I am Anne Bartlett-Bragg and I am a lecturer in the Faculty of Education at UTS
(University of Technology) in Sydney. I lecture in e-learning in the organisational context which would include institutions, education institutions, higher education and corporate learning. In addition to that, I design e-learning landscapes as a consultancy business.
When I am designing learning environments, I tend to look at particularly the social software applications and think about how that could enrich, augment or possibly enhance the learning experience, particularly in social bookmarking. There probably wasn’t a need as such. We had a number of ways that we could already share resources, perhaps not as effectively, but it was more about ... what would this application provide that would give my learners an enriched experience and engage them in openly sharing their resources in a different sort of way to perhaps we’d been doing previously. So I guess I’m not looking at it as a solution or a need, but as a more enriched learning environment.
With any social software application, I have a bit of a philosophy that I won’t inflict it upon my students or learners, until I have tested it and played with it myself to get a concept of how they might experience that and then how will I embed that into the technologies that we might be going to use within our learning context. So it’s very much an, ‘I’ll try it first, think about the different ways that I can use it and therefore how can I use it with my learners and how might they use it amongst themselves?’
I start off with a fairly structured process of introduction, making sure everybody can log on, has logged on, can do the basic functions that the piece of software, the application we’ve selected, so they get the opportunity to just do it, basically, before we start looking
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at the more complex or abstract. For many people some of these concepts are really abstract – how that can play out in their own learning. So we just do some really basic functions until they are comfortable and then we start talking about opportunities to expand that. From then on, I really allow the students and learners to take their own context and look at how it can be integrated into their own context as well as our learning environments. They really take to that without too much difficulty, but that initial set-up and structure process is really crucial. If they can’t get past technology challenges, they won’t learn. The technology is just so much in the front-of-mind that the learning in the other context – whatever subject we are doing – can’t occur.
The set-up can take sometimes up to four weeks really, for people to get very comfortable where the technology isn’t full-grounded. Now, some educators will say, ‘Well, I don’t have four weeks; they’ve got to get it straight away’ but the time that you spend pacing that through, ensuring everybody is participating and getting the abstract concepts, is essential to sort of under-pinning further development, and as we go through the subject, we keep again sharing and talking about ideas and that’s where we start to come across different ways people have applied it and again, we de-brief and share and learn that and look at it from examples. We also will have people sort of saying, ‘Well, can I do this?
What if ...?’ and the minute I hear, ‘What if we did this?’ or ‘How can we do that?’ I realise that we have started to engage the learners in the processes as well, so we do spend quite a lot of time looking at each other’s work as well and seeing how it can be used.
I think it is important to explain your purposes of what you are attempting to do. The concepts as I said are still quite abstract for some people that have had little exposure to these types of applications and they will struggle sometimes with the abstract concepts, so I kind of revert back to typical social learning theories which talk about modelling behaviour. So I will show them my account and we will look at other people’s accounts and we will test what it will do and let them see the process in action, and that will help a lot of people. It doesn’t explain it for everybody – some different learning styles like to get in and try that themselves, which they’re able to do as well – but I do think the
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purpose is important for them to sort of ... ‘Where are we going with this?’ and ‘What does the end look like?’
We use the social bookmarking for a variety of purposes. They will evolve sometimes in a subject into ways that I hadn’t actually anticipated, but that is empowering the learners to take control of their own learning as well, which is great.
We’ll often start with the concept of ‘tagging’ and just discuss how tagging works and we talk about filing cabinets, you know, paper-based environments and how you have to make a decision about which folder you are going to put it into. But what if you could put it into several folders? And then, your own tagging systems like the folksonomy, so we talk that through and practise that a little as well. Then we also have agreed tags so we talk about the purpose of, for a subject, ‘How am I going to communicate? I’ve found something to the rest of the group that is of interest to them’. That’s when we come up with an agreed tag. I used to get the group to select that agreed tag. I don’t anymore because that was taking up quite a lot of time – no-one would agree. Once you go out to about 30 people at a time, forget it, consensus is just impossible so I now nominate an abbreviated agreed tag and I just give them that and say, ‘This is the one we are going to use for our shared resources’.
From collaborative research it’s very powerful. I’ve got a number of classes at the moment working on some small projects. The are setting up their own network of shared resources through the social bookmarking, so they don’t actually have to now email each other and say, ‘Hey, I found this’. They’re just sharing it within their social bookmarking. We use Del.icio.us and that has the ability to create little networks and they are sharing their resources through that way and they are just loving that concept of seeing what other people are finding almost instantly on their screens. Others have developed it further where we use an aggregator and they are bringing either the agreed tag or some of their collaborative research tags into their aggregator in different areas and they can see again almost instantly what is happening on an on-going basis. The business women have actually now, a lot of them are looking at it and adding their Del.icio.us
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resources to their business websites and they are using that as communicating with their customers, information regarding their business or topics of interest. So they’ve taken it actually beyond the learning context and they are now putting it into their business processes as well.
What we are enabling people to do when they use these social bookmarking processes, and a lot of the other social software, is we are empowering them and enabling them to do this sort of on-going research and as they are actively participating in it, they start to see the value of it and it becomes embedded in their own processes. There is definitely evidence that they’re taking this and transferring it to their workplace context. With my students who are TAFE teachers or adult educators in the organisational context, I know a lot of them are now starting resources for their students in this way and it transfers very easily across. There doesn’t seem to be that disconnect that we often have with structured content in subjects across to other contexts. It really seems to just slip across very easily and they love the fact that they can still have the same Del.icio.us account but through their tagging process, they can direct their resources into these different notification channels and that seems to be one of the key elements I think, is the simplicity with how this is so easily done. They don’t feel overwhelmed by it. Some of the other earlier applications perhaps were too complicated. I think the simplicity enhances transfer into other contexts.
There is not a lot of online communication with this except your distribution and sharing of resources that you’ve found and think others may find valuable. That is actually quite an important aspect socially within a group of learners, to get them to start to openly share their resources and think of others, and I do notice with the bookmarking – and I’ve heard them talking in class – some will say, ‘Oh, I just put something into Del.icio.us that you might be interested in’. So there’s a difference. I wouldn’t hear that with readings if
I had to give people readings. So there is a difference in ... I don’t know that I’d call it community ...but they are certainly very open in sharing of resources and interest in being able to notify people that they’ve shared their resource.
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I think this is an interesting topic mixing the social software for personal and professional or learning environments and if we are trying to approach the life-long learning and the more informal aspects of learning that we know are powerful, but we’ve never really engaged them fully before, I think this merge or the segregation of these different types, is going to have to blur.
The young business women that I’m working with, have actually been talking about that recently with their identities and their networks through places like Facebook and
LinkedIn and we’re sort of all coming to the ...not agreement even ...but they are sort of understanding that there’s less distinction between ‘This is what I do at work and nobody knows anything about me’ and ‘This is what I do at home and that’s my business’ and there seems to be quite an acceptance that this is who I am. It’s confusing I think the business women more than it’s confusing the students. I’ve had no reactions at all that there is any issue around their personal tagging and their learning tagging, because they nominate their own tags, that’s partitioned off in many ways. Now I can go to somebody’s account and have a look at their personal tags but to be quite honest, I’ve got more to do than look at their personal tags. I’m not that interested. I don’t see that as an issue and I do see this blend of not having to constantly segment your life, is breaking down through a lot of these social softwares and I think that is a good thing because we start to become more authentic as people. I think. I think that is an issue that has got to play out a little bit further, another year or two.
I’ve used web logs for years in my practice and I set them up, again like I do with the social bookmarking, but then I say to them, ‘This is your web log so I have requirements that I need to see for your assessment tasks – but the rest of it is up to you – how you personalise it or not, what you put on it or not, is not really my right to tell you what to do and what not to do, but I do need to see certain aspects for your assignments, and that’s all I’m looking for’ – and they love that. They really seem to appreciate the fact that an education institution is allowing them to personalise rather segment it out to have 10 blogs – you know, they’ve got their personal blog and they’ve got their education one and they’ve got this and they’ve got that – it gets complicated. Anyone that has joined a
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number of communities of practice will soon tell you, ‘If we could just pull it all together into the one spot it would be easier’.
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