ECEL Copenhagen 2007 Terry Anderson
description
Transcript of ECEL Copenhagen 2007 Terry Anderson
Effective Educational Social Software:
Getting the Correct Granularity
6th European Conference on e-Learning
Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark
4-5 October 2007 Terry Anderson
Blog: [email protected]
Interaction in Formal Education Social software Granularity of the many
Groups Networks Collective
Educational applications
Athabasca University,
* Athabasca University
Fastest growing public university
in Canada
32,000 students
700 courses
Graduate and undergraduate programs
Largest Masters of Distance Education program
Only USA Accredited University in Canada
Athabasca University
Alberta, Canada
“Canada is a great country, much too cold for common sense, inhabited by compassionate and intelligent people with bad haircuts”. Yann Martel, Life of Pi, 2002.
The Net Changes Everything!
Affordances of the Net, Social software, Net 2.0 (user-generated knowledge), e-learning 2.0, semantic web and other jargon names
Assume a world of network ubiquity We construct the real uses of these
technologies 94% of 9-17 Americana teenagers use Social Software- with
education being a major topic (National School Board Assoc, 2007)
81.6% of USA undergrads use social software ECAR EduCause 2007
New Net Pedagogies – George Siemens Connectivism “
A learning theory for the Digital Age
Maybe the Sky Really is Falling!
The Net Creates: Great challenge and Great Opportunity
What is the most cost and learning effective approach to organizing formal learning ???
within the walls of schools.??Towards new learning networks,
Futurlabwithin formal distance education or
e-learning packages ??Within the personal learning
environments of learners ???
Educational Social Software defined:
“Networked tools that support and encourage learning through face-to-face and online social interactions while retaining individual control over time, space, presence, activity, identity, relationship, and community.” (Anderson, 2005)
Interaction Models of Learning
Effective interaction between and among learners, content and teachers makes authentic learning happen.
Interaction key ingredient in all forms of learning Content, learner, teacher
Learner
Teacher Content
Educational Interactions
Learner /teacher
Teacher / content.
Teacher / teacher Content / content
Learner / learner
Learner /content
•Anderson (2002) Equivalency Theorem
Learner
Teacher Content
Educational Interactions
Learner /teacher
Teacher / content.
Teacher / teacher Content / content
Learner / learner
Learner /content
•Anderson (2002) Equivalency Theorem
Group as educationa
l actorJon Dron, 2007
Learner
Teacher Content
Learner /teacher
Teacher / content.
Teacher / teacher Content / content
Learner / learner
Learner /content
•Anderson (2002) Equivalency Theorem
Group as educationa
l actorStephen Downes,
2006
Stephen Downes, 2006
Learner
Teacher Content
Learner /teacher
Teacher / content.
Teacher / teacher Content / content
Learner / learner
Learner /content
•Anderson (2002) Equivalency Theorem
Group as educationa
l actorAnderson & Dron,
2007
Dron & Anderson
‘Taxonomy of the Many’Dron and Anderson, 2007
GroupConscious membership
Leadership and organizationCohorts and paced
Rules and guidelinesAccess and privacy controls
Focused and often time limitedMay be blended F2F
Metaphor : Virtual classroom
Group
NetworkShared interest/practice
Fluid membershipFriends of friends
Reputation and altruism drivenEmergent norms, structures
Activity ebbs and flowsRarely F2F
Metaphor: Virtual Community of Practice
GroupNetwork
Collective‘Aggregated other’
Unconscious ‘wisdom of crowds’Stigmatic aggregation
No membership or rulesAugmentation and annotation
through use ofData MiningNever F2F
Metaphor: Wisdom of Crowds
Group Network
Social Learning 2.0
Dron and Anderson, 2007
Collective
D
Networks
Groups
Collective
WIKI Blogs
Del.icio.usFlickerFiltering
SecondLife Calendaring Geotracking
Social
Learning 2.0
Email, Skype, IM
LMS/VLEs
RSS, Atom
Google Alert
Commercial PersonalizedServices
ELGG
Meetup
Mail Lists
Social Learning 2.0
Each of us participates in Groups, Networks and Collectives.
Learning is enhanced by exploiting the affordances of all three levels of social learning.
Issues, memes, opportunities and learning activities and knowledge can be created at all three levels of granularity.
Certain network tools are optimized for each level of granularity - Can they be appropriated for effective use?
Social Learning 2.0 Applications in Educational Contexts
1.
Groups
2.
Networks
3.
Collectives
Personal Learning
Environments
Formal Education
Organizational Learning
Social Learning 2.0 Applications in Educational Contexts
1.
Groups
2.
Networks
3.
Collectives
Personal Learning
Environments
Formal Education
Organizational Learning
1. Formal Education in Distributed Groups:
Comfortable, classes and cohorts Increases over independent learning:
completion rates, achievement satisfaction (Jung, Choi, Lim, & Leem, 2002)
Same logistic challenges as for institutional, campus -based learning
Can operate ‘behind the garden wall’ to allow freedom for expression and development
Refuge for scholarship
Formal Learning and Groups
Long history of research and study Need to optimize:
Social presence Cognitive presence Teaching presence
(see communitiesofinquiry.com) Strong identification with group Little use of anonymity Need for high trust levels
Group Tools
•Calendars to synchronize activities•Collaborative and distributive file management•Group editing systems that support versioning and review of collaborative work. •Communications tools – asynchronous and Synchronous•Often wrapped together and deployed as Learning Management Systems (LMS).
Problems with Groups
Confining in time, space pace, & relationship
Often overly controlled by teacher expectation and institutional curriculum control
Foster learner dependencies Isolated from the world of
practice Not scaleable
Morten Paulsen, 1993Laws of Cooperative Freedom
Relationships
Challenges of using INFORMAL social software tools for FORMAL group tasks
Control Support Privacy Assessment Ownership and perseverance
Challenge: Challenge: Creating Creating Incentives to Incentives to Sustain Sustain Meaningful Meaningful ContributionContribution
The New Yorker September 12, 2005
Example: How are Blogs used in Groups?
“You are required to post at least two messages to your blog and respond to the postings of at least two other enrolled students in our class.
Please use your postings to address the issues discussed on pages 34-38 of your text.
Your post and responses will be assessed for 10% of your final grade
To protect your privacy, your blog is not accessible outside of the VLE and postings will be destroyed at the end of the course.”
Paraphrased from major UK university graduate course requirements
Assessing Reflective writing
If we don’t assess the blog, will group based students use them??
Only learners should be able to decide on the audience - no-one; everyone (including Google); teacher; class; program; parents; etc.)
Elgg supports this capacity.
Group Strategies in Formal Education Use real time tools (web, audio and video
conferencing) to increase social presence afforded by immersive environments
Deploy powerful, open standard based tool sets such as Moodle
Support standards and tool sets such as Open ID that permit Group control of access to Group conversation and artefacts in a seamless and easy to use fashion
Develop and deploy distributed production and content management tools such that Group products are easily created and distributed
2. Formal Learning with Networks
Each of us belongs to many networks Networks are fluid and generative Networks can connect self-paced and independent
learners Network leadership arises in multiple formats Evolve forms of self-organizational planning Allow connectivism to flourish (Siemens 2006)
“It is not what you know, but who you know to ask.”
Formal Education and Networks (cont.)
Provides a ‘commons’ from which students’ extract and contribute information
In school one should learn to build, contribute to and manage one’s networks
Through exposure, provides application and validation of information and skills developed in formal learning
Mix of weak and strong ties to gleam benefits of both (Granovetter 1973 , 2004)
Basis for ongoing support and advise from alumni and professional communities
Network Tools
Most web 2.0 apps including: Inviting: Profiles, finding significant others Blogging - outside the garden wall Recommending (Slashdot, Diig, Cite-u-like) Scheduling meet-ups for study, debate,
collaboration Connecting people and resources - syndicating
Interaction and Extremism
Unplanned, unanticipated encounters are central to democracy itself. Such encounters often involve topics and points of view that people have not sought out and perhaps find quite irritating. They are important partly to ensure against fragmentation and extremism, which are predictable outcomes of any situation in which like-minded people speak only with themselves (Sunstein, 2001, P.8)
Networks are today’s most widely used public spaces
Public spaces have many purposes in social life they allow people to make sense of the social norms
that regulate society, they let people learn to express themselves and learn
from the reactions of others, and they let people make certain acts or expressions ‘real’
by having witnesses acknowledge them. (Arendt 1998) from Danah Boyd 2007
Group spaces are not public spaces.
Network Learning Applications
Examples: Extract and comment on a themes from last
month’s IT Forum – blog results Create an analysis of the affordances of Second
Life for educational purposes – blog results Search and summarize from Technorati the roll-
out problems in OLPC’s $100 laptop program? Post a request to a professional educational
group requesting examples of use of OER materials, blog your analysis for group and network feedback
Networked Learning example:
Choosing the right tool?
http://www.go2web20.net 1618 apps as of Sept 24, 2007
3. Formal Education and Collectives Smart retrieval from the universal libraries of resources
– human and learning objects through use of collective space and tools,
information is continuously gathered and rendered for the benefit of all individuals
Requires high skill and literacy skills to effectively exploit
Requires contribution to the collective (tagging, sharing whenever possible, leaving traces) only 16% of users are taggers (Pew, 2005)
Allows discovery and validation of academic norms, values and paradigms
Collective Application - Amazon
Example 2 Aggregation of Crowds
Collective Tools
explicit or implicit selection or recommendation from the Many aides decision making
Aggregation and selective analysis of aggregated behaviours
Wisdom of crowds or stupidity of mobs May suffer from Mathew Effect: rich get richer
Collective Strategies Strategies to increase visibility, compatibility and perceived relative
advantage by teachers and users Strategies to insure high levels of Collective literacy and efficacy Strategies to promote contribution to not only increase individual
social capital but also increase institutional brand Strategies to support collective knowledge use in organizational
Networks and Groups Support for access to collective knowledge outside the organization –
during work time Support for active harvesting of collective knowledge to provide
insight into threats and opportunities for organization and individuals. The design and deployment of software that uses algorithms that
include negative feedback loops Interaction design that provides sign posts rather than fence posts, so
as to prevent runaway mob behaviour.
GroupNetwork
Collective
Taxonomy of the Many
Social Learning
Summary
Summary (cont.)
How do you design effective activities for Groups, Networks and Collectives ??
Design principles for Social Learning 2.0 (Dron, 2007)
Emergence, Evolution and Complexity: Principle of Adaptability; Principle of Evolvability; Principle of Stigmergy
Architecture and Design; Principle of Constraint, Principle of Parcellation; Principle of Scale
Social Psychology & community, Principle of Sociability
Embedded opportunity for building relationships; Principle of Trust –
personal control Networking Theory
Principle of Connectivity Principle of Context
Are Social Networking and Collective activities DisruptiveTechnologies?
Disruptive technologies: Start out as not being good enough for the established
market Have scalability, mass production advantages Appeal to non traditional consumers Not understood by mainstream organizations
Clayton M. Christensen Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave, his 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma.
Should you establish a formal institution presence in FaceBook?
Is it ‘their space’ or ‘our space’ or ‘everyone’s space’??
Where will Facebook be in 12 months? Who really owns my Facebook space? We are obliged to explore these contexts as
responsible professionals
Don’t Expect help from your IT department
“in the bowling alley (pre tornado, rapid adoption phase) you are asking a company to adopt a new paradigm in advance of the rest of the market. This is not in the interest of the IT department. It means extra work for them, and it exposes their mission-critical systems to additional risk.” p. 46-47 Moore’s 1995 Inside the Tornado
Strategies for Early Adopter Leadership
Use the tools you want others to exploit Develop formal and informal learning activities in
new Network and Collective spaces Develop an action or design-based research
program to validate and learn from your interventions
Communicate the results through your networks Use a new application in every course you teach
Conclusion: Benefits of Using Social Learning 2.0 tools and concepts Essential lifelong learning skills Enhances involvement with and awareness
of learning processes –unfreezes old patterns Creates legacy and real world artifacts Supports collaborative and reflective learning Increases integration with institution, teacher,
other students across the ‘Taxonomy of the Many’
A Tale of 3 books
Open Access
84,000 downloads plus
indiv. chapters
350 hardcopies sold @ $50.00
Free at cde.athabascau.ca/online_book
Commercial publisher
934 copies sold at $52.00
Buy at Amazon $$$
E-Learning for the 21st CenturyCommercial Pub.1200 sold @ $135.002,000 copies in Arabic Translation @ $8.
Athabasca’s Open Access Press
New Distance Education and Educ. Technology series www.aupress.ca
“"He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever."
- Chinese Proverb
Terry Anderson [email protected]
Blog: terrya.edubogs.org
Your comments and questions most welcomed!
Collective Strategies Strategies to increase visibility, compatibility and perceived relative
advantage by teachers and users Strategies to insure high levels of Collective literacy and efficacy Strategies to promote contribution to not only increase individual
social capital but also increase institutional brand Strategies to support collective knowledge use in organizational
Networks and Groups Support for access to collective knowledge outside the organization –
during work time Support for active harvesting of collective knowledge to provide
insight into threats and opportunities for organization and individuals. The design and deployment of software that uses algorithms that
include negative feedback loops as well as interaction design that provides sign posts rather than fence posts, so as to prevent runaway mob behaviour.