Joseph Gliddon :: Blog

Hallo
I have uploaded on elgg community site new language pack for Georgian language.
Dear Administrators, please look http://community.elgg.org/pg/plugins/highlander/read/9324/georgia
and add it to eduspaces too.
Thank you much in advance!!!

I have been wandering around with a post in my head for the past few weeks. Each time I attempted to put it to text I would drift across something else that I needed to make sense of, to integrate, and to rationalise.  I gave in and looked for other distractions.

 

I developed an enthusiasm for social software and Web 2 tools through my interest in ePortfolios.  I am a bit predictable, each time I drift across a new tool I very rapidly recognise its potential to support learning. I am becoming increasingly addicted. I am using the tools; I am joining the brigade of professional talking about the tools but am becoming increasingly frustrated that I am unable to influence their adoption in main stream practice. I am talking the talk more and walking the walk less – so a bit more talk then! I began to wonder whether all of the talk had resulted in us designing a ‘concept’ learning environment; but like a lot of the clay models in the motor manufactures design offices, a concept that does not make it to the production stage?

 

I can see many good reasons why schools should not allow/encourage the young students in their care to use the emerging tools. Perhaps it might be useful if we forget these for a while; put to one side the suspicion that young learners use and enjoy using the same tools outside of school, and consider the case for promoting social software in schools.

 

The tools and technology have the potential to:

 

• Support 1:1 and 1:many and many:many multimedia communications between learners anywhere in the world, for ‘free’;
• Provide learners with access to information and to the research tracks of others who might be, or might have previously, searched for similar information;
• Provide learners with the opportunity to share their research and their research tracks with others;
• support the learner as they make connections with others,  to enable them to follow and collaborate with others who have similar interests and purposes;
• provide the learner with opportunities to publish their thinking and findings and to obtain comment and feedback from others;
• enable learners to record and share their thinking from wherever they are working;
• provide an active, interactive environment capable of engaging learners;
• capable of supporting anywhere, anytime access to learning
• support what learner do naturally, to provide the majority of the elements that learners are likely to accept as their Personal Learning Environment;

 

It is our responsibility to prepare young (and older) learners so that they can function in a world where emerging technologies are being accepted and embraced.

 

I cannot see that schools will be able to resist pressure to use these tools indefinitely. Eventually they will accept them and begin to build on them. I do not know what it will be that actually tips the balance. It might be the development of a new set of management tools or safeguards, or perhaps simply that we accept the tools as valuable and decide to educate and manage the risks?

 

OR are we approaching a Luddite swing towards traditional, proper learning with teachers straightening up the desks and requisition a new box of Interactive White Board chalk. Drawing an analogy with the credit crunch, have we built learning environments on ‘foundations of sand’? The constantly changing sand (ICT and social software etc) and prevailing currents (national expectations etc) making it impossible to construct anything on it. An acceptance that with everything constantly changing, it is not worth building anything, it will simply fall down!

 

Or do we, as builders do,   build a concrete raft that will spread the load and build on top of the raft. If the sands shift the worst that could happen would be that we ended up with ‘the leaning tower of learning’. Ahh – tower, ivory tower are we looking out from it.

 

Could the learning process act as the raft? The learning process would ‘sit’ on, be supported by, the emerging as well as traditional tools.  New tools are then unlikely to phase the learner, they will evaluate them and either adopt or dismiss them.

As some of you will have noticed, we have given EduSpaces a new skin and added a couple of features, namely; Shouts, Push to Twitter, Incoming Twitter and FriendFeed on all profiles.

This combination of features allows users on EduSpaces to continue using the external tools of their choice while still updating their followers on EduSpaces.

A few may ask why we have revamped EduSpaces, the answer is simple, this site launched four years ago this month, before Facebook, MySpace, Twitter et al were household names. Yes, it has gone through a couple of rocky patches, however, people kept on using it, so we wanted to show our commitment and say thank you.

The service will continue to be free to use, however, we are considering putting a couple of links on the frontpage to a few worthwhile educational charities, I hope this is ok.

Anyway, thanks to those users who kept supporting the site, we appreciate it.

Has the ability to post by email been removed? I've used it in the past, but not for ages & was trying to test it - and had forgotten what random address I'd set up. I can't find where I entered the details, though, now.

It has been a while since I was involved in the ePortfolio scene, and with my PhD on hold as I pursue running a business, I have not been able to keep up-to-date.

It feels like the whole ePortfolio / PLE movement has died out, is this the case or are developments flourishing? 

Eduspaces seems to have a flaw.  You can only add to it.  How can I delete a community that I created?

I feel the need, prompted by Cristina’s Post, http://tinyurl.com/5flo7d to over-cook the PLE thinking a bit more!

 

I distilled, from an earlier attempt at summarising the PLE discussions that I had followed , http://tinyurl.com/57eugd that it is what the learner ‘does’ in their Personal Learning Environment that really determines what they will learn.  What they do in the environment is more important than the environment itself. [I take the environment as meaning where they work/operate/learn, in its broadest term.]

 

Individual will learn something from any environment that they operate in. It is our job to create/contrive the physical environment and then cajole, encourage and support our learners to ensure that they encounter the experiences and stimuli that we hope will result in learning taking place. Not any old learning, but the learning that we, or ‘somebody’, thinks will be important to them.

 

While the physical environment provides learners with access to the tools and resources it will be the ‘teaching’ that will provide the experiences, activities and support that will supply the opportunities for learning. The ‘teaching’, in whatever form it takes, will: create the climate for learning; wet the learner’s appetite; create the need for learning; encourage learners to recognise when learning has taken place and encourage them to take responsibility for their own learning. It will need to create the space that will allow learning to happen and hopefully and provide learners with an experience that will enable them to be creative and that they will enjoy.

 

The bad news, or the big challenge, is that this is unlikely to be what the majority currently accepted as teaching, where large groups of students arrive every hour, expecting to be entertained, expecting to be taught a separate subject and expecting to be examined every 5 minutes. Re-stating the obvious, but creating a Personal Learning Environment for every learner, that is delivering the required shift in emphasis from teaching to learning, will need commitment, imagination and resource.

 

So leaving the hard bit, for now, and moving on! How the learner operates in this new environment, how they behave, how they use their initiative, how they interact with others, how they manage their time, how they support others, how they employ their different learning styles and how they deploy their different intelligences will affect how and what they learn.

 

To be able to survive and learn in the environment Learners will need to develop a set of skills, the Personal Learning and Thinking skills, the Functional Skills and, another skill set, yet to be defined, that will enable learners to use the tools and approaches that we are beginning to recognise as having potential to support learning.

 

Back into the loop; learners need to work in an environment that provides the appropriate opportunities for them to operate as independent learners – the environment needs to exist before they can work in it – what they do in the environment determines how and what they learn – to function in the environment they will need to develop a specific set of skills.

 

How do we break-in to the loop?

I started to think about how I will often write something up, then edit, re-edit and re-edit it until I have word processed the meaning out of the message that I set off to present. By overcooking, I often loose the message.

 

I listened to a radio programme that discussed the problem created by all of the space debris that was whizzing around, in orbit, just waiting to collide with some thing.

 

I related the space debris hazard to the distractions that surround learner and my thinking, thinking and thinking about ePortfolios, PLEs and Social Networking to the over-cooking bit. I began to think back 20 years when I watched Woodwork and Metal work [as curriculum subjects] being over-cooked to make Technology. Practical subjects that had most everything - practical problem solving opportunities where learners developed, practiced and mastered skills; where they developed the ability to select the most appropriate tools for their purpose; where they learnt to protect their own heath and safety, and that of others.  They had (often) opportunities to be creative, to work with others and to enjoy what they did. Then it got over-cooked in the name of rigour and academic acceptance.

 

So learner have access to the majority of tools that they need to manage their own Personal Learning – should we not concentrate on encouraging them to just do it?  Oh – tried to pedal that message before http://eduspaces.net/jpallister/weblog/177464.html

 

The man on the Bill says ‘someone out there holds the key for this, they just don’t know’ it yet – are you the one with the Key that will unlock this?

Learning is a personal process, personal to individual learners whatever their age or stage of development. When learners work in classrooms, in groups or on-line they will encounter and have to deal with distractions provided by others. They will need to develop strategies that will enable them to manage the distractions. They will need to be able to recognise situations when interacting with others will support their learning; they will need to be able to recognise situations when the distractions provided by others will retard or handicap their learning; they will need to find out when using their social network will help and when it will distract.

 

They will need self discipline and independent learning skills.  In PLTs terms they will be Reflective learners who will be expected to "evaluate their strengths and
limitations, setting themselves realistic goals with criteria for success”. They
have to “monitor their own performance and progress, inviting feedback from others". They will need to be Self-managers who will be expected to "organise themselves, showing personal responsibility, initiative, creativity and enterprise with a commitment to learning and self-improvement".

 

These budding Self Managers, will have to balance their desire to be recognised and accepted by others; their desire to influence the community that they operate in or that they want to belong to, with their desire and need to learn. In a traditional classroom situation, the teacher attempts to manage and moderate these distractions for their learners. In a Personalised Learning Environment the learner will need to take responsibility for moderating and managing these distractions.

 

How can we help them to develop these skills?

I have watched and contributed to, Twitter now for something like six months. I admit that I have got a bit addicted. I have developed a ‘habit’ of checking Twitter when ever I read my email. I do not use it on mobile devices; apart from my phone I have none! I only watch/follow about 50 people, to follow more would take too much of my time, I would need to scroll back through several pages. [teaching prevents the luxury of constant, real time monitoring! – constant alerts from mobile would not go down well in a classroom -   micro blogging does require discipline]

 

What have I got out Twitter? - Lots and lots - I enjoy the frequency of posts; I have learned by following the links that those that I follow have suggested/recommended; I have found others who have similar interests as my self and, quite difficult to admit, but I get a little bit of enjoyment from ‘listening-in’ on the conversation/chat that goes on as well as following the travelling/wanderings of others.

 

How are people using it?  - to chat; to ask for help: to publish and promote themselves and their work; to share links to resources and to share their thinking.

 

How am I using it? – Really only finding my way around and experimenting. I am learning by follow links. I have not got drawn into much chat but can see the potential of something that encourages you to generate and share bits of thinking; thinking that is not well formed enough to be bundled up into ‘full’ blown blog post.  

 

http://twitter.com/jpallis001

  

Will it take over from the Blog? – lots of micro blog posts = a blog?