Category Archives: E-Learning

Posts on Flexible Learning (which may or may not include elearning), Blended Learning, eLearning, Distance Learning and a few other buzz words. A world with few well defined borders, little real consensus amongst different interest groups – but it’s a fun place to be. (And we are making a difference)

George and Stephen’s course

Leave a reply

CoffeeblogThis is a must.  From two individuals espousing the benefits of networked, connected “Free-range” learning, a thing they call a course.

The course – Connectivism and Connective Knowledge – (the wiki is here) will be delivered fully online with a combination of synchronous and asynchronous interaction. Participants who have enrolled in the course will receive feedback on assignments and course work and will receive credit for their work. We are in the planning stages of what will become a Certificate in Emerging Learning Technologies (slated for delivery in January, 2009). Connectivism and Connective Knowledge will count as credit in that program. ltc.umanitoba.ca:83/connectivism/?p=15

Read the post: they are taking on some of the critical issues around learning for learning’s sake and learning for credit.

In summary:

  • If learning materials are freely available, what are learners paying for when they take courses? Are they paying for credit?
  • What is the nature of large scale learning experiences? What is the value created?
  • What kinds of technologies should we use? To what degree are we fully distributed?
  • How can we involve participants before and after the course?

This is cool.

I had tea yesterday with a friend who has a wife studying at an institution I have had a lot to do with.  My friend has described a litany of loose ends and sad experieinces with learning over the months, and his wife has in his words “figured out what she needs to do to pass and is engaged in doing it”. Sad.

I’m signed up for this course.  If we can call it that.  I expect to have a challenging and stimulating time, and sort out a few of my ideas further, and have some fun.  If anyone is interested in a New Zealand – or a Christchurch Learning Cell around this course – please contact me.  I’ve also advertised on the DEANZ blog.

More later . . .

We have our Moodle Trial

2 Replies

I’m really not sure how I feel at the moment, 6 days into our Moodle trial.  Surfing the forums.  A lot of them.  Just wondering where to delve in . . .

We need:

  1. timed release
  2. signups for groups [how can you have a supposedly constructivist enviroment without this?]
  3. student folders for files [ditto!!]
  4. better multimedia handling [Their mps player has no volume of time]
  5. Better text editor

DOWNS:

  1. They have a lingo (activity locking) where all I want is timed release like “Show the tutorial answers on Monday, after the tutorials” They are using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
  2. There are several ways to insert multmedia.  A sound player with NO volume and NO duration – that you cannot stop downloadng the file whether you want to or not.
  3. Few critical help messages in the screens, you need to use trial and error, or check the help. (ie a poor UI)
  4. LOUSY text editor.
  5. Save buttons ONLY at the bottom of screens sometimes.
  6. Uploading of files has THREE approaches in different places.
  7. Extra clicks:  Tons of them.

BUT: then I get some help calls about Blackboard and it doesn’t seem so bad.

Just deciding how to engage in the forums, not finding them quite as helpful or positive as the wordpress forums.  Martin seems to regularly exercise his right of veto with a robustness he really doesn’t need to use. I wonder if it is a different client base: institutions, whereas WordPress is largely individuals.  More installations of WordPress . .  dunno.

UPS:

  1. Nice wiki (But then Glen loaded the OU wiki that is supposedly better)
  2. Forums
  3. New guy working here.
  4. 5 minute text editor fix sorted.  (I am still waiting for a Blackboard fix from August 2006 to their text editor that I estimate could take all of 5 minutes)
  5. Speed.
  6. Multiple windows.

As an aside, we have not chosen to trial Sakai.  To many show stoppers for us.  For instance, “By sometime in mid-2008 admins will be able to delete forum posts”
Has anyone done a feature by feature comparison Moodle/Bb/Sakai recently?

Onwards. We have a plan, just figuring out how to work the plan.

The long dark tunnel

7 Replies

It probably should be the best time of year.  Trying new things, getting up and running for the year.

In fact, it’s not.  It’s largely firefighting, getting little things sorted in a less than decorous fashion, with the exception of Veronica’s project and Nicola’s Creative Thinking – it’s been a lot of business as usual.  And the LMS review.  I have done 12 sessions with staff in the last three weeks.

Do we do a Moodle trial?

This is the question – and the committee may be ready to make a decision on Wednesday.   I’ve compiled a document comparing Blackboad and Moodle, and Podcast as well.  My sessions were to elicit feedback on IF we have a trial and any comment on the PROCESS of a trial.

I’ve had a lot to do with Moodle in a short time.  I’ll need to do a silly little things easlity fixed with Moodle post soon.

Why did we choose Drupal??

Still tinkering with drupal for our UCTL.  Got a request for a revamp two weeks after we launched, and are now working on this.  Drupal is cool!!  But it is just a framework.  Needs a lot of fixing to get it anywhere – needed is a template install with some stuff done.  May be coming: Via Glen Davies:
www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/27/pirillo-starts-large-scale-community-cms-project/

In summary: Chris Pirillo (LockerGnome) wants to produce decent installs of Drupal for non geeks, out of the box functionality.  Not just a framework.

Having just been through a drupal install, some built in installs would be great.  There are several things I don’t really know much about in Chris’s talk. Chris is behind “activity streams”, a Drupal plugin. http://drupal.org/project/activitystream He is a little polemical and evangelistic in this video.

Getting things Done.  GTD.  My story continues . . .

I now do have a system where pretty well my whole life is in folders and lists.  Piece of cake.  It’s the psychic side that has been a problem.  Tim Barnes, an old friend from the 60′s visited from California and has talked about a Canadia consultant (whose name escapes me)who describes three types of days:

  1. Days where yooyu are really focused on your delivery of core business stuff.  You are on the top of your game.  You are delivering %110
  2. Day’s off.  Resting.  No work.  Re-creating.
  3. Days to make sure type I and II actually happen.

A simple little template, which has been quite helpful during the busy March that is just about to end.  My unit is less than a day.  But the principle applies.

E-mail worries.

I’ve tried the 43 Folders approach.  Didn’t work. Merlin has several buckets to toss e-mail into. I’ve checked a few of the variatins on this model, and until M$ outlook implements decent tagging, I’m sticking with three buckets.

  • In
  • Follow Up - no more than 30 e-mails, but it can drift up.  All the stuff Merlin has in Waiting for, Action, Follow up etc.  I have NOT been able to get hard edges, and rely on search in this folder . . .
  • Recent Past. A plie, that often includes “May need”  I sort these later into Monthly buckets.

I also have a ton of subject related folders.  These are growing at the rate of one a week.  I am cavalier with these.  I just chuck things into them as references I may use.  My mail is empty several times a week at the moment.   BUT:

Committee involvement

The wiki committee. The day I got a new wiki toy to play with with any classes I went to the University (Dekiwiki - but that is another story) I joined a committee to have it’s first meeting.  The purpose: To investigate whether we needed a centrally supported wiki.   We are doing the usual university thing: terms of reference, minutes . . . .  we are sort of using a wiki, but it is not available outside the firewall, and at the moment people are still using e-mail.

The LMS Review committee. We have a superb forum, notifications etc – but people are still using e-mail.  I am not actually on the committee (whew!!) but I am at their beck and call.  We are now playing e-mail non-collabnoration in the countdown to a decision on Wednesday.

Which brings me to my next matter.

Death to e-mail at work

Today I stumbed across the blog of Luis Suarez www.elsua.net/
One of the worst designed wordpress blogs I have ever seen (little things like Blue on blue side columns, no post summaries, Scores and scores of links and stuff that prints in a single column out if you print a page (No print CSS!!!), lousy search, but I digress – ) – this guy is onto something about e-mail.  It’s been hard to locate the posts in his latest theme, but there are several dating back over 7 week on a theme:  death to work e-mail.

(quote to come, I cannot locate on the site the first post . .)

Death to work e-mail: with one exception . . . (personal, private/sensitive e-mails from one person to you) The rest??  Put it in some decent social software tool.  Cool. Here are the posts: Week 1 (the announcement) | Week 3 | Week 6 | Week 7

As an aside, his comments about Twitter I will come back to later.

OK.  Enough for now.  Still to come.  Blogging and wiki policies.  TALO.  China.

Blogs: sorted. Wikis: not quite

Leave a reply

Wow, wordpress 2.3 is nearly out of beta.  I think the decision is clear: if you need blogs for your institution, WordPress multiuser.  The question is not too clear for wikis.  I’ve been asking this question on the TALO forum: Is there an open source wiki that avoids wiki markup? (and has all the other features: permissions, notify, forums . .)  I think the answer is at the moment No.  At least not a complete solution.

Also, I’ve been eavesdropping on the course Bronwyn, Leigh and Merrollee are involved with in Dunedin. Fascinating!! They (and the participants) are struggling with some very real issues around social software, blogs, wikis, forums. ethics, public/private . .

I was thinking about this yesterday with regard to folksonomies and discovered an old post (2005) by Thomas Van der Waal with a side comment on wikis:

They are a jumping off point, not destinations. They are true conversations, which have very real etherial qualities.

I have had a feeling that for a while the wiki markup etc etc gets in the way of new users.  I’m sure there is some reseach on this somewhere.  But there is the other issue as well: what is a wiki?  What is it really for?  How do we best engage with a wiki?

PS.  From the TALO list, I visited this wiki comparison site. Verhy comprehensive.

Thoughts on Communities, Blogs and Moodle

2 Replies

I’ve taken a bit of a break from the community aspect of my life. The change from the College to the University has accounted for most of this. However, things have moved on. First the West Coast visit and now next week we have our next session on community nurture/community development, and the first for 2007. Then Derek stopped in for a chat after dropping off the guest speakers at our e-portfolio seminar. His question: How can Moodle best support communities? He is using Moodle blogs, but they have no comments feature. We have Moodle 1.8 installed to we had another look, and yes, it’s true: no comments feature in a Moodle blog.

It took me a bit of time to remember, but this is actually by design, not accidental omission.

Martin Dougiamas talks about it in the moodle docs forum. This from an oft quoted May 2006 post:

Yes, there are no comments allowed for blog entries in (Moodle) 1.6. Let me explain why.

Firstly, I want blogs to be well-integrated in the Moodle experience. I do not want to just bolt on Simpblog or WordPress. Most standalone blogs have comments because there is no other way for readers to discuss things (one assumes they don’t have blogs). In Moodle though we already have lots of ways for discussions to happen, and everyone has a blog.

So what I’m trying to do is extract the part of of what makes Blogs unique (ongoing unstructured public reflection) and make that work well first, then carefully link it in with the other tools in Moodle. It’s much harder to take features away than add them carefully.

Firstly, there is a big conceptual overlap between a blog and a forum. See this listing of all the discussions you’ve started – it looks suspiciously like a blog. I am convinced that if we allow blogs to effectively be like user-centered forums that a lot of important discussion will float out the blogs (which are not course-based) and make “keeping up” with a particular course very difficult.

If you think keeping up with forums is hard now, imagine if every user has their own.

Secondly, if you want to use blogs to collect reflections from students and comment on them or grade them then we already have Assignments for that. If there is something missing about Assignments then perhaps we need a new assignment type, but anything you are assigning students to do for feedback is an assignment.

Overall, I view blogs as an external window to the course activities, a “skin” of not-private comments that you might monitor via RSS etc and use to access the forums and other activities within Moodle.

So my aim for 1.6 was simply to have a basic framework up that we can get used to and better see where we might go with the next level. If you want WordPress go and install it now, I’m not stopping you. smile

So, there we have it: the reason why we have no comments is that it will not support the courses that are going on. Nothing about reflection and interaction with other students. I think Martin does not quite understand the essential difference between blogs and forums.

In at FLLinNZ we have had a short sharp discussion last year on communities and the best or at least not a bad support platform for a distributed voluntary association community. As far as Derek’s question goes: Moodle is not really designed with this in mind. You can of course try to do it, but it’s just a little more difficult. Moodle is designed as a Course Management System. Martin said this: “If you want WordPress go and install it now, I’m not stopping you.” – he could also have said “Moodle is open source, if you want comments, go and write the code – it’s just we won’t be incorporating into the main release . . .”
From the same forum:

It’s about ownership and location more than whether the communication is possible.

And:

To me, it makes more sense to notice how people use something and add functionality to enhance that, not restrict functionality to force your viewpoints of how people should be using something.

Today, someone posted their diffuculties with their homework assignment to their blog. Now, there is no way for anyone else to express they had similar difficulties or suggest a solution for that person. Currently, they have to leave the page and enter a discussion or forum. They can also post a seperate blog entry that can end up several posts away and gives no indication without reading the entire entry that the two are related. The current approach is so disconnecting and it cripples the entire social flow.

Besides, what makes a Blog different from a Forum is not commenting. Their difference is conceptual. Blogs are a place to publish and share personal thoughts, ideas and experiences. A Forum is a place for people to post content or topics of interest to start discussions. The technology behind them is exactly the same. They are both basically CMS. Commenting is just an added funtionality that lets other users interact with other users who read that post, making it SOCIAL SOFTWARE. Removing that functionality from either one decreases the value of each one equally. (Eric Fino)

This does not auger well in using Moodle for a community support platform.

I’ve written before about my conversations with another significant Moodle user, when I asked “Show me one Moodle site anywhere in the world where there is an active vibrant community happening . . .” We couldn’t find one, and even thought the discussion continued intermittently for several months – still no joy. Moodle supports some great discussions on SCoPE, but has yet to really move to being a community environment there. But at present it’s the best I can find.

Learning Journals = vaults of good stuff

Leave a reply

I’ve gone a little cold on Learning Journals. At least the personal, compulsory ones that are part of a formal taught course.
Now I think: make them public, give them another name, add a few more tools, generate some new habits (for tutors and participants).

Several comments:

1. Good stuff is wasted inside the locked walls. Our experience recently if that a lot of really cool, helpful, interesting and worthwhile comment can get locked up in them. Next time I will just give a personal workspace and some tools. These will be inside the CMS. But with the option of making the results public to any degree:

  1. me only
  2. (course) space admins only
  3. (course) members only & possbly selected members off a list??
  4. logged in members (of the whole site)
  5. The world

2. Don’t call it “personal”. The next problem is the name. I cannot call it a personal workspace – because this has connotations of being more private than I want. Webcrossing as it is configured for cpsquare.com has the concept of a porch. This is the public area where you can meet and chat.

But what name? What metaphor?

3. Foster/Enable Collaboration. How to make it friendly enough for people to come in and actually participate? Friendly may not be the exact connotation I mean, but you will get the idea.
How to lower the boundary to enable true collaboration, not just ‘working alongside’? In the current setup (with a PLJ), course members still tend to prefer to dialogue and feedback in private, and it can be just too much for one course guide/lecturer to manage.
All this is easier said than done.

Derek Wenmoth has blogged recently about a his 4 C’s, a kind of a spectrum of involvement. The most recent being his post on levels of engagement. It comes with another cool diagram.

I quote:
lMy diagram attempts to illustrate how many participants in the online environment move through phases as they gain understanding and confidence.

  1. consumer – The first phase is where participants (often referred to as lurkers) simply read and explore the posts of others. Far from being passive as the word lurker suggests, consumers can be very active participants in an online community – just not yet visible to others.
  2. commentor – as this label suggests, these people make comments on others posts (either on blogs, or in discussion forums), often seeking clarification, agreeing with a statement, or offering a suggestion or link to something similar.
  3. contributor – as this label suggests, contributors are those who have started their own blogs or who initiate new threads on discussion forums. They are confident about putting forth their own ideas etc.
  4. commentator – a commentator is someone who frequently takes a ‘meta’ view of what is going on, providing a level of leadership within the community. Their contributions will often draw attention to the ‘bigger picture’, making links with other work – analysing and synthesising the contributions of others.
OK. We know what the problem is. But no-one comes to any of these courses we run with nothing to contribute or no area of expertise. So we can say “Everybody could function as at least a contributor”. so . . .
Here is a question: can we help people feel less worried about engaging online by sharing this 4C’s view with them?
What habits will help move into this new space?AFTERWORD: This relates to Stephen Harlow’s view of the idea. No CMS’s with logins.

Intranets for schools

1 Reply

I discovered a list I wrote in 2000. Features I’d like in an intranet . . . I think I owe some of these ideas to discussions with Graham Warburton.

A picture of a fully developed intranet

Monday 3rd July 2000

  1. A medium to communicate information – all sorts of administrative stuff for staff – all sorts of curriculum stuff to kids and parents, daily notices, events for kids such as Science summer schools information etc etc.
  2. A way of quickly accessing teaching programmes and resources eg labs, worksheets, videos, pictures, applications such as datalogging, graph analysis, etc etc. One click and you are there.
  3. A way of helping kids revise – objectives, summaries, on line check tests.
  4. A ways of quickly getting remote events into the school and homes eg Kokiri (outdoor ed) experiences etc
  5. A way to save paper – assignment on the intranet. Kids can access it anytime. – even when away – takes the hassle out it the paper war for teachers too.
  6. A way of sharing students on-line presentations.
  7. A way to access stuff from home for staff and students.
  8. A way of giving students remedial work by them being able to view a video on a technique such as soldering correctly, or how to slice carrots.
  9. Breaks the “same time-same place” requirement for learning.
  10. Seamless and precise integration of web access – when it’s needed. (More than just a list of web sites, but specifically targeted pages)
  11. Enables collaborative document sharing