Brighton University
Opportunities for Learning Using
Social Software and Personal
Learning Environments
March, 14 2007
Terry Anderson, Ph.D.
Canada Research Chair in Distance Education
terrya@athabascau.ca
Presentation Overview
Traditional Opening Joke
Affordances of Web 2.0
Personal Learning Environments
Change process
Research and evaluation
Your comments and questions
Why is E-Learning
Better Than Sex?
• If you get tired, you can stop, save your place, and
pick up where you left off.
• You can finish early without feeling guilty.
• You can get rid of any viruses you catch with a $50
program from McAfee
• With a little coffee you can do it all night.
• You don’t usually get divorced if your spouse
interrupts you in the middle of it.
• And If you're not sure what you are doing, you can
always ask your tutor.
Congratulations
You - as a contributing
lifelong learner
Are the
Person of the Year!
This Person of the year
Wants to learn things
Continuously moves between on and
offline
Is learning to recognize and demand
quality when investing in learning
Knows there are many paths to learning
Uses a wide set of information and
communications tools
“The decline of the compliant learner’. P. Goodyear 2004
How do professional educators
deal with these
“persons of the year”?
“We must look at today's radical changes
in technology, not just as forecasters but
as actors charged with designing and
bringing about a sustainable and
acceptable world.”
– Herbert Simon, 1916-2001
Importance of this issue
Educational problems are not solved through
evangelism, threats or technologies alone.
Change happens when teachers, administrators
and learners make it happen
– Perceived benefits – Personal
– Readiness - Organizational
– Pressure – Inter-organizational
Chwelos; Benbasat; Dexter, 2001)
Each of us is an agent of change
Maybe the Sky Really is Falling!
The Net Creates
– Great challenge and Great Opportunity
Values
We can (and must) continuously improve
the quality, effectiveness, appeal, cost and
time efficiency of the learning experience.
Student control and freedom is integral to
21st Century life-long education and
learning.
Education is an academic, individual and a
social experience – both on campus and
online.
Learning in a Networked Era
Focuses:
Even in formal learning, focus on Learner
Choice to co-determine and negotiate:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
Tools for learning
Content
Time and place
Pace
Means of evaluation
Ways to learn
Relationships
Openness
(Paulsen, 1993)
The Ubiquitous Net Context
Context uniquely creates and constrains
learning
Context affords learning opportunities
Context and Content are created:
– through interaction with others and,
– through use and creation of artifacts
Connection to the Net
67.9% of Canadians
use the Net - Computer
Industry Almanac (2005)
85% access from
home
– Canadian Internet
Project (2006)
Average 13.5
hours/week
76% Broadband
UK
Affordances of the Educational Semantic Web
(Anderson & Whitelaw, 2004)
Abundance of Content
Filtering,
Mashups,
Updating
Read/Write
Web 2.0
Connected
High quality,
Low cost
Communication
Learning
Automated
Facilitation
Net as OS
Agent
Assistance
Affordance 1. Massive Amounts of Content
Any information, any
format, anytime,
anywhere
Customizable content
Interactive content
User created content
Open content
resources
Wiki and Open Courseware
Imagine a world in which every single person is
given free access to the sum of all human
knowledge. That's what we're doing. –
– Terry Foote, Wikipedia
Content - conclusion
Cheap or free
Need to learn to share and re-use
Don’t build your value on your content
Content is necessary, but not sufficient, to
create a quality educational experience for
the persons of the year
Affordance #2
High Quality, Low Cost Communication
Multi synchronous
– Synchronous, asynch
– Text, audio and video
– Stored, indexed and retrievable
Mobile
Embedded
Pervasive
Learner, teacher, community and
publisher created
“I learned more about Clive by reading his
introduction tonight online than I did in our
entire course together last summer”
(Kerlin, R-A, 1997)
http://kerlins.net/bobbi/research/diss/
“Each person operates a separate
personal community network and switches
rapidly among multiple sub-networks.”
(Wellman, Boase, & Chen, 2002)
Affordance 3
Agents
Google Alerts
MeetingWizard
RSS
Athabasca
– Freudbot AIML
– E-Advisor
– Are you ready
for AU? Agents
These Affordances Stimulate
Development of a Participatory Culture
relatively low barriers to artistic expression
and civic engagement,
strong support for creating and sharing one’s
creations, and
members believe their contributions matter,
and feel some degree of social connection
with one another - at the least they care what
other people think about what they have
created.
– Henry Jenkins, Media Education of 21. Century
2006
Creating
Incentive to
Sustain
Contribution
Pedagogical Basis
Our educational discourse is largely stuck in a time warp, framed by
issues and standards set decades before the widespread use of the
personal computer, the Internet, and free trade agreements.”
Stewart and Kagan (2005)
Connectivism – “Knowledge exists in the network”
(Siemens, 2005)
Community of Inquiry Garrison & Anderson, 2003
Integrating online learning – pedagogy of nearness
Mejias, 2005
The contributing student Collis 2005
Goodyear “Towards a Pattern Language for Networked
Learning, 2004
New Learning Environments John Seely Brown, 2006
Learning
About
Learning
To Be
Dimensions of Knowledge
Michael Polanyi
Explicit
Knowledge
Tacit
Knowledge
John Seely Brown
New Learning Environments for the 21st Century 2006
Learning Networks
Imagine a world where there are tens of
thousands of online learning paths,
communities, experiences and objects.
Imagine that they can be aggregated to
demonstrate competence and accrue
accreditation.
How will learners find and connect to
particular paths?
Will UK Universities thrive in this world?
We have to move learning out of an
education context into one that
stimulates, creates, rewards and
evaluates learning anytime,
anyplace, anywhere, for any reason.
Are today’s education tools helping
create lifelong learners?
Context and the Technology
Lifelong learning demands a move from
Institutional to Learner Centered
Paradigms
The Personal Learning Environment (PLE)
Solution
Getting the
right mix
Dallsgaard, 2006
http://www.eurodl.org/materials/contrib/2006/Christian_Dalsgaard.htmr
What is a PLE?
“The logic of education systems should be
reversed so that the system conforms to
the learner, rather than the learner to the
system.” Futurelab 2006
What is a PLE?
A PLE is a web interface into the owners’
digital environment.
– Content management integrating personal and
professional interests (both formal and informal
learning),
– a profiling system for making connections
– A collaborative and individual workspace
– A multi formatted communications system
– All connected via a series of syndicated and
distributed feeds.
"The PLE is an approach not an
application." Stephen Downes
An approach that:
– Values and builds upon learner input
– Protects and celebrates identity
– Respects academic ownership
– Is Net-centric
– Supports multiple levels of socializing,
administration and learning
– Supports communities of inquiry across and
within disciplines, programs, institutions and
individual learning contexts
Technologies used to create PLEs
Mobile computing
Wireless
High bandwidth
Cell phones
Digital photography, video and audio recording
Internet video, audio and conferencing
Low cost hardware - $100 laptop
PLEs are not VLEs
VLEs were designed, built for and operated by
institutions of formal learning
– Designed to meet teacher needs
– Based on dissemination & push rather than a pull model
of education
– Contributions are owned by the institution
– Student is forced to learn a new system at each institution
– Course centric view of learning
– Hard to interoperate with competitive or OS products
– Designed to protect intellectual property, not make it
freely available
– Very poor record of innovation
PLE- Learner Links their environment
to that of education institution
My work
My social Life
My school(s)
My calendar
My profile
My hobbies
My files
My publications
E-portfolios
My identity
My conversations(s)
PLE Activities
Making connections
Sharing artifacts
Applying knowledge on and offline
Sharing experiences and creating new contexts
Teacher’s job is:
– to help learner’s determine and satisfy their learning
needs
– to create and support environments from which
learning emerges
Learner Centred OLE.doc – Derek Wenmoth,
March 2006
Early PLE Prototype products
Blogs and Profiles
With RSS
PLEX - RSS Reader
on steroids
Welcome to Flock, the
safe, spyware free web
browser that makes it
easier to connect with
your friends. With Flock
it's a snap to upload,
comment, and discover
new pics. Read all the
news you care about, in
one place. Blog freely. Get
search results as soon as
you start typing in the
search box, and much
more.
Technologies of AU’s MDE 663 Fall 2006
Me2U.Athabascau.ca
Moodle
Content
Admin
Asynchronous Int.
Blogging
Connections
Portal
Products
Learning Objects
CMAP
Elluminate
Real Time
Pacing
Social Presence
Furl
Dissemination
Knowledge Polling
An elgg instance http://elgg.net
Usefulness over 8 Educ Functions
BookMarks
Profiles
Web Conf
Cmap
Usefulness
RSS
Moodle Discussion
Blogs
Email
0
N= 9 of 13
1
2
3
4
5
Are we ready for PLE’s ?
Advantages of LMS
– Purposefully designed
– Mature
– Safe and Secure
– Ease of Use
– Centrally Supported
Advantages of PLEs
Identity
Customizable and control
Ownership
Social Presence
Capacity and Speed of Innovation
Open Connectivity (API, mashups, web
services)
See my blog posting at: Are PLE’s ready for prime time?
http://terrya.edublogs.org/
A PLE Roadmap
From PLE Reference Model Presentation by Colin Milligan/George Siemens
Will VLE’s become PLEs?
Some will.
Most likely survivors
– Are modular allowing student and teacher use
of component parts
– Are standards based and provide access to
source code for mashup and imteroperability
– Are driven by user centric innovation
– Don’t make mistakes that alienate their users
Some see PLE’s as just for
informal learning
Learning is “a continuous, (largely) selforganized process of change” Sebastian Fiedler]
PLEs:
– provides learning systems for the vast majority of
people who are not enrolled in formal learning
programs.
– helping learners organize informal learning.
– allow people to form their own (transitory) networks
for learning. Learning is a social activity and takes
place in communities of interest and communities of
practice. (from Graham Attwell)
Response to my blog posting
Are PLE’s ready for Prime Time?
Who are "we" in this case? We in the ed-biz or we human
inhabitants of the earth? I may be being hyper sensitive but all too
often we in the ed-biz see it as our job to operationalize things for
them, the (demonic) other.
Through this, Terry appears to be perpetuating the teacher/learner
divide. Too many discussions are about how can we do things for
you/them.
Not until we realize that we are them and they are us - without
abdicating responsibility for mentorship, inscription, facilitation and,
indeed, teaching - can such ideas as PLEs be realized.
Seb Schmoller
http://my-world.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/01/personal_learni.html
Blogs vs Threaded Discussion
Cameron & Anderson, 2006
Cognitive presence
– Context beyond the course allows for enhanced verification and
application
– Harder to follow threads and quickly find new contributions
Social Presence
– Increased depth from chronological background
– Openness may inhibit self-disclosure, humour
Teaching Presence
–
–
–
–
Poor navigation and tracking
Difficult to follow conversations
Harder to assess
Little institutional support
Formal education paradox?
Many PLE applications today are:
– challenging to learn how to use,
– unstable and unsupported
– not as administratively effective for either
students or faculty as VLE substitutes.
– Why bother with their use????
PLE response to needs of a
Complex Adaptive system
“A complex system, when
disturbed or threatened
by some change in its
environment, can be
lured by attractors and
feedback modifiers out of
a sense of equilibrium
towards the edge of
chaos” (p.125 Pascale et al.,2000)
Qualities of complex
adaptive systems:
– Emergent behaviour
– Unpredictability
– Amplification and
dampening feedback loops
– Complex relationships
content, actors (learners
and teachers), machines
– ‘edge of chaos’ sweet spot
“zone of high creativity,
innovation, and breaking
with the past to create new
modes of operating”
(Zimmerman, 2001)
PLE’s on the Edge of Chaos
“living systems thrive only when
pushed away from their comfort
zone, the area in which they
must reconfigure themselves”
(Dervitsiotis, 2005, p. 925)
Three key factors are variation,
interaction and selection (Benet
& Benet, 2004, p.45)
Diagram of the Edge of Chaos/Zone of Complexity
Copyright © 2001, Brenda J. Zimmerman. York University, Canada. Permission to copy for
educational purposes only. From Ralph Stacey, 1996
There is no PLE best practice
Work on PLE’s is needed to create Edge
of Chaos context for our universities
“the point isn’t to find the best learning
strategy but to evolve systems that
continually search, explore, and test out
those strategies” Cooper et al.,2004
“Time Inc. to Eliminate Nearly
300 Magazine Jobs”
(Jan 19, 2007)
"It really is a different
world, and these
legacy businesses are
going through a
wrenching transition .
. . they have to run
the old business while
building the new one."
Harold Vogel
Conclusion
The context of both formal and lifelong learning
is changing rapidly, creating great opportunity
and considerable risk.
Positive adaptation requires allowing student
and teacher choice, support and opportunity to
exploit affordances of Net technologies.
Role of management is to create an ecology of
innovation, testing and reflection.
There is no single ‘killer app” in this environment
- rather an evolving set of personal and social
tools, pedagogies, and resources.
Thriving in a Net-Centric
Learning Context
Be the person you want your pupils to be –
model desired behaviour (Stephen
Downes).
Support a culture of reflection, innovation
and teaching scholarship on the edge of
chaos in your institution
Use open standard and interoperable
tools.
Try a new tool in every course you teach.
“Learning a Living”
– The Age of Information demands the
simultaneous use of all our faculties, we
discover that we are most at leisure when we
are most intensely involved, very much as
with the artists in all ages”
Marshal McLuhan - Canadian Media Theorist
Your Comments or Questions
Most Welcomed !
Terry Anderson
terrya@athabascau.ca
Final reference: futurelab (2006) Social software and learning
The Great Community
..a subtle, delicate, vivid and responsive art of
communication must take possession of the
physical machinery of transmission and
circulation and breath life into it. When the
machine age has thus perfected its machinery, it
will be a means of life and not its despotic
master.
– John Dewey (1927) The great community
Choices
Appropriate learning Environments
Skills and Knowledge
Feedback
http://www.nestafuturelab.org/research/personalisation/report_01.htm
Threaded
Discussions
Rod Boothby. ,2006 http://www.innovationcreators.com
"First Law of Technology":
"A consistent pattern in our response to
new technologies is we simultaneously
overestimate the short-term impact and
underestimate the long-term impact.
– Roy Amara of the Institute for the Future.
Net-Gen Teacher
Action Research
Lisa Suben, 23. told her supervisors she
was going to produce her own fifth-grade
math curriculum.
A year later, her students achieved the
largest one-year math score jump ever
seen at a KIPP school from the 16th to the
77th percentile
Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Suben said: "My primary goal as a teacher is to
help my students understand the reasoning
behind math rules and procedures.
– Understanding is constructed by the learner, not
passively received from the teacher.
– Understanding is built by making connections
between as many strands of knowledge as possible.
– Understanding is galvanized through communication.
– Understanding is only valuable when you reflect on it
and question it."
Jay Mathews
Terry’s Technology of the Year Award
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) society
aims to distribute a laptop to every child in
the world in the next 5 to 10 years
“Our display has higher
resolution than 95% of the
laptop displays on the market
today; approximately 1/7th
the power consumption; 1/3rd
the price; sunlight readability;
and room-light readability
with the backlight off.
www.laptop.org