Shock of the Social – Oxford University
Social Software and Personal
Learning Environments: Do they
really fit with Formal Education?
March, 22 2007
Terry Anderson, Ph.D.
Canada Research Chair in Distance Education
[email protected]
Presentation Overview
Traditional Opening Joke
Affordances of Web 2.0
Personal Learning Environments
Change process
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.
Athabasca University,
Alberta, Canada
Fastest growing university
Canada
in
34,000 students, 700 courses
100% distance education
*
Athabasca University
Athabasca University
Graduate and
Undergraduate programs
Master & Doctorate – Distance
Education
Only USA Accredited
University in Canada
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
Normally uses a wide set of information
processing, creation 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
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 for elites is not sufficient for
planetary survival
Importance of this issue
Educational challenges are not met 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
Learner Values in
Networked Era Focus on
Learner Choice:
to co-determine and negotiate:
– Time and place
– Tools for learning
– Content
– Pace
– Means of evaluation
– Ways to learn
– Relationships
– Openness
(Paulsen, 1993)
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 - 57% of homes
have Internet access
69% use broadband
(2006)
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
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; and sunlight
readability”
www.laptop.org
See Mar 13/07 review of beta2
http://paulstamatiou.com/2007/03/13/hands-on-the-100-laptop/
Content - conclusion
Cheap or free
Need to learn to share, recontextulize 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 mode
– 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
Social Affordances of the Web
Content
WIKI
Blogs
MySpace
Del.icio.us
Flicker
Filtering
Learning
Agent
Communication
SecondLife
Calendaring
Geotracking
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)
Knowing Knowledge Siemens, G. (2007)
Integrated Virtual learning – pedagogy of nearness
Mejias, 2005
The contributing student Collis 2005
“Towards a Pattern Language for Networked Learning,
Goodyear, P.
Community of Inquiry Garrison & Anderson, 2003
New Learning Environments John Seely Brown,
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
Educational Interactions
Learner / learner
Learner
Learner /
teacher
Learner /
content
Teacher
Content
Teacher / content.
Teacher / teacher
Content / content
•Anderson (2002) Equivalency Theorem
Educational Interactions
Group as
educationa
l actor
Learner / learner
Jon Dron, 2007
Learner
Learner /
teacher
Learner /
content
Teacher
Content
Teacher / content.
Teacher / teacher
Content / content
•Anderson (2002) Equivalency Theorem
Reasonable expectations of ‘the
group’
As a resource – wikipedia effect
As a motivator
As a real world source of
authentication/validation
As a way for integration with the
institutionalized learning
Context and the Technology
Lifelong learning demands a move from
Institutional to Learner Centered
Paradigms
The Personal Learning Environment (PLE)
Solution
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 user constructured 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 to each other and selected others.
"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
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)
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 Activities
Making connections, classifying and organizing
Creating, tagging and sharing artifacts
Applying knowledge on and offline
Sharing experiences and building 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
“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.”
PLEX - RSS Reader
on steroids
“The perfect solution for you to bring
people together around shared goals,
activities and interests to form a shared
knowledge network”.
Technologies of AU’s MDE 663 Fall 2006
Elgg -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
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 VLEs
– 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/
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
(APIs) or source code for mashups and
interoperability
– Are driven by and respond to user centric
innovation
– Don’t make mistakes that alienate their users
Users of Web 2.0 – UK Data
David White, JISC funded ‘SPIRE’ project 2007’.
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
– Focus beyond course aids in application to real contexts
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.
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
Your Comments or Questions
Most Welcomed !
Terry Anderson
[email protected]
Final reference: futurelab (2006) Social software and learning