Interesting things from today:

• video diaries on student learning habits
• blogs as portfolios – time, tools and common format for digesting
• “presumption of competence”
• formative vs. summative – not only assessment of competencies, but also assessment of research
• taking responsibility for choosing learning options vs. can you judge learning options about things you don’t know
• role of intermediaries (people and tools) to help navigating learning landscape

Those pages are likely to move, but I keep links here for a while:

• ProgrammeLifelongLearning
• GroupWorkArea
• Resources

Relevant pieces from earlier blog posts:

• On responsibilities/competencies for being self-directed (including learning)
  • Preaching to the converted: PKM is not about methods and tools, but about attitude change
  • Personal knowledge management in KM Magazine
  • Learning: communities vs. courses (4) – learners’ skills and motivation
• On formal/informal learning and supporting both

• Converging knowledge management, training and e-learning: scenarios to make it work (more here)
• Early version of my PhD proposal – for an overview of interplays of formal/informal learning and necessary support
• Supporting informal learning

• BlogTalk: who owns narrated experiences?

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/04/07.html#a1758; comments are here.

• Searching for knowledge as constructing personal learning experience
• E-learning is not important
• Formal/informal interplay (2)

I’m in Leiden at ALT Spring Conference – it’s a very nice mix of people talking about learning technologies and (a bit suprisingly) the interesting issues (e.g. games, communities, social software, informal learning) are well covered. Below are some (patchy) notes…

Prof Robert-Jan Simons, “Are our students changing and what does that mean for ICT in education?”

• Carl Rohde, 2004 (trend-watcher; company of himself, a laptop and 200 people around the world, looking at children between 6 and 12 and 12 and 18; not published, for big corporate customers)
  • Game generation – interactivity!
  • Search generation
  • Extended home (=your home is where your friends are)
  • Lived experience – searching for authentic experiences
  • Respect my authority
• ICT changing?
  • Mobile computing: Connectivity and sharing, mobile learning
  • Digital information mining: Visual, textual and human information + judgement of quality
  • Digital empowerment: Tools expand intelligence + testing; students become more independent
  • Multi-media rendering: Authencity +outside world
  • World-wide communication: Weblog, podcast, vidcast, wiki, etc.
  • ICT as commodity: Everybody involved; expectations of students; beating the system
• Virtual action learning system (find example!)
• Learners vs. staff (D.Oblinger)
  • Multitasking | One thing at a time
  • Audio-visual | Textual
  • Random access | Linear, logical, sequential
  • Interactive and networks | Independent and individual
  • Commitment | Discipline
  • Spontaneousely | Deliberately
• Need more research…

Scott Wilson ‘Web 2.0 and the personal learning experience of the net generation’ (presentation and podcast). Also – The PLE Blog.

Good talk with an overview of relevant trends (do not agree 100% ;) and an overview on personal learning experience/environment. Bits and pieces:

• “participation overload”
• when students describe what do they want from e-portfolio it looks like an online dating system
• PLE:
  • Multiple-context learning
  • Formal and informal networks
  • Role-switching
  • Asymmetric spaces
  • Self-organisation
  • Integrated identity
• Theory – Scott promised to add references in his blog
• Personal vs. personalised technology
• How do we construct a set of tools as an individual?

Prof Angela McFarlane, “Playing to learn – learning to play”

• Fun production sites (forthcoming book chapter)
  • Poetry – emotional experiences comparable too books
  • Drawing – tutoring and learning from each other
  • Novels – reader feedback and encouragement (+ Robison, 2004 on constructive criticism and collaboration between writers and audience at cardcaptor.com)
• It’s rather hidden cultural practices if you are not an insider. Since there are no physical artifacts… Now visible creative activities.
  • Temptation to generalise (everyone is doing it)
  • E.g. parents and teahers are unaware of those activities
  • Those activities are not acknowledged in formal learning life.
• “I’d kill to have my students reading each others work as in fun production sites” and “I’ve never got some many comments on something I’ve written. Not in my face.”. Why it doesn’t work:
  • How far institutional pressures are there? Formal organisational structures that “distort the magnetic field”
  • Lack of authenticity?
  • Assessment – experience of collaboration as cheating. Not only education systems, but an understanding of knowledge is……we do not sufficiently privilege the act of production is part of learning, once we do it it’s too late… to produce something personal… How to modify the modes of assessment to fit???
  • Granularity of assessment – lots of material, not enough time to cover it – always summative evaluation of half-baked products

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/04/06.html#a1755; comments are here.

• Course as a playground for KM instruments
• What I want to do when I’m done with my PhD
• eLearning’s Next Chapter

I’m looking for examples and how-tos of how Drupal could be used in e-learning settings (class/group/course management part is important) – any suggestions?

Context: in one of the projects we are creating an online space that is supposed to combine content, community and courses. Drupal is pretty much in the shortlist as a tool to support that, however it’s not clear how far it could support course administration and management…

I’d also appreciate any examples of Drupal uses for one of the following:

• specific learning activities supported within Drupal-based site
• support for multiple courses (with private spaces)
• community and personal space integration
• editor-created content and user-contributed content
• social networking functionalities (personal profiles, “friends”, finding/matching/introductions)
• event management (e.g. scheduling, registration, etc.)

The examples are needed for people who are going to work on designing online courses (they have LMS/e-learning experiences, but do not know much about communities, blogs, wikis in educational contexts) and technology people (who know about CMS, community platforms, blogs, wikis, etc., but do not know much about using those tools to support learning) – so it’s all about demonstrating how particular Drupal functionality could be used to support learner/course designer/facilitator/admin activities…

Some things that I came across so far: DrupalEd, Distance Ed with Drupal: A live example, Setting up a blog based classroom site, Drupal Site Configuration Guide (see more at del.icio.us/mathemagenic/Drupal)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/03/01.html#a1735; comments are here.

• Saturday readings…
• How MIT’s OpenCourseWare Will Change E-Learning
• e-learning, KM, HRD – where am I belonging?

Are You Ready for the Next Wave of Workplace Learners? by Margaret Driscoll [via LTI newsletter]:

The Internet has breathed new life into self-directed learning. In a 2001 study done by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, adults and teens were asked how they use the Internet. Do they use it to teach themselves new things or to answer a specific question? The study found that 80-percent of all Internet users use the Internet to answer a specific question. More surprising, the study found that during a typical day, 16-percent of adult Internet users go online to answer a question. With this in mind, training organizations should consider leveraging learning strategies that take advantage of informal, self-directed, and collaborative learning.

The report is here – The Internet and Education: Findings of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. I checked some other reports too.

College Students and the Web (2001):

Sites with high proportions of college traffic:

[...]Livejournal.com, an online personal journal service, had the highest composition of visitors from the university audience (20 percent).

The Internet Goes to College: How Students are Living in the Future with Today’s Technology (2001) – “college students say the Internet has enhanced their education”. Some highlights

Two others I may need:

• Email at work: Few feel overwhelmed and most are pleased with the way email helps them do their jobs (2002)
• Counting on the Internet: Most expect to find key information online, most find the information they seek, many now turn to the Internet first (2002)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/07/24.html#a693; comments are here.

• Random quotes of Don Norman talking about learning
• eLearning’s Next Chapter

George Siemens does a lot of work on his weblog, but still writes/points to interesting things:

• The Whole Picture of Elearning (check this one because visual is much better than words describes “the whole picture”)
• Edubloggers list
• Computer Programs for Social Network Analysis
• Data Mining Email to Discover Social Networks and Communities of Practice

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/07/23.html#a691; comments are here.

• Socialware for learning environments at HICSS-38
• Ed-Media…
• Fast link

I’m listening to Jay Cross talking for the on-line workshop Lets Write eLearning’s Next Chapter Together. I enjoy it a lot as I enjoyed Jay’s talk in Graz as listening to someone like-minded, but different. This talk should be on-line within a few days.

Some highlights:

• Jay is really promoting blogs in e-learning world :)
• “Bouillabaisse” learning (blended learning methaphor)
• Learning=content+collaboration
• “Unsertainty engages the mind”
• Template for Developing an eLearning Implementation Action Plan
• There are a lot of questions on informal learning and how to invest in it. Jay says “start from recognising its importance” and promises “boosting informal learning” link at his web-site to answer in more details. [see also What’s the best way to invest in informal learning? and Workflow-based eLearning and the Bottom Line]
• On “how to do personal knowledge management?” – “My experience with personal knowledge management is entirely my own” :)

While listening I found out that Jay moved his RSS feed (this explains why I wasn’t recieving his recent posts).

Later: follow-up posting by Jay Cross:

• part of Jay’s presentation, focused on Blogs (I’d love to see the rest, but I guess there are some reasons for not putting it on-line) and other presentations
• as promised: presentation follow-up with links to other resources (I especially liked this one – Jay’s notes on Living on the Faultline)
• reflection on the workshop feedback with some background thinking about choices made

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/07/22.html#a689; comments are here.

• More on connections between learning and teaching
• Notes on my PhD methodology: reflexive ethnography
• Saturday readings…

Do Completion Rates Matter? by Will Thalheimer

When knowledge is applied immediately after learning, completion-rates don’t matter, but ease-of-access and simplicity do. When the on-the-job performance situation follows the learning by more than a few hours, additional instructional supports are needed to ensure that knowledge and skills are retrievable from memory. By completing a well-designed e-learning course, learners provide themselves with the instructional supports they’ll need to maintain their learning until they can use it on the job.

As usually Will provides good input for thinking (you can subscribe to the newsletter too). The arguments provided in the article can help to make choices between e-learning and KM tools.

• In most cases KM systems usually support access to information, sometimes help to understand it, but usually do not have more advanced instructional support to help long-term remembering or practicing with application. So, I would say that KM systems are good for those learning situations when learner have a problem to solve.
• E-learning systems provide more instructional support, so they would be better choice for those case when learning is needed for a future goals.

This also explains why corporate on-line communities work so well in Q&A mode or to provide awareness of what’s going on, but fail when it comes to support longer-term learning. E.g. orientation training for newcomers would work better than hope that they can find out about certain topic from community discussions. (In this piece I talk only about learning about certain topic, not co-creation in dialogue, apprenticeship or building own network).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/03/31.html#a511; comments are here.

• Links
• Saturday readings…
• Found in internet

Sebastian Fiedler in Please Excuse Me While I Snap for a Moment

James Farmer askes in his new edu-blog:

So why doesn’t Blackboard or WebCT or, well, any of them offer effective blogging tools?

I generally maintain an even keel here at Tuttle SVC, but let me shout in the direction of nobody in particular:

It is because they are not paying attention!

Can’t the people who develop these applications be bothered to read O’Reilly Network? What do they do all day?

Watch the alpha geeks and steal a march on the fearful! ["Tom Hoffman"]

Hmm… even if they included blogging tools they would be left with the problem of “ownership”. Would they allow their users to quickly download the content of a particular blog, move on, and host it with an ISP of their choice? I don’t think so…

This brings me two questions:

1. What do you do if you want to have blogs next to LMS? If you want to make blogs part of the course then you should provide some support for them. Most likely solution is to provide some kind of blogging infrustructure, but then you run into similar questions: would your blogging tool allow their users to quickly download the content of a particular blog, move on, and host it with an ISP of their choice?

2. Who owns learner-created content in LMS (e.g. reflections on readings, assignments, feedback)? How learners can take it with them after course ends?

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/03/11.html#a491; comments are here.

• Corporate objectives and learner-centered learning
• LMS and knowledge mapping
• e-Learning Curu

E-mail brings an invitation from Kevin Kruse to join e-Learning Guru. I didn’t have much time to browse the site, but there are a couple of topic that I’d like to check later:

• resources on marketing e-learning (scroll) – I would add the report on e-learning motivation study (pdf)
• an overview on the ARCS model of learner motivation (I somehow missed it in my “training design” education :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/02/11.html#a458; comments are here.

• Why do I Blog: simple and powerful
• How MIT’s OpenCourseWare Will Change E-Learning
• Links: knowledge sharing and e-learning localisation

What’s elearning good for? [elearnspace blog] points to Elearning’s Unique Capability:

Article details four learning effects (spacing, delayed feedback, relearning, and reducing the retention interval)…and asserts the characteristics of elearning uniquely meets those effects. Particularly valuable statement: eleanring as means to extend the learning timeline through us of “pre” and “post” learning event activities…as well as the learning event itself. Simple concept, but like the author states, not really being explored.

Next to the fact that this article is worth reading, its author, Will Thalheimer from Work-Learning Research is the one who pointed me to matemagenic processing. I have to thank him for the name for my blog.

Back to the article. Will argues that four learning effects are best supported with spiral curiculum and doubts that learning objects and LMS will support it well:

The learning-object concept seems to push the field backward toward isolated non-spaced bits of information. Learning objects could be designed to produce spaced e-learning, but their basic framework will make this difficult.

[...]Learning Management Systems apply the same constrains as learning objects. They push us toward a model of learning as a series of isolated topics, glued together through a system that manages incidents, not spaced flows of information and reinforcement.

I feel like thinking more about this article, but now I’m too sleepy :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2002/12/17.html#a394; comments are here.

• E-learning is not important
• ID for e-learning