Reading back over my posts, I can see that I have used it primarily as a reflective learning space. Reflective learning has been defined by Brockbank et al. as ‘an intentional process, where social context and experience are acknowledged, in which learners are active individuals, wholly present, engaging with others and open to challenge’ (quoted in Bartlett-Brag, 2003, p 4). I have used my personal space as a tool for reflecting on my own experience as an educational designer in higher education, where part of my role was to support learning management systems, which led me to identify the weaknesses of these systems for creating more constructivist, learner centred, networked learning opportunities, and identify the possibilities of personal learning networks. The example learning networks I selected to post about saw myself reflecting on my own experience as a student and the benefits such learning networks could have provided me. You can see that, as a learner myself, I have used the ‘tool’ for ‘creating meaning and context from events and experiences – leading the learner towards creating new meanings and further enhancing their ability to contextualise and progress towards self-directed and deep learning’ (Bartlett-Bragg, 2003).

So, I guess the previous paragraph begs the question, what, if any, ‘new meanings’ have I discovered through blogging my ideas about personal learning networks within elgg - but that perhaps should be the focus of my next post - too much thought for the end of this post... But while I'm here, the main way my thinking has changed about personal learning environments is that through my first hand experience of a personal learning environment, I can now see personal learning networks as more than a ‘tool’ that supports learning – but as something that has greatly changed the way I think about ideas, and the reading, writing, or research process. Having had experience working as an educational designer in higher education, and using WebCT to support teaching and learning, I was very much of the belief that learning technologies are merely a ‘tool’ to support learning – and it’s not about what tool you use, but how you use it to help support what you want your students to learn. I am no longer so sceptical of the claims many enthusiasts espouse about their advantages, and believe that there are all sorts of new possibilities for using personal learning networks in higher education. These possibilities  include possibly changing higher education’s continued dependence on the polished and static essay format that students are expected to magically produce at the end of term, with its focus on text and argument structure as the primary means of assessment in the humanities, and perhaps even helping to move beyond the artificial constraint of a 13 week semester for completing a unit of study for a program, and perhaps even beyond the artificial constraint of the classroom.

 The Open Content initiative of The Open University (UK) is going to make its higher education resources freely available through what they are calling a 'repository' , allow creators of educational resources to add their own materials to a 'depository', and what I believe to be more interesting, provide personal learning spaces for 'self-learners' to form supported 'non-formal' learning communities if they want to.

While MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative has been successfully used by both learners and teaching staff, the OU open content initiative is taking it a step forward - by not only providing open access to content - but also providing the tools for supporting social presence and informal learning communities - 'the key issue is not so much access to content itself - which in an information rich world is increasingly easy - but rather how to use content in empowering ways.' The initiative is investigating pedagogical models that support open content provision as well as the tools to support individual learners and  communities - which include social networking, or what they call 'sense-making' tools.

Similar to Terry Anderson's challenge he discusses in his article 'Distance learning - Social software's killer ap',  the Open Content Initiative will also need to find ways around the 'conflicting priorities' of self-paced learners - the priority of supporting and retaining the freedom of self-paced learners to come and go as they please, while at the same time that of creating spaces for learners to work together in communities.

What kind of learning design model can provide 'learning activities' or 'sense-making' activities as the Open Content Initiative calls it, which are deemed valuable enough for learners to take part in, and which encourage learners to work together, while at the same time, retaining the flexibility and individual freedom these environments afford?

He has selected elgg as the ESS solution for these types of students and has already installed an instance for his students at Athabasca University and for his own design-based research into ESS. What is interesting, in the context of students enrolled in self paced and continuous enrolment programs, the learning environment will be designed to be informal, to support students creating relationships with other students, with voluntary learning activities.

He makes the distinction between collaborative and cooperative learning - where in cooperative learning activities learners are encouraged but not required to work together, wheres in collaborative learning activities learners are required to work together - preferring the former for these types of students. He sees the attributes and tools of elgg as a way to support this type of learning strategy. His second stage of development includes the 'adoption and development of new learning designs that create compelling, but optional, learning activities that support the learning community while retaining student freedoms.'

Sounds intersting. Is it possible? Something that may move on from the traditional curriculum, course readings, powerpoints, syllabus posted online for supporting students? While I love taking a look at MIT's OpenCourseWare resource, and the fact that it is all open is kind of unique these days - where you can actually see what other institutions are teaching - actually see another teacher's syllabus or course readings from another institution, it's still basically a replica of what happens in the classroom, or within webct. Listening to video lectures online to me is tiresome - and date very quickly. Would ESS make the learning experience more interesting and alive? Could Terry's approach apply to the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative or similar programs? What resources would be necessary - educational, teaching, technical etc? How would the syllabus change? What would be the cost?

My initial proposal written in August last year, basically asked the following questions:

What does it mean to design online learning environments that position learners at the centre of their learning networks?

Other more specific questions that I wanted to explore were:

• What web-based technologies would best support the creation of personalised learning networks?
• What types of learning or research activities would these online personal networks best suit?
• What would be the distinctive characteristics of learning activities or artefacts that learners produce through their own personal learning networks?
• How do these environments challenge current assessment practices?
  

How have my initial questions/ideas changed?

Since then, I've found that most of my ideas have already been posted about, analysed and discussed on the edu-blogoshpere - and that 'personal learning environments', or PLEs, seems to be the common term for these personal learning networks. Defined by Terry Anderson:

The PLE is a unique interface into the owners digital environment. It integrates their personal and professional interests (including their formal and informal learning), connecting these via a series of syndicated and distributed feeds. The PLE is also a portfolio system allowing the user to maintain their repository of content and selectively share that content as needed. It is also a profile system, exposing the users interests in a variety of ways allowing automated, but selective search of the individual and their digital contributions. Of course, the PLE is a social as well as an information environment, connecting the user to individuals and cooperative events and activities throughout the Net.

There is even a blog called 'The personal learning environment blog'. 

• PLEs are different from eportfolios as they do not just store work produced, cvs, assessments competed from someone's past, or for students' assignments. As Jeremy points out in the diagram above, it's not only what you've done in the past, but what you're doing/learning, or want to learn about.
• PLEs are different from LMSs in that they allow you to publish your own ideas/work/notes on the web. You are not just reading and collecting from the web, but contributing information to the web.
  
• PLEs are personal spaces, and it's up to the individual to use the web based applications, or 'self-directed' tools they feel will suit whatever project, or assignment, they are working on at the moment. In fact, some proponents of PLEs believe that  you can't design a PLE for someone else, such as elgg, as it is up to the individual to choose their own self-directed tools of which some examples are shown in the diagram above.
• PLEs are not designed for institutions, or teaching, but for learners to manage their own learning. 
• The difficulties of getting students motivated about the potential of blogging or 'publishing'. Also getting students blogging effectively due to the time constraints of formal educaction, the semester, and the time consuming nature of blogging itself - both students and teachers are time poor - and students do need to focus on their assessments to get through. It takes longer than a semester to see the value in blogging your ideas. As Sebastien Fiedler says, 'Activities would often come to an end before the participants even had a chance to get a glimpse of what is possible.'
• A learner's charter for PLEs
  

Being more aware of the current debate, and the issues, I would like to move on from this 'conversation',  desciriptions and critiques of existing models, supporting technologies, and pedagogies and attempt to focus on more practical examples of personal learning networks or PLEs. In looking at examples, such as Labsome 2006, I would like to explore Peter Goodyear's 'middle ground', which tries to align pedagogical theory with practical teaching tatics.

Other examples to include may be examples of informal learning networks such as 'FourDocs' or 'Sketch club' - which work well outside of formal institutions . I would like to perhaps analyse a personal learning network external to elgg, but within an institutional framework, such as Barbara Ganley's approach to using student blogs, and if time would like to explore a collaboratively authored course wiki.

I would also like to bring teaching back into the debate - as to incorporate these learning spaces into a course or program - as a tool to support student learning, connections, research - the teacher will need to play a role and will need to understand the particular teaching or learning contexts these environments could be intergrated into and how to integrate them successfully, and efficiently. As Tim commented on one of my posts, how to specify the particular teaching contexts that CBLEs [PLEs] might be most useful for? And hope to come up with a set of guidelines for design, or templates, based on Goodyear's middle ground, similar to the areas depicted in Goodyear's Educational design space diagram - maybe even coming up with my own concept for representing the middle ground of educational design.

As far as blogging my ideas - it's still early days but I am finding it really useful. Besides helping me understand the object of my study, by blogging about using blogging as part of a personal learning network, it has been useful in several other ways. For example, instead of reading and taking notes on various pieces of paper, or in a text editior on my desktop, and as a result, missing the connections between ideas, I feel like I'm reading more actively, re-articulating main ideas, and seeing the connections and understanding the issues more quickly than before. I can also see pretty quickly when I'm going down the wrong track.

As I became more comfortable with the technology and the potential public nature of it all,  and more confident by reading other people's blogs within elgg, I have changed all my posts to public. I hope to make my posts shorter in the future - as I feel I've been breaking some rules here. I would also like to hear my voice more rather than summaries of articles . Using blogging to help me complete my reading program feels less like just 'jumping through hoops' to complete the reading program, and more like a learning process than ever before. If I started again - I probably wouldn't have made this a community blog - but started a personal blog - as I now believe this is distinguishing feature of blogging now - they are personal.

I really need to learn to make my blog posts shorter. 

Students in the honours program have their own individual elgg, which they are using to post their thoughts and ideas about their research, research problems, to do lists, annotated bibliographies, questions, anxieties about the program/specific assignments, and sharing their completed work with others using the file repository.

All are connected to each other through the Labsome 2006 Community Adrian has created for the cohort of students, and through adding each other as friends. It is interesting to see that most students seem to be posting to their personal blog spaces rather than the community blog (unless there are a lot of posts that have been restricted to just the community members).  Adrian has made the community a closed community which means  membership must be approved. Students seem to be posting fairly regularly to the personal spaces and there are some really interesting postings - useful for all students completing the program.

It is great how elgg offers students their own personal blog as well as the possibility to create communities. There is something different about having your own space than that of a community blog. I remember being involved in a community blog for a masters research course, and found it quite difficult to get involved in, as everyone was posting each week and the ideas were so separate and disjointed.  Your ideas became quite fragmented. We were also required to make a posting each week. I ended up not writing for myself but for the class. We were also assessed on 3 of our best postings nominated by ourselves.

Perhaps I shouldn't have made this a community blog - and used my personal blog?

I wonder whether the honours students in Labsome 2006 were required to get their own elgg space? Whether they are being assessed on their posts? Or whether they had the choice to join or not? Whether they see it as a chore - a task they must complete, or as a useful tool which supports their work, and they are posting because they want to? What format will their completed projects be in? How different are the pedagogical strategies used within the blogging/personal learning space? How different are the tasks?

The article gives reasons why LMSs were adopted, and asks the question - 'is an LMS the most effective way to manage teaching and learning online?' - given the variety of learning needs and particular contexts that exist witin a university and the associated costs of supporting (technical, helpdesk, training), upgrading and managing the system.

I like his concluding argument:

The CBLE model supports a more cognitively flexible approach to course design that places more emphasis on instructors thinking about what they are using technology for. My contention is that the better instructors understand the tools and why they're using them then the better the learning environment and instruction will be.

and with regard to informal/impersonal learning: 

Often courses built within a proprietary LMSs are inaccessible once the formal institutional term is complete. Given that learners have an existence and identity outside the formal school setting, component-based learning environments can be designed in such a way that when a formal course is "over," the learner has the ability to take their work with them.  Contributions to a CBLE by the students are owned by the learner and can be used and re-used as the owner deems appropriate.

Another article on this topic cited in the article's references is from Terry Anderson's blog PLE's versus LMS: Are PLEs ready for Prime time?

While comparing is useful to see the differences, it's not that PLE's (personal learning environments) or CBLE's should be seen as replacing LMSs. As Christopher says in his blog - that decision should be based on each individual learning context.

Also as Terry points out in his conclusion:

Although there is something quite compelling about the vision of a lifelong learning environment that is centered upon and perpetually belongs to the learner, I think we are some distance from being able to operationalize that vision. I am reminded of the resistance from early net adopters and innovators, when LMS systems were first introduced. At the time (and still today) they offer little that can’t be built with off the shelf HTML, scripting tools and Open Source databases. Yet LMS systems have afforded teachers the capacity to create their own web courses with minimal programming expertise or even instructional design support. Thus, they have become essential and very popular tools for early and late majority users – something that never would have occurred with ‘roll your own’ tools of 10 years ago.

But why can't these web applications such as blogs, wikis etc. be an alternative for teachers and students within a formal learning institution? And yes, LMSs do give more teachers control over their own site, with tech and ed design support, yet what about students getting some control? What do they think of these teacher created WebCT/Blackboard sites? How much tech support/ed design support be needed for elgg to function well within an appropriate educational context?

I guess we'll all find out with the news that  Curverider - the commercial arm of elgg have joined forces with Aperto Elearning Solutions founded by Sasan Salari - a founding member of WebCT - to integrate Elgg into WebCT ... I wonder if students will be able to make their posts public?

Sketch club is a great example of an informal learning network where animators/designers/artists can learn from each other. Members of sketch club meet for lunch and together identify someone who interests them. Then after lunch and back at the drawing board, each member of the club draws the the person they picked out how they remember. The character is then posted to the communal blog for members to see, compare with others, and get feedback on. 

What I find particularly interesting about this example is using the online space to complement what they see and experience together in the 'real' time in Carlifornia, as a group, and then posting their own individual ideas to the blog. No one is leading the group, they are all equal and learning from each other, and the blog supports their coming together to share their illustrations.  They each have their own individual spaces within blogger under blog links. The network extends even further in the online world - the main animator at my current workplace (in Sydney) referred me to this site and he accesses it on a regular basis for ideas. In his words, his collection of blog links is the only place he learns anything from.

A great idea for blended learning environments in both higher education and the corporate sector.  How simple would it be - using blogger, or one of the many other free blogging software out there.

Do informal learning networks have a role with formal educational institutions - or do they work because they are informal?

• Copyright - If only students of the class have access to a course site,  it is easier to get permission to use copyright materials within the site using 'fair use' arguments - however, you would still need to get permission from the copyright holder, though there would be less chance of being found out (like the classroom), and thus protecting the university from copyright breach.
• IP - Teaching staff and students may prefer their work not to be easily downloaded and reused without their knowledge - thus if access is restricted students may feel more inclined to have their work shown and teachers may feel more inclined to use more of their own work in their teaching.
• Privacy - Learning environments such as classrooms have traditionally been private and intimate spaces for both teachers and students. To have your work, opinions, ideas on display to the whole world can be quite intimidating and impede participation and thus learning.
• Assessment - Protecting students' results in online quizzes, or final results which could be delivered online (but not often!)
• Security -  Protection against spamming, hacking, flamming
  

These arguments are valid within the traditional pedagogical framework most dominant in formal educational environments. An environment where 'teachers assess, students are assessed', where 'teachers should know more than their students', where 'teachers lead, students follow', where 'the curriculum is set in advance', and where 'the more one knows their students the better' (McWilliam, 2005).

It could be argued that LMSs, with their one-size fits all features and tools, and teacher centred design and functionality, encourage a more traditional approach to learning and course design. An approach where knowledge is independent from personal experience, hierarchical, linear, and structured around important topics of the field. Personal student expressions, reflections and experience are not part of the overall approach.

This approach can be seen in the tools implemented in higher ed LMSs - content modules, single pages, the teaching control panel, the gradebook, assignment dropbox,  and the plethora of student management and tracking tools. This can also be seen in the way the majority of LMS course sites have been used by teachers - uploading course lecture notes(powerpoint) and readings which students print off and read offline, to digest, learn and be assessed upon through multiple choice questions, short answer questions or the traditional essay format. Assessment is the measure of your learning and ranking among your peers. Readings, lectures, tutorials, week after week, year after year. Arguments for restricting access to course sites seems natural when used within the more traditional views of knowledge, where assessment is what counts.

However, the set of pedagogical beliefs and values behind the development of personalised learning networks such as elgg, or FourDocs, differs greatly from the traditional or discipline based approach. The approach is more in line with contructivist, experiential based, student centred personal or reflective learning approaches - but perhaps taking it a step further in that:

The rhizomatic capacity of networks to flow around a point in a chain means that teachers may be located in a linear supply chain of pedagogical services but excluded from their students' learning networks (McWilliam, 2005, p 5).

To what extent do the above concerns about copyright, IP, privacy in online learning apply in networked learning environments? Are the reasons for limiting access above only valid within a traditional based pedagogical framework - where students are competing against each other for marks, where the esssay  and exam format is dominant, and students are at the bottom of the 'linear supply of pedagogical services' and can't be trusted?

The problem with most online learning environments is that they provide teaching staff, designers, administrators with the control panel - not the learners. This is equally true of the centrally run learning management systems used in higher educational institutions and the modular approach taken by most corporate training programs. Problems arise in both contexts when attempts are made to design learner-centred online activities that are collaborative, reflective, experiential, participatory, and networked across a wider community of peers and experts. Paradoxically, these types of activities seem to be what the central teaching and learning units, or elearning specialists, are espousing.

FourDocs is an example of an informal learning network that gives members the control panel. Described by its makers, Channel 4 in the UK, as 'a broadband documentary channel', it provides a space for anyone to upload their own 4 minute doucmentary films, download others, get advice from experienced filmakers, access resources and rushes, and review and get feedback on their own films. It also has an amazing collection of classic documentatries you can download and view for free.

To me, it would have been a great place to showcase a short film I made as part of film course I took last year. Not only acting as a delivery mechanism for my film - but also giving some sort of meaning to why we were making the film - a starting point for analysis - and a purpose for making the film. The end product was a short 1 minute film compressed for the web - but no-one except the teacher ended up seeing it - making the task seem a little futile and thus, less motivating. Now the film I made has ended up as 'dead' data on my computer.

What I find particularly interesting about the site is how easily it seems to have overcome issues with copyright by stating the legal requirements for all films uploaded and using a creative commons licence. One of the barriers seen by higher educational institutions to student created work that is openly accessible on the web is fear of copyright breach - which this site seems to simply overcome by clearly stating the legal guidelines upfront for your work to be shown. What a great way to learn about the legal implications of films distributed online as well as alternative options to copyright - rather than the inauthenticity of guidelines given in the classroom ...

Why can't higher ed institutions move beyond the classroom, the university, password protected LMS course sites, and take advantage of the informal networks that connect with a broader community of peers and experts?

Never at rest
And another more topical:
School Spirit 

As an educational designer, I have often found it difficult to conceptualise or articulate the connections between learning philosophies/pedagogies and the design of practical individual tasks and activities. What I like about the process conceputalised in the diagram is that it takes into account the iterative nature of the design process - rather than the linear nature of many instructional design processes. Goodyear's representation of the educational design problem space offers a way to connect the theoretical or high level pedagogies, with concrete practicalities of the tasks and activities we design. In this article, Goodyear introduces a pattern based approach to elearning, within the context of networked learning - offering designers/teachers an easy to understand way to share, interpret, and apply each others' design ideas within their own contexts. It could be a useful and holistic way to represent example designs or guidelines for networked learning spaces.

To what extent should we direct our learners within the environment? If learners are to create their own learning networks - what is the design role? the teaching role? Should the arrows pointing to the right under Educational setting go the other direction as well?