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

‘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.

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.

Web 2.0 is widely used by children, with over 74% having at least one social networking site account and the use of email and instant messaging is almost ubiquitous. However, most of this activity takes place OUTSIDE the school – 49% blogged outside of school with only 9% blogging inside school, whilst 69% had a social networking profile, but only 8% used it  within the  school. The only real area where school use was widespread was in the use of wikipedia, where over 73% used it in school. Only 8% of learners do not use Web 2.0 tools at all, and only 24% do not use social networking sites. But the really interesting part are the analysis of what these activities mean. The report finds that despite this high level of activity, there is “little evidence of groundbreaking activities and only a few embryonic signs of criticality, self-management and metacognitive reflection”
However, the report does acknowledge that web 2.0 can be useful in several key areas in shifting the pedagogy and methodology towards a new learning paradigm. Specifically, it finds that web 2.0 stimulates new modes of enquiry, in particular engaging in collaborative learning activities and engaging with new literacies. The report makes some fascinating comparisons between traditional school based learning and the new paradigm, making the following paired comparisons:

Private learning versus collaborative learning
Creative editing versus cutting and pasting (highlighting the danger sof the quick fix of cut and paste from the internet)
Serial processing versus parallel processing (and the growth of tagging and ‘folksonomy’)
Successive attention versus simultaneous attention (multitasking)
Authorised knowledge versus distributed knowledge (the need for some form of directed guidance to the web)

It also sounds a warning note as to why the adoption of web 2.0 may have to be a slow and steady progression, rather than an overnight sensation.  The report found that

‘Most teachers interviewed saw social networking as ‘play’, and as a medium to be discouraged in school. Most young people surveyed, however, saw social networking as usefully transient and private, occupying a space safely distant from the gaze of their teachers and parents.’

emphasising the division between school life and personal life.  But it also cites the new demands web 2.0 makes on learners to adopt new modes of learning, and the products of this learning then need to be accommodated into the school curriculum – how do we assess group collaborative work for example.

The report found that Web 2.0 approaches worked best when there were flexible models of learning, with Web 2.0 approaches embedded in the curriculum, both within and across subjects, coupled with support for student learning at home. This needed to be backed up with sufficient computer infrastructure, bandwidth, and technical support, and needed support and encouragement from senior management, with sufficient resources dedicated to training and development, especially for innovators. All this had to be backed up by a clear and reasonable e-safety policy that allowed maximum access possible whilst still providing adequate levels of protection for students.

The reports conclusion notes that
‘Perhaps one key implication for practice, therefore, is for evangelists, innovators and visionaries (and policy-makers) to take careful account of just how much is being asked of teachers in encouraging the wider implementation of Web 2.0, and to recognise that relatively slow and cautious progress is inevitable. That progress may require inspiration sustained with resources that meet both the infrastructure and pedagogic challenges. But it may also require deeper consideration of the wider fabric of curricula, assessment, and established practices for designing sites of teaching and learning.’
So the  need is  to take things slowly, build out from outposts of innovation and prove the need for web 2.0, and then see the transformations emerge organically from experience. What does this mean for higher education and businesses? Well at present it seems that children are going to emerge from school with a lot of experience of web 2.0 in their personal lives, but not much concept of how to apply that to other spheres. So the responsibility of educators at that level is going to be, at least for a generation or so, to provide the guidance and mentoring to allow learners to combine their familiarity with web 2.0 with a critical sensibility of how to use it to enhance their understanding of the world. We need to help them analyse and critique their world, and do that in a collaborative way through dialogue.

A recent presentation by Chris Lehmann sums it up really well, (thanks to kevin’s blog engaged learning for this, the slideshare is at ignite philly)  he calls for us  to ‘make technology like oxygen, ubiquitous, necessary and invisible’, and then use it to help students

Research:Collaborate:Create:Present:Network

A great clarion call for all levels of education!

“One thing we misunderstand frequently when talking about how great and amazing social media is comes from the fact that we’re thinking from the perspective of what we want the tool to do while the people who are receiving the message might be thinking about the tools in the abstract. When we talk about how Twitter forges real time conversations and delivers business value, others show up and see us bitching about a late flight and live tweeting the baseball game. When we talk about how blogging changes the world, other people are slogging through all the crap blogs indexed by Google when they’re looking for actual useful information.”

He makes a very interesting point that when a new technological tool emerges, we spend the first part of its life trying to figure out what it is useful for. At a certain point, that process becomes transparent, when the tool just becomes embedded in our daily lives – think of the cell phone or even email, how they didn’t exist a generation ago, then they were a minority interest mainly for professionals and now are ubiquitous and we couldn’t imagine life without them.

his key point is that social media tools are just that, tools for communication that allow for more “nuance”, the revolution as he sees it is in how we use them.
In his case it is to market products to consumers, but in our sphere i think the key is in personalising learning, so each learner feels more like they are getting a bespoke educational experience that is tailored just to them, a unique learning journey where others have laid out some signposts, but by forming alliances and communities of practice with like-minded voyagers, their journey is a far richer experience than it could have been previously.

That’s certainly been my experience with using blogs in my post grad course, they have greatly enhanced the ‘personality’ of the students for me, and opened up their thought processes in amazing ways.

For me, these tools are about communication, collaboration, collective knowledge and connected knowledge.

The other thing was to invite the MAPJD online students I work with to the ning site i set up ages ago, but wasn’t sure whether or not to make it live. The choice of ning by such an experienced group as the facilitators of this workshop gave me the confidence to go with it. So I’m interested if anyone else is using it for running a course in higher education, we are hoping to use it as a ‘virtual commons’ to mirror the physical social spaces of a f2f environment, as well as to keep the group informed of key dates, classes etc etc.I am part of a team at my university who are trying to ‘demonstrate the need’ for a more web 2.0/social networking approach to HE, and we are trying to find something that can sit within our existing VLE (blackboard) and offer more interactivity and feedback, so we can then get the investment that building something like elgg would need.
One problem with this is that ning doesn’t seem to be able to sit ‘inside’ a window in another browser so that it ‘looks’ like it is embedded within BB, which netvibes can – has anyone used netvibes as a portal for information etc? -  its what michael wesch uses on his anthropology course at kansas.

We as an institution are stuck with BB for at least the next 3 years or so, so there is a team of us trying to work from within it – it does do some things like student enrollment etc etc reasonably well – so we populate our courses from bb and then add the content using whatever plug in software we want. So far we are trying things out, and i suspect that something like elgg or drupal wil be the final solution, but until we can justify the investment in something like that ning et al provide a realistic short term way to experiment and  ‘demonstrate the need’

The Q is how much work needs to be done in order to create an environment where the average user can easily get in and set up a site like this one- we talk a lot about targeting the ‘hump’ – the middle area of staff who will use new tools if they are easy and quick to master, we will never impact on the bottom of the hump – those who are so old school that they will never change – nor do we need to affect those at the top – the early adopters who are already doing stuff. We need to create the conditions for change amongst the middle to see real benefits.

I’ve been working on applying blogging to developing Donald Schon’s concept of the reflective practitioner and his idea of the practicum as a 

‘virtual world, relatively free of the pressures, distractions, and risks of the real one, to which, nevertheless it refers. It stands in the intermediate space between the practice world, the ‘lay world’ of ordinary life, and the esoteric world of the academy’ (Schon, 1987 p37).

This is a space to build a community of practice, where the processes of problem solving, experimentation, coaching and building a professional repertoire of experiences can be undertaken. Blogs can act as the ‘glue’ to hold these activities together, acting as a reflective commentary on the practitioner’s growth.

My argument is that blogs provide a perfect vehicle for reflection and critical self-awareness, and as such they provide the possibility of what I term the eflective practitioner, because of their unique qualities that raise them above traditional learning journals.

The key reasons for this are that they map the learning journey in real time; they are deeply personal, giving a whole person view; they use rich media that becomes searchable and reconfigurable using tagging; they are portable and easy to access; they encourage dialogue, interaction with an audience and peer group feedback; and they are emotional and playful too. They also give great insights into how learners learn, articulating how experience is transformed into learning.  

I’ve posted a presentation on this that is a modified version of my Wimba talk that I also gave at the designs on e learning conference 2008 at Penn State here at slideshare

you can sign up at workliteracy here

Thanks to anyone who attended my talk in the Wimba distinguished lecture series on wed 24th sept, there were over 60 people online from australia to the USA pretty much spanning the time zones. Here are the references for the talk:

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.Cowan, John, (2006), On Becoming an Innovative University Teacher, 2^nd Ed, 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.Higher Education Academy UK Centre for Legal Education (2008) Introduction to Developing Reflective Practice. http://www.ukcle.ac.uk/resources/reflection/introduction.html Retrieved 14 June 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.

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.

Williams, J B and Jacobs, J (2004) Exploring the use of blogs as learning spaces in the higher education sector, Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 20(2) p232-245, http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet20/williams.html. Retrieved June 15th 2008.

Kolb’s learning cycle has been expanded on and developed by many authors, with Cowan’s learning spiral and Boud and Webb’s learning patterns developments of the concept. However, even though they develop beyond the Kolbian analogy, most of these still suggest a relatively linear progression through the various stages. However, the relationship between experiential learning, reflection, the practitioner’s established repertoire and knowledge and the development of new levels of understanding is more fluid and cross-referencing that these models suggest. In many ways, the analogy is with the experience of the web, with hyperlinks connecting different levels of shallow and deep knowledge and information, some of which is very ‘hard ‘ and academic, and some of which is ‘softer’ and more anecdotal or personal. To continue this analogy then, I therefore suggest the metaphor of a cloud of learning, where at various points all these different elements are more or less relevant to the progress of understanding, depending on the exact circumstances of each learning experience. Thinking of this in a more three dimensional way, the linkages, connections and cross references that occur are much more complex and interdependent than traditional two-dimensional models, and the ‘eureka moment’, generated by Schon’s concept of ‘back talk’, (Schon 1987) when apparently unconnected concepts inform each other is more easily explained. This complex process of articulating experience into learning is typical of the ‘real world’ of work based learning, where problems have to be solved using a wide range of skills, abilities, knowledge and analysis that draws on practical understanding, ethical awareness, emotion, technical ability and intuition.

This is where the blog, I believe, has a vital role to play in sitting inside the learning cloud, acting as the fulcrum and catalyst for the learning experience, serving as a place to simultaneously record, reflect, plan, discuss, review and explore ones ideas, testing them out both on oneself and on an invited audience of peers and mentors. The fluid, flexible nature of the blog, with its relatively unstructured hierarchy combined with the ability to search the archive using tags and categories, allows a ‘stream of consciousness’ style of writing whilst retaining the ability to rapidly and easily cross reference individual posts, reslicing the thoughts of the writer in countless ways depending on the search terms used. This is analogous to the ‘double entry’ format of journal that Moon suggests, where entries can be retuned to and revisited in the light of future experiences. Finally, their open-ended and inherently ‘unfinished’ nature echoes Schon’s insight into ‘the value of incompleteness’ (Schon, 1987, p 272), with the implication that learning is a developmental process, where the journey is as important as the destination.