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Reflection on keeping an e-learning blog for 1,000 days
Fig. 1. The Open University’s Masters in Open and Distance Education (MAODE).
Expressed as a Wordle. A personal collection of key influencers based on those tagged in this blog. Includes my own reading and indulgences.
On Friday, at midday, my ou student blog reached a significant milestone.
I’ve been at it for 33 months. I’ve blogged the best part of FIVE modules now – most of which required or invited some use of the blog platform (or another). It required little encouragement – I used to keep a diary and have found since 1999 that in their digital form they are an extraordinarily versatile way to gather, consider, share and develop ideas.
Modules
- H807 – Innovations in e-Learning
- H808 – Technology Enhanced Learning: Practices and debate
- H800 – The e-Learning Professional
- B822 – Creativity, Innovation & Change
- H810 – Accessibility online learning: supporting disabled students
The investment in time, on average, an hour a day in addition to – though sometimes instead of coursework over 1000+ days.
(This excludes 8 months I spent on the Masters in Open and Distance Learning in 2001)
To mark this event, and as I need to go through this online diary, this e-journal, this ‘web-log’ (as they were also once momentarily called) ahead of some exciting meetings coming up next week I thought a simple task might be to click through the tags to identify who have been the key influencers in my reading and thinking over the last two and a half years.
Fig.2. Another way of looking at it. Betham, Conole and Weller are key MOADE authors from the Open University. John Seely Brown is a vital undercurrent, Engestrom one of several enthusiasms like Vygostky. While Gagne, second hand hardback, needs to be on your desk for frequent reference.
What I thought would take an hour has taken nearly 40 hours.
Clicking on a tag opens a corner of my head, the notes take me back to that day, that week, that assignment or task. It also takes me back to the discussions, resources and papers. And when I find an error the proof-reader in me has to fix. Aptly, as we approach November 5th, and living in Lewes where there are marches and fireworks from late October for a couple of weeks peaking of course all evening on the 5th, my head feels as if someone has accidentally set light to a box of assorted fireworks.
Just as well. Meetings these days are like a viva voce with eager ears and probing questions – they want the content of my mind and whatever else I bring to the subject after thirty years in corporate training and communications.
Fig. 3. Wordle allows you to say how many words you want to include in the mix. To create weight I had to repeat the names I consider most important twice, three or four times in the list. I also removed first names as these would scattered into the mix independently like peppercorns in a pan of vegetable stock.
The Task
- List all authors who have been part of my learning and thinking over the last couple of years.
- Include authors that my antennae have picked up that are relevant to my interest in learning, design, the moving image and the english language.
- Visualise this and draw some conclusions
Fig.4. This even makes the key protagonists look like an advertising agency Gagne, Beetham, Conole and Weller.
The Outcome
I can never finish. Take this morning. I stumble upon my notes on three case studies on the use of e-portfolios from H807 which I covered from February 2010-September 2010. To begin with I feel compelled to correct the referencing in order to understand the value, pertinence and good manners (let alone the legal duty) to cite things correctly. (Even though this post was locked – a ‘private’ dump of grabs and my thoughts).
Then I add an image or two.
These days I feel a post requires a visual expression of its contents to open and benefits from whatever other diagrams, charts or images you can conjure from your mind or a Google Search – ‘the word’ + images creative commons – is how I play it.
Fig. 5. From David Oglivy’s book ‘Ogilvy on advertising’ – a simple suggestion – a striking image, a pertinent headline and always caption the picture. Then write your body copy.
A background in advertising has something to do with this and the influence of David Ogilvy.
I spend over two hours on the first of three case studies in just one single post. At the time I rubbished e-portfolios. The notes and references are there. Tapped back in I can now make something of it. A second time round the terms, the ideas – even some of the authors are familiar. It makes for an easier and relevant read. What is more, it is current and pertinent. A blog can be a portfolio – indeed this is what I’d recommend.
From time to time I will have to emerge from this tramp through the jungle of my MAODE mind.
Not least to work, to sleep, to cook and play.
Fig. 6. In a word
Along the way this behaviour, these actions, me being me, has found me working at the Open University for a year, and then at Lumesse a global corporate e-learning company. In the last month two international organisations have had me in, in the last week four more have been in touch online including interest from Australia, France and North America. Next week a magical triad may occur when I broker a collaboration between two of them with me holding their respective hands to initiate a project. There could be no better validation for the quality, depth, impact and life-changing consequences of seeing this OU degree through.
On verra (we will see)
USEFUL LINKS
REFERENCE
Gagne, R.N. (1965) Conditions of Learning : Holt, Rinehart and Winston
Fig. 1. James Mason and Sue Lyon in Lolita (1962) Directed by Stanley Kubrick
‘I could use a colourful swimming costume’.
This pegs the following ideas:
Interconnectness
Complicatedness
Uncertainty
Ambiguity
Conflict
Societal Constraints
And recalling the authors Mason & Mitroff (1981)
However, I need to visualise this.
Perhaps the actor James Mason (in his Nabakov role of Humbert Humbert from ‘Lolita’) with a Russian girl called ‘Olga Mitroff’.
Everyone around them are wearing colourful Versace swimming costumes whereas their’s are plain black. She is black and young, suggesting the ‘complexity’ required here and they are standing on the end of a springboard, like walking the plank, and holding hands to give me ‘conflict’ and ‘connectedness’ even disaproval from those around them and so ‘societal constraints’. All I need to do now is peg this further with an orange flavoured fruit Polo. And then be able to add a couple of relevant sentences to each. Assuming there is a question from which this ‘mind dump’ can provide some detail.
Why does this all matter?
I’ve been learning in B822 how to apply a variety of creative problem solving techniques to business problems; both the theory and practice says the the problem you are dealing with has to indicate all the above to warrant a creative problem solving approach.
Beyond the exam I can and will apply this to what I do which has in the past been solving communications problems using creativity in the execution of ideas.
REFERENCE
Mason, R.O. and Mitroff, II. (1981) Challenging Strategic Planning Assumptions, Chichester: Wiley
Talking about social media learning
A call from a colleague with a major corporate and we talk social media learning for nearly three hours.
During this time I repeatedly search this blog, using the e-portfolio that it has become, sending charts and grabs from Picasa and from the iPad, creating a mind-map in Bubbl.us and balancing how the MA in Open and Distance Learning compares to the OU MBA he completed last year and the MRes he is doing now.
Just a phone call. We could have gone to Skype, Elluminate or even Google+. The phone freed up the laptop. Several photos picked up from workshops, as well as screen grabs, were emailed from the iPad which was also running.
Fig.1. Social Media Learning Mind Map
Timely as I am procrastinating over the ECA which will be on the use of Forums and Mobile devices in e-learning.
A reminder of how a synchronous conversation can achieve so much, especially when there were items set before our eyes to discuss.
We also discussed (I hadn’t the energy to take many notes. In retrospect I wish I’d recorded it):
- Belbin Team Roles
- Activity Theory
- Management Mindsets
- Silos
- Web 2.0
- Learning on the periphery
- Vicarious Learning
- Medical Market Research
- TV Production
- The role of an Alumni Board
- Narrative
- Research
- Assessment
- Blogs as ‘electronic paper’
It was invaluable to have the external point of view, someone from a global comany of thousands talking about social media learning. Looking at the devices we now have, such as smartphones and tablets, it was particularly interesting to be reminded of human nature, how devices may be used for things and in ways that they were not designed.
Whilst the iPad permits mobility, we often use it when static: in our favourite chair, recumbant on the sofa, even in bed or in the bath. Is this mobile learning? It’s hardly getting out of the house, drawing down data on the run using augmented technology to enhance the environment your in. And simply having content on an iPad so that you can using the touch screen to open and close the text, enlarging text, flipping the screen size between portrait and landscape all the time – the joy of its tactile nature. Unable to sleep I use the light from the iPad as a torch to sneak away from the marital bed and passed the children’s bedrooms and to find my way downstairs withouth having to put the landing light on.
It also was clear how both devices and approaches to learning cannot be isolated, we got our joint heads around Engestrom’s ‘Activity Systems’. The technology is complementary, the move to personalise everything through device and software choices.
I’d played Devil’s Adocat a couple of times suggesting that ‘nothing had changed’ only to come away agreeing that many of my behaviours were/are different as a direct result of Web 2.0. I have gone from learning in private, hunched over my books never showing it to anyone to a situations where, more like someone tending a public garden, or at least one seen from the street, people can see my thinking. Ironically, it is the end result that often fails to appear because I’m not about to post TMAs and ECAs online.
Some authors I quoted/cited during the conversation:
- Vygotsky
- Engestrom
- Richardson
- Moon
- Cox
- John Seely Brown
- Jonathan Swift
To which I subsequently add as a result of browsing the blog and so re-engaging with my own experience within the chronology of the module; it is this, after all, that is to be examined, rather than my knowledge from this and the preceding modules. A learning design fault?
- H807 You diddle about with every instrument in the orchestra and several that have just been invented.
- H808 You learn to conduct, or at least why a conductor is important (even if you can’t play an instrument or read music).
- H800 You learn to play an electronic keyboard
I quoted Swift as saying (paraphrasing) ‘I don’t know what I mean until I hear myself speak’. If anyone has any idea how to cite this please do offer your thoughts.
More authors to consider in this context (mobile learning, forums, e-learning, web 2.0):
- Haythornthwaite
- O’Reilly
- Weller
- Traxler
- Gregory
- Mason
- Sharpe
- Beetham
- Belshaw
- Hinchcliffe
- Bacon and Dillon
- Siemens
- Boyer
- Wenger
- Bruner
Other topics that we should have discussed:
- User Generated Content
- Collective Intelligence
- Apprenticeships
- Problem based learning
- Participation
- Demand Pull
BEING DEVELOPED FURTHER HERE
http://socialmedia4education.wordpress.com/2011/09/08/social-learning-for-corporates/
62 matters relating to Social Media Learning
A call from a colleague with a major corporate and we talk social media learning for nearly three hours.
During this time I repeatedly search this blog, using the e-portfolio that it has become, sending charts and grabs from Picasa and from the iPad, creating a mind-map in Bubbl.us and balancing how the MA in Open and Distance Learning compares to the OU MBA he completed last year and the MRes he is doing now.
Just a phone call. We could have gone to Skype, Elluminate or even Google+. The phone freed up the laptop. Several photos picked up from workshops, as well as screen grabs, were emailed from the iPad which was also running.
INSERT IMAGE
Fig.1. Social Media Learning Mind Map
Timely as I am procrastinating over the ECA which will be on the use of Forums and Mobile devices in e-learning.
A reminder of how a synchronous conversation can achieve so much, especially when there were items set before our eyes to discuss.
We also discussed (I hadn’t the energy to take many notes. In retrospect I wish I’d recorded it):
- Belbin Team Roles
- Activity Theory
- Management Mindsets
- Silos
- Web 2.0
- Learning on the periphery
- Vicarious Learning
- Medical Market Research
- TV Production
- The role of an Alumni Board
- Narrative
- Research
- Assessment
- Blogs as ‘electronic paper’
It was invaluable to have the external point of view, someone from a global comany of thousands talking about social media learning. Looking at the devices we now have, such as smartphones and tablets, it was particularly interesting to be reminded of human nature, how devices may be used for things and in ways that they were not designed.
Whilst the iPad permits mobility, we often use it when static: in our favourite chair, recumbant on the sofa, even in bed or in the bath. Is this mobile learning? It’s hardly getting out of the house, drawing down data on the run using augmented technology to enhance the environment your in. And simply having content on an iPad so that you can using the touch screen to open and close the text, enlarging text, flipping the screen size between portrait and landscape all the time – the joy of its tactile nature. Unable to sleep I use the light from the iPad as a torch to sneak away from the marital bed and passed the children’s bedrooms and to find my way downstairs withouth having to put the landing light on.
It also was clear how both devices and approaches to learning cannot be isolated, we got our joint heads around Engestrom’s ‘Activity Systems’. The technology is complementary, the move to personalise everything through device and software choices.
I’d played Devil’s Adocat a couple of times suggesting that ‘nothing had changed’ only to come away agreeing that many of my behaviours were/are different as a direct result of Web 2.0. I have gone from learning in private, hunched over my books never showing it to anyone to a situations where, more like someone tending a public garden, or at least one seen from the street, people can see my thinking. Ironically, it is the end result that often fails to appear because I’m not about to post TMAs and ECAs online.
Some authors I quoted/cited during the conversation:
- Vygotsky
- Engestrom
- Richardson
- Moon
- Cox
- John Seely Brown
- Jonathan Swift
To which I subsequently add as a result of browsing the blog and so re-engaging with my own experience within the chronology of the module; it is this, after all, that is to be examined, rather than my knowledge from this and the preceding modules. A learning design fault?
- H807 You diddle about with every instrument in the orchestra and several that have just been invented.
- H808 You learn to conduct, or at least why a conductor is important (even if you can’t play an instrument or read music).
- H800 You learn to play an electronic keyboard
I quoted Swift as saying (paraphrasing) ‘I don’t know what I mean until I hear myself speak’. If anyone has any idea how to cite this please do offer your thoughts.
More authors to consider in this context (mobile learning, forums, e-learning, web 2.0):
- Haythornthwaite
- O’Reilly
- Weller
- Traxler
- Gregory
- Mason
- Sharpe
- Beetham
- Belshaw
- Hinchcliffe
- Bacon and Dillon
- Siemens
- Boyer
- Wenger
- Bruner
Other topics that we should have discussed:
- User Generated Content
- Collective Intelligence
- Apprenticeships
- Problem based learning
- Participation
- Demand Pull
REFERENCE
Cox, R. (2006) Vicarious Learning and Case-based Teaching of Clinical Reasoning Skills (2004–2006) [online], http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/ esrcinfocentre/ viewawardpage.aspx?awardnumber=RES-139-25-0127 [(last accessed 10 March 2011).
Virtual Society? Technology, Cyberbole, Reality
To what extent do you think that all five of Woolgar’s themes are relevant to virtual worlds?
The answer is to look both ways and to do so with aplomb.
Read Woolgar’s five themes.
| 1 | The uptake and use of the new technologies depend crucially on local social context | Liff et al. (2002) demonstrated the importance of ‘third-place’ settings, separate from both home and work, as influential in engaging a wide range of local people in using the internet: museums, trains or jogging circuits. In all these places technology now enables people to learn using the resources of formal education. The idea of ‘place’ takes on a new form, as the boundaries of a multitude of sites are crossed. |
| 2 | The fears and risks, anticipations and enthusiasms associated with new technologies are unevenly socially distributed | Woolgar cites research into surveillance equipment in support of this theme. Counter to expectation, for example, surveillance technologies in the workplace were not found to be generally resisted by workers. However, acceptance was undermined by the failures of the technology to meet design specifications. This led to extra work and sometimes the technology had to be scaled back (Mason et al., 2002). There are differences between staff and students in universities, in terms of perception and usage of ICT. |
| 3 | Virtual technologies supplement rather than substitute for real activities | Electronic communication has multiplied the use of paper in offices, though we can read material online. Learners may feel less need for the printed page. Educators look to substitute electronic supports for expensive and scarce direct tutor contact. |
| 4 | The more virtual the more real | One unanticipated outcome of teleworking was that travel increased. Electronic communication increased the number of clients contacted and a face-to-face meeting was then required. Computer-mediated communication is being used, partly because it offers benefits for learning and partly because students seem less able to, or to have less time available for, travel to study centres to attend tutorials. It may be, however, that mediated communication using one tool encourages a somewhat different form using other tools. Thus learners may use forums provided by their institution, but also Facebook, Skype and Twitter. |
| 5 | The more global the more local | ‘The very effort to escape local context, to promote one’s transcendent global (and/or virtual) identity, actually depends on specifically local ways of managing the technology’ (Woolgar, 2002, p.19). In Singapore, for example, the Singapore Institute of Management was the base for provision, and a careful fostering of mutual understandings between the two organisations was developed over at least a decade
Educational provision is typically seen as valid and trusted only if it is located within recognised local institutions and accredited by local awarding bodies – even though the technology enables all aspects of a course to be delivered electronically from the originating institution. |
Having just completed the activities about Second Life, to what extent do you think that all five of Woolgar’s themes are relevant to virtual worlds?
| 1 | The uptake and use of the new technologies depend crucially on local social context. | Not one bit, in this case any versioning is simply the English language (US). |
| 2 | The fears and risks, anticipations and enthusiasms associated with new technologies are unevenly socially distributed. | The context will include access to broadband, a computer, time to indulge, family attitudes to gaming, space in the home, time to indulge, other commitments (persona, family, school and/or work). |
| 3 | Virtual technologies supplement rather than substitute for real activities. | Substitute. It has become too easy to tap into a game that is, like the modem and some computing devices, on through all waking hours and readily accessible. A blended form of activity often occurs with participants playing together online, sometimes coming round to each other’s houses to do so. |
| 4 | The more virtual the more real. | On the contrary, seeking out the tricks and cheats is very much the culture of gaming. Even if you don’t have wholly real-life attributes ways are found to defy gravity, walk through walls, I’ve even see a sub-culture underneath or behind the game in which you behave/exist play and muck about ‘subway’ like behind the set, as it were. |
| 5 | The more global the more local. | In the context of business working at the OU Business and Law School I have first hand knowledge of how OU materials are developed for Russian partners (the 1000th MBA student celebrated this week) and are being initiated in Japan while having various other local centres globally. Though NOT in the US or France where local politics have restricted tutoring on the ground. |
Select two of the five themes that you feel most strongly reflect the way in which you perceive the effects that technology is making currently in a context known to you.
| Reflection | Example | |
| 4
The more virtual the more real |
On the one hand there is a culture of gaming that attracts escapism and engenders a rule-breaking sub-culture of hacking with cheats a supplementary and important quest and reward. On the other webcasting and conferences whilst becoming more real, speaking and seeing each other in real-time, nonetheless afford less than real behaviours. | I attended a live-cast 250 miles away and did so in my PJs, not dressed for the office. When interviewed by an organisation in New York I set up an redecorated one corner of a bedroom rather than reveal that I was sitting either at the end of a bed, or at the kitchen table, or in an office the size of a walk-in cupboard and as messy as a shed-used as a dump for unwanted stuff. It is a different reality, sometimes a ‘hyper-real,’ that as we become familiar with its nuances will play to these differing attributes and so become distinct from reality … or of course, enrolled in that universe that we call ‘real’, which of course it is. |
| 5
The more global the more local |
Thinking directly of the technology, it strikes me that there is a global language: HTML. Are these codes not universal? | Watch the HSBC bank ads and see how we have two distinct types: the importance of local knowledge on the one hand, followed by the current roll-out support for their ‘Key’ which is universal. i.e. there is a duality, that is Janus-like. Aptly Janus is the god of transitions. He is depicted as having two faces on his head facing opposite directions and so look simultaneously into the future and the past, back at the last year and forward to the next. What strikes me about HSBC is that whilst globally owned and operated, it works to meet not impose local cultures; while this new ‘key’ with its diddy 1970s like plastic key-ring calculator code generator and the concept of bolts, locks and vaults, feels highly retro. |
REFERENCE
Liff, S., Steward, F. and Watts, P. (2002) ‘New public places for internet access: networks for practice-based learning and social inclusion’ in Woolgar, S. (ed.) Virtual Society? Technology, Cyberbole, Reality, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp.78–98.
Mason, D., Button, G., Lankshear, G. and Coates, S.(2002) ‘Getting real about surveillance and privacy at work’ in Woolgar, S. (ed.) Virtual Society? Technology, Cyberbole, Reality, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp.137–52.
Thorpe, M. and Godwin, S. (2006) ‘Computer-mediated interaction in context’ in Markauskaite, L., Goodyear, P. and Reimann, P. (eds) ‘Who’s Learning? Whose Technology?’, Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the Australian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education, University of Sydney, Australia; also available online at http://routes.open.ac.uk/ ixbin/ hixclient.exe?_IXDB_=routes&_IXSPFX_=g&submit button=summary&%24+with+res_id+is+res20033 (last accessed 10 February 2011).
Thorpe, M. (2008) Effective online interaction: mapping course design to bridge from research to practice, Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, vol.24, no.1, pp.57–72. This article provides an in-depth case study of a well-designed sequence of conferencing and online activity and introduces a particular form of concept mapping called ‘compendium’ to demonstrate the design.
Thorpe, M. (2009) ‘Technology-mediated learning contexts’ in Edwards, R., Biesta, G. and Thorpe, M. (eds) Rethinking Contexts for Learning and Teaching: Communities, Activities and Networks, Abingdon, Routledge, pp.119–32.
Woolgar, S. (1999) ‘Analytic scepticism’ in Dutton, W.D. (ed.) Society on the Line: Information Politics in the Digital Age, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Woolgar, S. (ed.) (2002) Virtual Society? Technology, Cyberbole, Reality, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
E-Learning : Further reding from the OU
Further reading and distractions. Several I’d recommend here for H800ers and H807ers and H808ers. In deed, anyone on the MAODE.
A couple reveal other interests (Swimming, History) as well as business interests (Digital Marketing/Social Networking)
I just craved a read, cover to cover, rather than all the reports and soundbites. At the top of my list for relevance is the 1994 translation of Lev Vygotsky from a book that was originally published in 1926 – highly relevant to e-learning because perhaps only with Web 2.0 can his ideas be put into action. Also Rhona Sharpe and Helen Beetham (eds) on ‘Rethinking Pedagogy for the Digital Age’, just the kind of thing we read anyway, just valuable to read the entire collection as there is a pattern, a train of thought you follow through the book with an excellent introduction to each chapter by the editors. Others? Several on the corporate side, impressed with Larry Webber. Several practical if you are teaching and want loads of ‘how to’ e-tivities. Don’t touch Prensky – inflated and vacuous. I don’t understand why or how come he is so often brought into conversations … because he irritates people into speaking out?
Mind Bursts 