferencing replacing f2f meetings; there were lots of really clear examples where significant costs were saved in terms of travel. Obviously this was more apparent for US institutions, as many of them are dispersed with large distances between different offices and faculties. Another major influence was the threat of weather extremes and the potential problems of H1N1, in both cases web conferencing was seen as offering the potential to continue to deliver when physical meetings become impossible. Putting back up plans into place seemed to be a big concern for many institutions.

Wimba is being used increasingly to deliver staff development, often in bite sized chunks or for more informal help sessions, the University of Maryland showed a training program they have developed that is very similar to the Learn@Lunch session we initiated at UAL except more focused on e learning and technology than pedagogy.

There were plenty of great ideas about how to use web conferencing creatively as well, especially for things like student recruitment, holding virtual open days and course tours or pre enrolment orientation sessions for example.

Another increasing use that Wimba is being put to is as a simple recording studio for faculty to produce online resources, and from the noises about potential acquisitions of lecture capture and screen capture companies this seems to be a major focus for Wimba in the future.

Wimba also demonstrated their new incarnation of their user interface, which looks like a much slicker and feature rich version of the existing pronto. It was great to sit down with their new head of user engagement and go through some of the wireframes of the new interface and offer advice and ideas. Some great possibilities emerged, including using pronto to automatically reach a help desk operator, or to go straight from pronto to the live classroom.

As with last year, the conference provided lots of great ideas about how to use Wimba and web conferencing more generally, the trick now is to get my own institution to embrace it more fully.

One of the main themes to emerge from the Wimba connect 2010 conference was using Wimba as a lecture capture system as well as for web conferencing. This seems to be being driven by users as much as by Wimba themselves, but they are now really beginning to realise that they potentially have a good platform for this. The main advantages to Wimba over other systems like echo 360 is that it is already in use, and that it allows the simultaneous collaboration of both real world and online participants in a session. Wimba demonstrated a set up for using the live classroom browser based platform to record a lecture, especially now that the video capture part supports any video camera/device that can be plugged into the computer, including HD video. With a simple switcher box, multiple video inputs can easily be handled, for example a room camera and a document camera, and a DVD input could all be used in turn during a session. Using  a simple video camera with an auto pan tilt zoom and an echo cancelling speaker/mic set like the Phoenix Quattro or its smaller version the duet it looks pretty simple to capture all of the action and sound in a reasonably sized room with a kit that would pack into a flight case. Wimba are considering the archiving and streaming end as well, and it looks like they might even be in the mood to acquire one of the existing lecture capture/screen capture companies.

I’ve just returned from the Wimba connect 2010 conference in Orlando. At the Executive Track Session the discussion was about how to plan for the strategic use of technology, seeing it as an enabler of collaboration and communication rather than as an end in itself.  Wimba’s CEO Carol Vallone outlined 4 main drivers that they see as key to the intelligent use of technology to support education:

1: Meeting the expectations of today’s students – studnets now expect universities to meet them where they are, rather than having to come into the faculty itself. They are increasingly Digitally literate and want to be productive in the workforce immediately on graduation

2: Increased demands for accountability – to the market, to students and to quality assurance.

3: Strategic use of technology – Successful collaboration means mapping out a strategy for the institution and then mapping collaborations against it, with a context based application of technology for collaboration – looking at costs, efficiency, productivity, and engagement. It’s key to map technology to specific initiatives e.g. retention rather than just randomly training staff in various software packages.

4: Repurposing and leveraging current investments – find ways to use systems already in place in new and innovative ways e.g. for administration and student support as well as for teaching and learning.

Some tips on using google wave

wave works best when you use google’s browser, chrome

http://www.google.com/chrome

hitting the space bar takes you to the next unread post in a wave

from wired magazine a good starting guide

http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Get_Started_With_Google_Wave

from mashable a guide on getting started

http://mashable.com/2009/10/01/google-wave-get-started/

the complete guide to google wave

http://completewaveguide.com/

from chris brogan a blog post on using wave for collaboration

http://www.chrisbrogan.com/tips-for-google-wave/

FAQ on wave

http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2010/01/frequently-asked-questions-about-google-wave/

a cloudworks on Wave in education http://cloudworks.ac.uk/index.php/cloud/view/2511

from mashable a guide on using it for collaboration

http://mashable.com/2009/12/18/google-wave-business

from mashable why wave is a game changer

http://mashable.com/2009/05/31/google-wave-features/

list of links to activities on wave in education

http://www.dontwasteyourtime.co.uk/elearning/google-wave-in-education/

wave for project management

http://elearningaustralia.net.au/2009/12/project-management/

link to my blog report on using Wave – this is one of a series

http://eflections.edublogs.org/2010/02/20/what-is-google-wave/

Co-creating a living curriculum

I work with the online Masters participants entirely virtually utilising a variety of web 2.0 and social networking approaches, creating a ‘learnscape’ (Cross, 2004), a series of overlapping interactive spaces that act as a ‘virtual commons’  replicating the physical spaces in a face-to-face environment. This approach is informed by Schön’s work on developing the ‘reflective practitioner’ and the concept of a ‘Practicum’ (1983) as an intermediate space between the worlds of work and study; and Wenger’s (1998, 2002) ideas  of Communities of Practice and his newer ideas on creating ‘Digital Habitats’ (2009), where technology serves to enhance the ecology of learning by extending the potential for interaction and collaboration in a virtual world.

Central to this approach is the notion that we are all learners; in the fast changing world of digital media, we are all, including me, my staff, visiting professional tutors and the students, trying to understand and evaluate the evolving landscape of practice. I therefore endeavour to create a non-hierarchical space where we all work together to comprehend the complex world that we engage with.

I collaborate with the students in an exploration of the affordances of technology, firstly identifying the pedagogic goal(s) we need to achieve, and then experimenting with a solution. In this process, we co-create the learning space, trialling various ideas and solutions to find the ones that work best for the group. My learning design philosophy is based on the concept of a ‘living curriculum’ maintained in conjunction with the student cohort, with whom changes and modifications are negotiated. I am also keen to use the most suitable available technologies to address the pedagogic issues of the moment, moving to better alternatives as they emerge, in a ‘Best of Breed’ approach to selecting learning tools, whilst recognising that the focus should always be on creating a student-led learning environment (Wenger 2002).

CSCL often uses an iterative design-based research approach to the use of new technologies, which has many similarities to that of action research. Wang and Hannafin define this as a

‘systematic but flexible methodology aimed to improve educational practices through iterative analysis, design, development, and implementation, based on collaboration among researchers and practitioners in real-world settings, and leading to contextually-sensitive design principles and theories’ (2005, p. 6)

whilst Wegerif characterizes this approach as follows

‘Driven by the interactions among evolving theory, informal observations and stakeholder engagement, design-oriented researchers continuously improve the artifacts intended to mediate learning and collaboration. Their research is not necessarily either qualitative or quantitative, but may also be “quisitive” ‘(2006, p14)

In approaching this research  I used a variation on Jean McNiff’s action research planning cycle to generate the research plan. This consisted of identifying the research question and pedagogic need, implementing the new activity, allowing it to develop over time, evaluating the experience and then applying the results of that evaluation back into the activity in order to repeat the process again. However, in the spirit of design-based research, our interaction with the new platform was open ended, non-determined  and exploratory. That such a research project has real pedagogic value is demonstrated by Ebersole and Wood’s comments that

‘even though many traditional verbal and nonverbal communication cues are filtered-out in the online setting, the very nature of CMC may foster deeper, more long-term social commitments among learners online than learners in F2F settings. Future researchers should continue to explore the ways in which such intense, long-term commitments may be leveraged to maximize cognitive learning benefits. The ways in which social dynamics in the online classroom are better than, or at least different from, social dynamics in F2F educational settings should also be explored’ (2003)

‘In addition to understanding how the cognitive processes of participants are influenced by social interaction, we need to understand how learning events themselves take place in the interactions between participants’ Rupert Wegerif (2006, p11)

Introduction

This is the first in a series of posts on our experience of using Wave for collaborative, peer-to-peer project planning on a masters course. There will be a bibliography in the last post

Google Wave has rapidly established itself as a significant presence in the social networking environment, dividing opinion between those who see it as a confusing, time wasting gimmick and those who see it as a potentially powerful tool for collaboration, networking and information sharing.

This post outlines how I and my students on the online part time Masters in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the LCC explored Wave as a collaborative environment in which to research, plan and discuss  project ideas with their peers. In the following posts, I explain what Wave is, and then outline the context of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) and Computer Mediated Communication (CMC), before detailing our experiences of using Wave and the results of my evaluation of it.

The course I teach  has developed over the last 3 years using the model of a virtual community of practice (Wenger, 1998, 2002) as the central pedagogic foundation. Central to this is the idea of collaborative learning as a route to individual enhancement as a practitioner, often in a dialogic, conversational format. The students, staff and tutors never meet physically, but instead communicate using a variety of overlapping synchronous and asynchronous platforms which provide spaces for formal and informal learning, with varying temporalities between real time and what I call ‘own time’ i.e. the time that suits the learner best. One area that we work hard on developing is the potential for peer-to-peer learning and collaborative support, using discussion forums, blogs and group tutorials to further enhance the potential for this. However, we identified a need for a space for feedback that crossed the boundaries between synchronous and asynchronous spaces, deciding together that we needed a collaborative area to quickly respond to ideas and projects. We therefore embarked together on a trial of Google Wave to explore whether it could solve this problem.

We explored using Wave as a ‘brainstorming’ space to receive critical feedback, advice and support. The level of critical engagement with each other’s work has been very high, with exchanges often reaching a level of intensity and interaction that is rare in a face-to-face tutorial. Most of this interaction has been peer-to-peer; whilst the presence of a tutor has sometimes been seen necessary to validate the concepts, mostly it is each other’s advice and commentary that is acted upon. One idea that has been particularly successful is a weekly ‘Wave day’ where students and staff regularly check in, responding to each others comments, making Wave an almost real time experience and creating powerful feedback loops. Overall, Wave has proven to be a useful vehicle to enhance communication, collaboration, engagement and interaction.

Here is a short flipbite I made reflecting on building communities of practice in HE

paul lowe on building a community of practice for learning from paul lowe on Vimeo.

Here are the references for the talk i’m giving at Photo Next in Stockholm, Feb 5th 2010 on communites of practice in postgraduate education

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
Wesch, M, From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments, http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/knowledgable-knowledge-able retrieved 15 April 2009