Learning Conversations

I was really pleased I managed to get to Edinburgh for yesterday's Curverider Conference. As others mentioned during the day, it was like a meeting of people who've known each other for a while. Even though I had never met any of them before, there were so many people there who's blogs I read regularly, I felt I knew them already.

Here's a quick run down of the day - with some of my key learning points highlighted. I had to leave before Ben Werdmuller's keynote at the end, so I'm looking forward to picking that up when it goes live on Google video.

We started with a presentation from Terry Anderson on Institutional Adoption Issues with Social Software. I've been following Terry's work for a while; his open-source book on "The Theory & Practice of Online Learning" has been a major influence.

Athabasca University has a totally different model to most if not all educational organisations, in that they operate continuous enrolment - you can join a course at any time. This has great advantages (in that you learn when you need to learn, not when the organisation says you can learn), but great disadvantages, particularly around building groups of collaborative learners. Terry sees social software (and specifically Elgg) playing a part in solving this problem. Even so, there are always barriers to adoption in the mainstream part of the organisation. He led us through some of the models & theories around innovation - which need a lot more thinking about than I've done so far.

One thing that Terry said, and formed the basis for quite a bit of informal discussion later, was about the demise of the VLE/LMS - at a point when a lot of companies & schools are only just starting to work out what a VLE is good for. I think he's right, but I also think that moving straight to a social networking environment for supporting learning might be a step too far for many organisations - given the complete paradigm shift and reassignment of control that it entails. [And anyway, I've got too much tied up in Moodle to give up with it that easily. :-) ]

Learning Points:

For social software to work well you need to have a critical mass of contributors.

Papers to read:
Learning, Technology and Educational Transformation

Examining the Ed. Tech. Metamorphosis:
Emerging Butterfly or Deleterious Root Worm?
http://education.ed.pacificu.edu/bcis/workshop/adoption.html

Adoption of learning technologies in schools and universities
http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~lsherry/pubs/newadopt.htm

Terry's presentation will be available from: http://www.athabascau.ca/html/staff/academic/terrya.html

Misja Hoebe presented his experiences at CHN University in the Netherlands. CHN is a global university, with a common curriculum, with many students travelling between campuses for different parts of their programmes. They are re-emphasising their philosophy which puts Problem Based Learning as the main means of developing learners. With this approach, the student is in the centre of everything, and any system that is used to support learning needs to take this into account. It sounded like Misja is on a quest to find a small toolkit of preferred applications - one of which is most probably going to be Elgg, which is based totally around the individual.

Learning Points

Elgg can integrate with LDAP - which is critical if you need to get a lot of people, within an organisation, into the system very quickly, which is necessary to gain the critical mass required to sustain the
"community". Not so helpful in our CPD Connections context, which isn't tied to any particular organisation.

www.cpdconnections.net

Stan Stanier from Brighton University was next up. Brighton will be the largest implementation of Elgg, with over 30000 users. They are integrating it into StudentCentral, which is their portal for students (mainly based on Blackboard) and has the strapline "Cool, funky & georgeous", which sort of shows the attitude that the university is taking towards it. They're trying to make it as attractive and fun as possible, not necessarily functional like many organisation's VLEs.

Learning Points:

Clear branding is essential to build a sense of community. Even if people don't like the branding it needs to be there. A design that polarises people is better than one that is bland and unappealing.

The required critical mass for social networking is dependent on the culture of the group. If people don't want to post stuff online they won't. It's about people not technology. As Elliot Maisie highlighted a few years ago, success in elearning is 1/3 support, 1/3 motivation & 1/3 marketing.

Chris Sessums (from Floriday University) is another person who's blog posts teach me so much. He is involved in Teacher Training, and has a huge amount of insight into the ways in which social networking software can support teacher professional development. To be honest, I can't remember what his talk was about - I'm going to have to pick it up when it gets published. But even so I did learn a lot!

Learning Points:

As an example to use of a teacher using reflective writing to improve her practice, Barbara Ganley is probably one of the best.

http://mt.middlebury.edu/middblogs/ganley/bgblogging/

Banksy is a brilliant source of images - I'm not sure of his licensing policy though :-)

http://www.banksy.co.uk/

Most action research takes place in a vacuum, with teachers going through a cycle of: experiment, reflect, learn, experiment etc. What social networking does is allows the teacher to pick up ideas easily from other teachers who are trying similar experiments, or in similar situations. In a similar way to Stephen Downes' concept of teaching resources never being finished, instead they are improvements on the previous person's ideas, the same happens with teaching ideas.

Chris McKillop gave a presentation in which she highlighted the need for structure in reflection - giving people a scaffold, based on a story-telling idea - within which they could begin to reflect on practice. These prompts are along the lines of:

• Tell me a similar story to this one...
• What is your viewpoint on this story...
• I wonder what would happen if ...
• What have you learnt?

Next up, after an extended lunch break (thanks Ewan!), was Miles Berry. I'd spent a lot of time during the breaks with Miles and Terry Wassall and knew that we have a lot in common in the way we think about education , but I hadn't realised quite how similarly we think... You see Miles puts things in terms of journeys, landscapes & maps, which, for me, is a fantastic metaphor to use. It's a way of describing how learning happens in peoples' heads; that you build up a mental picture of how things fit together, just as you build up a picture of a new town (just as I did first thing in the morning when I wandered through and explored Edinburgh).

Learning Points:

Moodle (or similar systems) are useful to help take school to home.
Elgg (being based around the individual) is useful in taking home into school.

After Miles, we raced through a couple of presentations from Bill Fitzgerald & Kevin Jardine.

Bill was talking about building class web sites using Drupal. In a similar way to Misja he is focussing on the learners at the centre, and with the teacher as a co-learner. The beauty of doing it within Drupal instead of Elgg is that Drupal allows you to have fixed vocabularies as well as free tagging and then to extract particular groups or types of items based on the vocabulary used. I just wish that the admin side of Drupal was slightly easier to use. That's the problem with such a flexible system; unless you know exactly what you want to do with it, just playing often leaves you frustrated.

Kevin demonstrated a couple of exciting developments: OpenID and SSE feeds. OpenID means that you can set one application to authenticate users and then other applications just feed off of that single point of authentication and also get user profile information. It wasn't quite single sign-on, as you still needed to put in your OpenID username, but it's getting there. SSE feeds are similar to RSS, but they also contain information about updates to the data, and so can be used to feed search engines. Thus allowing one search engine to search multiple sites. The possibilities are endless... as demonstrated by the interest shown from the delegates at the conference.

To wrap up, thanks to Dave, Ben & Misja for organising a really good day. It was great to be able to put voices to the names & the pictures.

I've just got to sort out two things now - using what I've learnt:

• How to revitalize CPD Connections
• How to pull these ideas together into a cohorent plan for my dissertation on social networking and CPD