Federica Oradini :: Blog

Date:  Wednesday 16 December 2009
Venue:  University of Wolverhampton, City Campus, Wolverhampton, WV1 1SB
Time:  12:30pm – 15:30pm


The future success of e-learning depends on appropriate selection of tools and
services.  This symposium will propose that the Virtual Learning Environment
(VLE) as an institutional tool is dead, no more, defunct, expired.

Originally delivered at ALTC 2009, this discussion has since moved forward,
opinions have changed, divided and developed so it could now be argued that
VLE's are undead - an entity which was once alive, has since died but
continued to carry some life like characteristics.

This lively debate is designed to give end users a voice and an opportunity to
discuss the issues that arise by using institutional VLE's.

•       The first panel member Steve Wheeler, will argue that many VLEs are
not fit for purpose, and masquerade as solutions for the management of online
learning.  Some are little more than glorified e-mail systems.  He will argue that
VLE's provide a negative experience for learners.

•       The second panellist, Graham Attwell, believes that the VLE is dead
and that the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is the solution to the needs
of the diverse learner.  PLE's provide opportunities for learners, offering users
the ability to develop their won space in which to reflect on their learning.

•       The third panel member, James Clay, however believes that the VLE
is not yet dead as a concept, but can be the starting point of a journey for
many learners.  Creating an online environment involving multiple tools that
provides for an enhanced experience for learners can involve a VLE as a hub or
centre.

•       The fourth panel member, Nick Sharratt, argues for the concept of
the institutional VLE as essentially sound.  VLE's provide a stable, reliable, self-
contained and safe environment in which all teaching and learning activities
can be conducted.  It provides the best environment for the variety of
learners within institutions.

The session will be chaired by Josie Fraser.

Structure of the Session

The event will start with a networking lunch followed with an opportunity for
attendees to voice their opinions on the future of the VLE.  Each member of
the panel will then present their case.  The panel, with contributions from the
audience will then debate the key issues that have arisen.  There will also be
pre-event online discussions taking place via Twitter and blogs asking for the
key issues that affect users and the most popular will then be taken for
discussion in breakout sessions.  The panel will then re-convene for a closing
discussion.

Intended Outcomes

By the end of the session, participants will be able to have a greater
understanding of the evolution and possible extinction of the VLE and its
impact on learners.

Booking Details

Places are available at the cost price of £40 per person which includes
refreshments and a light lunch.  To book your place, please visit the Learning
Lab website (www.learninglab.org.uk) or contact Abi Redmond, Event
Organiser on 01902 322362 for further details.

What is a wiki?

Sharing knowledge to create a common product

A wiki is a website that is developed and managed collaboratively by its users, via nothing more than a web browser. The best known current example of this type of application is Wikipedia which describes a wiki as ‘a type of website that allows users to easily add, remove, or otherwise edit and change most available content, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative writing.’ (Wikipedia)

Wikis are ideally suited to assessment, as they allow groups of students to collaborate on a given topic within a dynamic, evolving environment over a set period of time.  The end result is an electronic document which is non-linear and truly collaborative.

How could wikis benefit teaching and learning?

Vygotsky’s education theory (1978) highlights the “knowledge construction” process of the learner and suggests that “meaning making” develops through the social process of language use over time. This understanding that learning is a social rather than individual process is the backbone of the educational use of wikis. A wiki naturally affords collaboration; it is built and edited collectively. The purpose is content creation and consensus building through negotiating meaning. This communal constructivism will result in students being ‘actively engaged in the process of constructing knowledge for their learning community.’ (Holmes et al, 2001) Student centred, active learning is central to wiki use.

A key feature of wikis is their ease of use and their remote access capabilities, this feature means that students can collaborate on a project without always needing to meet face to face whilst being able to discuss and negotiate the value of their entries. In the modern higher education establishment this is particularly useful for a number of reasons. Students are taking increasingly personalised degrees with multiple ‘choice’ options, as a result they may be taking different modules at different campuses and so will find inflexible collaboration difficult. Also increasing numbers of students have work or family commitments or are studying part time and naturally need more flexibility.

Another important aspect is that staff have the ability to track the changes made to the document as the students edit it. The tracking ability allows staff to monitor the extent and appropriateness of the use of the wiki by the group members, but it also provides the means to assess and comment on the process as well as the outcome of the exercise.

They are appropriate for the student body, as many of them are already aware of and are using freely available wikis such as wikipedia, and they are likely to become more widely used in the work environment.

 How can wikis be used in teaching and learning?

Wiki Use	Description
Easily create simple websites	No programming knowledge needed allowing the user to concentrate on content and a simple user interface and navigation structure. As more organizations adopt the wiki for collaboration & information, students will be well prepared to use it in their careers.
Project development with peer review	A wiki allows students to write, revise and submit an assignment, showing development over a fixed term. Students might use a wiki to track their research on a topic and then build drafts of an essay, all the while receiving formative feedback from tutor, peers or experts.
Group authoring	A wiki allows collaborative democratised content creation with all group members having immediate and equal access to the most recent version of the document.
Track a group project	The modern student requires flexibility and as has previously been discussed, a wiki makes tracking research and ideas possible from anywhere they have internet access, it gives a central place to collectively prepare the final product.
Data Collection	Because of its ease of editing, a wiki can be very useful for collecting data from a group of students.
Review classes & teachers	A wiki could be used to build an evaluation of a module or course, allowing all the stakeholders to contribute to an evaluative document, this could potentially be done anonymously.

The following guidelines are designed to tackle some of the problems associated with creating an effective collaborative community:

• Pre-allocate the collaborative teams, this will save time and is in keeping with real life work situations.
• Use pre-defined steps when introducing students to wikis and make word limits and marking criteria clear.
• Take care with group size, ensuring there is the critical mass needed to make rich collaboration possible, a group size of 5-6 is generally considered optimal.
• Groups will need to elect or have a facilitator assigned to help with menus, loose links, summaries, re-edits.
• Have formative assessment built into the stages of wiki development, whether it be peer or tutor assessment
• Build in summative feedback, with a focus on process as well as final product, this can be done by incorporating individual student reflections on the exercise or by tracking students contributions

Blogging to me is exchanging of ideas and opinions with others (bloggers), so a blog , if used correctly, shouldnt be a monolouge but rather a dialogue!  

As part of my MA ODE course, I used forums and blogs extensively. At the beginning I did not like the idea of keeping a blog...mainly because I was trying to use my blog as purely an extension of the conferencing system. I was concerned about the potential for repetition or missing good points and that the thread of our discussions as a group would have become more fractured as we use the blog instead.

I then realised that a blog is dynamic and interactive, almost resembling a discussion board. However a weblog is a unique entity. It has its own autonomous space online; it is personal reflective micropublishing that requires audience participation. (Ward, 2004). Blogging has reading and evaluating multiple perspectives at its heart and this helps students to formulate their own ideas and start to express them.The blogging voice is getting much more distinctive, it is first person, informal and opinionated, but also requires a variety of higher order skills!!

As Will Richardson says blogging can improve writing ability as one writes consistently for real audiences whilst improving reading and critical thinking skills becoming more information literate in the process. Blogs ‘allow students to be active participants in the process, not just readers and writers without reach’.

'Blog' writing should build on previous posts, links and comments, always written with an awareness of audience.

Therefore a daily diary or journal would not be considered blogging; it may be reflective but is not ‘connective writing’ which is essential to blogging.‘I’m not journaling, I’m not just linking, I’m attempting to synthesis a lot of disparate ideas from a variety of sources into a few coherent sentences that I can publish for an audience and wait (hope?) for its response to push my thinking further. I have never in my life written the way I write in this blog.’ (Richardson, 2005)

(Another interesting article on the Economist) 

Metcalfe's Law says that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its users. In other words, if we take the telephone system as example, the more people have phones, the more useful they become. This “network effect” leads to rapid adoption and puts up barriers for new entrants. But unlike other networks, social networks lose value once they go beyond a certain size.

“The value of a social network is defined not only by who's on it, but by who's excluded"

says Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley forecaster. Despite their name, therefore, they do not benefit from the network effect. Already, social networks such as “aSmallWorld”, an exclusive site for the rich and famous, are proliferating. Such networks recognise that people want to hobnob with a chosen few, not to be spammed by random friend-requests.

This suggests that the future of social networking will not be one big social graph but instead myriad small communities on the internet to replicate the millions that exist offline.

"Future social networks will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be” says Charlene Li at Forrester Research, a consultancy. No more logging on to Facebook just to see the “news feed” of updates from your friends; instead it will come straight to your e-mail inbox, RSS reader or instant messenger. No need to upload photos to Facebook to show them to friends, since those with privacy permissions in your electronic address book can automatically get them....Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and other firms are now discovering that they may already have the ideal infrastructure for social networking in the form of the address books, in-boxes and calendars of their users....

That is because the extended in-box contains invaluable and dynamically updated information about human connections. On Facebook, a social graph notoriously deteriorates after the initial thrill of finding old friends from school wears off. By contrast, an e-mail account has access to the entire address book and can infer information from the frequency and intensity of contact as it occurs. Joe gets e-mails from Jack and Jane, but opens only Jane's; Joe has Jane in his calendar tomorrow, and is instant-messaging with her right now; Joe tagged Jack “work only” in his address book. Perhaps Joe's party photos should be visible to Jane, but not Jack.

To read the full article follow this url http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10880936 

Wordle is a cool little toy for generating word clouds, this one if from my blog :-)

There are many problems that academics tackling e-learning face in a university environment. Lecturers, tutors and students all have expectations and wealth of experience of the face to face, traditional models of teaching and learning. Truly sustainable innovation within an institution such as this can be difficult to achieve. There is a natural inertia, people do not all want to be challenged, they do not all appreciate being forced out of their comfort zone. 

It is clear to me early on that the relevance and advantages of a technological change must be clearly demonstrated to users, showing the importance of disseminating examples of effective practice from practitioners within the university. 

Talking to the academics I work with, made me appreciate that academics spend years developing their own teaching methods and the confidence necessary to impart knowledge effectively and that their teaching style is likely to be based on the way in which they were taught and learned throughout their lives.   

As a consequence of adopting an innovative technology academics are required to change their teaching practices, it will be challenging to teach using tools that one has not oneself used to learn. This was highlighted in the experience of the module leader and her tutors who struggled to engage with the technology. It is for these reasons above that the majority of academics will only adopt an innovation if they are given incentives and time to adapt, are supported by a community of practice and see that the effect of the innovation is to truly enhance the quality of the learning environment and outcomes. This should be central to our continued approach.

Roger James, Director of Information Systems and Gunter Saunders, Director of Online Learning Development are heading a JISC project called TOWLER: promoting student web 2.0 contributions with lightweight enterprise RSS. This project concerns widening student participation and increasing personalisation of the University e-environment. 

It aims to involve the 22,000 student body of the University of Westminster in improving the student computing services, through the use of ‘Google Apps for education’. The project started with students getting involved in design competitions, the first being to re-design the Google logo.

Throughout the year the developers will educate students on different aspects of the environment…next month is the Calendar, then Docs, Site and Personal pages in the months to follow. This will hopefully be a further opportunity for students to make their mark within the University.

For further information see the project website https://sites.google.com/a/staff.westminster.ac.uk/twoler/Home  

We have launched a new service hosted by Google for the University of Westminster. First year students automatically get an account when they enrol. Throughout the first semester 08/09 all continuing undergraduate and postgraduate students can sign up to Google Apps. Within the Westminster domain "my.westminster.ac.uk"  the following services are provided by Google Apps:

• Email
• Calendar
• Talk
• Sites (Staff only)
• Start page
• Google Docs

 

For more information on the Google Apps benefits and rollout follow this link http://www.wmin.ac.uk/page-16541

 

Introduction



The University of Westminster has used a virtual learning environment (VLE) for many years. The nature of VLEs is such that their use often reinforces a pedagogic model which does little to engage students in active learning (Sharpe 2006). The last academic year saw the introduction of 3 student-centred tools within the VLE (e-portfolio production tool, blog and wiki functionality). To date approximately 4,000 students and 50 staff have made use of these tools indicating some interest amongst staff in exploiting these more active Web 2.0 technologies with their students. With this interest in mind and with the realisation that the majority of Westminster staff, in common with those at other Universities, have only a limited experience of Web 2.0 technologies, a decision was taken to provide a Westminster-only social networking system so that staff and students could experiment with the utility of such an online resource for both learning and support. The Connect system (powered by Elgg) was therefore made available to all staff and students and provided a range of features typically associated with Web 2.0 systems including personal and community blogs, tagging, private and public communities, personal and community file storage and social networking capability including full syndication support.  The system has been used with pre-arrival students to help with their transition to university life and also by the student union who saw the opportunity to create dedicated communities for clubs and societies.  Elgg was chosen due to its open source nature based on the popular LAMP software, its thorough privacy controls and the possibility of import/export of FOAF. It was decided that Connect should be hosted internally for a number of reasons, these include; issues of content ownership, branding and avoidance of adverts.
For the purposes of this study, our specific research questions were: 

• Would students who already use social networking tools want to use and benefit from a closed, university-only social networking system?
• To what extent would students use such a system for socialising versus informal academic learning?
• Would academic staff unfamiliar with Web 2.0 explore the new technology to any significant degree?

 Research Approach

The study covered all staff and students who accessed the system between 10^th September 2007 and 24^th October 2008. The evaluation methodology included detailed questionnaires sent to all users of the system coupled with an anonymous analysis of the blog posts made on the system. In additional some statistical data (number of blog posts made by 1^st year students versus second or third years) was mined from the system database.
Quantitative data was collected via questionnaires in early October 2007 and in early January 2008 and then again in October 2008. The qualitative data, comprising personal blog posts and community forum posts were read and then categorised into types with the number of types being created spontaneously as successive blog posts were read. Once all blog posts were categorised, a summary of the different categories was written and related to the research questions posed.  

Results

The Connect system was launched in September 2007. By 8^th January 2008, there were 3,048 (approximately 2,300 students and the rest staff) registered users of the system. A total of 107 communities had been established and 508 blog posts made. The majority of students who accessed Connect were from the Business School, Computer Science and Social Sciences/languages. A much smaller proportion came from Biosciences/Health Sciences, Law and Architecture/Built Environment.

Amongst the undergraduates, more first-year students tended to access and use Connect than second or third years (first-year students comprised 34% of the total number of student users). More postgraduate students accessed and used Connect than either second or third year undergraduate students. 
Amongst students who accessed Connect, 44% had logged in regularly (defined as an average of 2-3 times per week). 80% said the main reason that they used Connect was to look for people with common interests and arrange meetings.

 

A high proportion of students, 49%, logged in only once. The most common reason for not accessing Connect more was that they preferred using other social networking sites, such as Facebook. Others mentioned that they used the VLE to communicate with their fellow students or stated that they simply did not have the time. An appreciable number of students surveyed (about half) didn’t feel the need or see the point in Connect as they attend the University everyday and can talk to their course mates face-to-face. 

Personal Blogs

Personal blog posts could be broadly divided into reflective contributions or contributions that were in some way providing or seeking practical information, help or support. The former type, which comprised 55% of the total, could in turn be split into reflections linked directly to the University and those which were focused more generally on life, personal problems or external news/events. Overall about 2.3% of users kept a blog with each user writing an average of 3 blog posts. Although more students than staff started a blog, students wrote an average of 2 blog posts, compared to 5 blog posts each by staff. Students mainly blogged to look for people with similar interests Staff mainly blogged about their work or the subject they teach or to give their opinion on something related to University life. 

Connect Communities

The communities established by individuals and groups within the Connect system could be classified into 3 broad types.
Type I were typically staff-led and were established to discuss or exchange ideas on an issue associated with the functioning or business of a staff department or sub-section of a department.
Type II communities were based around hobbies and interests.
Type III communities were those set up for the support of academic study, with about half being set up by students (and generally excluding staff), whilst the rest were staff-led or facilitated.

 

Staff and student feedback
 
Student feedback
Students were very evenly split about whether the Connect system was useful. Students commonly commented that Connect could be invaluable for making friends and supporting each other, especially within the first few weeks after arriving at the University.
A frequently-held view by those in favour of Connect was that the closed community that Connect provided was better than the more diverse groups presented by systems like Facebook or MySpace. Even in circumstances where external systems provide a group function - there is a Westminster Facebook community, for example - it was often felt that the local nature and feel of Connect provided a personal and collegiate environment. Others felt it was helpful to keep online social activities that are linked directly to university life separate from wider online social activity outside of University.

In the survey, some students considered that a University-owned social networking system would be a good source of educational help, although they pointed out that the institutional VLE (Blackboard) was the best place for that. Linked to this view was the perceived need to better integrate Connect and Blackboard in order to provide a seamless transition between the more formal learning activities and a space where students had greater control and autonomy. Although Connect was considered to be a space where students had greater freedom to do what they wished, there was very strong support from students for their tutors to use the Connect system as well, and for them to be part of at least some of the communities together with students.
Amongst students who thought that there was no point in having Connect, most cited either not having enough time or there being too many systems for them to interact with or, most commonly, they already used Facebook and Connect duplicated what they could already do on that system.
Staff feedback

While most staff reported that they had very little time to use Connect, 84% said that Connect has a role to play in helping students to build a community either prior to or after arrival at the University. Concerns were mostly about the fact students would have to duplicate efforts to maintain two sites and questions regarding access to Connect after completing their studies.

 

Conclusions and discussion

The results presented indicate that students can benefit in a variety of ways from the availability of a closed ‘university-only’ social networking system. However, it is also clear that one size does not fit all; whilst half of the students surveyed could see reasons to have something distinct from say Facebook, the other half could not. Selwyn (2007) describes how Facebook can function ‘in different ways depending on the preference of the user’. This degree of personalization seems to be fundamental to its popularity and is an important factor to consider when seeking to offer students a competing technology. 
 
Whilst a significant number of students have engaged with Connect in this first phase of development, only a small minority of those have tried to use Connect for overtly academic-related activities. In addition, groups of students that did start communities with an academic focus were not able to maintain them successfully. Panckhurst (2008) suggests the value of ‘specific, focused tasks’ when trying to effectively use a social network for direct educational benefit. It is generally felt that the future of learning lies in a carefully planned and integrated network designed to give autonomy to learners, whilst involving tutors in a facilitating role, stressing the importance of guidance rather than management in forming “communities of practice” (Lave and Wenger, 1991 taken from Panckhurst, 2008).
Data derived from the questionnaire suggests that students were keen to see tutors active in the Connect system and this could explain why students did not use Connect that much for academic purposes. It is worth noting that where academics have encouraged and worked with students to engage with Connect for academic purposes (e.g. the visual culture group), more significant contributions have been made by the students.  

References 

Panckhurst, R and Marsh, D. (2008) Communities of Practice. Using the Open web as a collaborative Learning platform, iLearn Fourm, Paris, France

Selwyn, N.   (2007)   ‘Screw Blackboard... do it on Facebook!  an investigation of students' educational use of Facebook', http://www.scribd.com/doc/513958/Facebook-seminar-paper-Selwyn

Selwyn, N. (2007) The use of computer technology in university teaching and learning: a critical perspective. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 23: (2) 83-94. 

Sharpe, R. 2006: The undergraduate experience of blended learning. The Higher Education Academy. http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/projects/detail/lr_2006_sharpe