My history in online interaction is primarily based in Usenet although that seems to be dying out nowadays with the move to web based forums. Can't claim that I like the move. Newsgroups were always easy to use and navigate whereas a web forum seems to often have low usability unless you can thread and view groups of messages together on the same page. I have seen some good examples but the ones that are replacing the newsgroups that I subscribed to don't seem to have made it yet.
I work in Higher Ed supporting staff and students on a distance learning course. I started discovering eportfolios and their uses at the end of last year and have been making a journey of sorts round various flavours. Spotted Elgg around Xmas and although it wasn't publicly available, the trails looked promising. Taken until now to get registered for an account ... work just seems to get in the way!
I'm really interested in the opportunities to foster a constructivist space, both personal and social. I'm also aware of the difficulties that institutions can have with anything that seems to give students control over how, where and why they learn.
Looking forward to the next step,
Nigel
Keywords: constructivism, constructivist, eportfolio, newbie
Comments
This is a real problem we are facing with tools like Elgg. I would be grateful if you have any thoughts/suggestions on ways to try and ease the concerns institutions have. I am exploring ways to try and find more early adopters to use these tools – we will not know the real value to learners until some institutions/faculty/courses take the chance and try them out – these places are not so easy to find!
You may be interested in a community that has just started - it deals with the pedagogical impact of this new wave of tools and I am sure discussion about the institutional perspective will appear.
I'm working with only a couple of other colleagues trying to persuade key people that an eportfolio could bring benefit to students learning. We have to justify any of that as a 'business case'. It sometimes feels like a Catch 22 where to demonstrate it's worth we would need to have some cohorts using an e-p ... but we can't finance one until we justify its worth!
In the last 2 or 3 weeks I've been working to set up the Ospi on a PC server to try and get some staff aware of what an e-p can / could be. I've also been trying to get Elgg to run but I can’t get it to talk to Apache properly. It doesn't help that I know next to nothing about server set-ups! My thought was to let staff see / try a variety of options with a hope that they could be persuaded that eportfolios (in as loose a sense as required) are a ‘good thing’. From there, it would be a case of persuading a faculty to invest in a server set-up and some support / time.
I could try and get staff to come here and sign up for accounts but I don’t think they would take it up. However, if you could actually get groups of staff collaborating on-line in this sort of environment I think you would be making progress. It is a case of moving beyond that first adopter group though.
Perhaps there are other people here at colleges and unis that have already adopted an eportfolio (e.g. Wolverhampton) that could throw some light on the internal process of making it happen.
I've only been able to see the publicly available demos of pebblePAD but they look quite useful. It looks like the kind of thing that academics could go for rather than Elgg (with all respect to Elgg!) I think this would be because a concrete process needs to be defined for the learning. I’m finding it hard to articulate this but I think that Elgg looks like it lends itself to a social networking, fuzzy, osmotic type learning whereas more structured environments lend themselves to scenarios of “I aim to learn this; I’ve read that; I’ve reflected thus; ergo I’ve learnt”. A and being able to say “I did this”, “I thought that” It’s the latter that I can envisage academia being able to point at and say “Look, a process; we enabled that”. It becomes harder to demonstrate the contributing elements when learning happens by osmosis...
My research as well as and some others into tool usage highlights that in most cases where there is a dictated direction/structure that is what the majority of people will do. Most will not delve any deeper and try to find out more for themselves so the worry was, if we included the more 'traditional' aspects of an e-portfolio the - “I aim to learn this; I’ve read that; I’ve reflected thus; ergo I’ve learnt” - ethos then people would not experiment with other approach such as the social networking, community building etc.
I am not sure if this was the best approach but it was the one we took - one of the ideas of Elgg is not to replace these other systems but rather to show what else can be done.
"It becomes harder to demonstrate the contributing elements when learning happens by osmosis..."
Very true - and this is not a route most faculty wish to go down.
It does make me think that perhaps tools such as Elgg will be student driven - they may never be part of an institutions infrastructure but instead areas where learners explore for themselves in their own time. This was my experience. This approach will not appeal to everyone but that doesn't matter just as long as those who wish to use these systems can.
The demographic moving into higher education are become more and more familiar with social networking tools such as flickr - so perhaps that should be the focus?
Quite agree. It can be really surprising how conservative some people can be when using IT. I wonder though whether this effect (of not delving / exploring) is a result of either goal driven assessments or coursework / assignments that aren’t properly encouraging active engagement / learning.
Elgg might be student driven but then where does it’s long term hosting and data storage happen if institutions aren’t installing it? (I suppose this only really applies with ref to student use). I would like to see unis and colleges making available online spaces for students and staff to freely use in whatever way they saw fit. The spaces would have tools such as wikis, weblogs, html, etc but the important point is that they wouldn’t be tied to specific modules, subjects, faculties etc (although that could happen as well.) Elgg would fit into that scenario and I think that its ability to form groups would be very important. The tools don’t have to be bundled all together – but they do need to talk to each other or at least co-exist without lots of navigation, log-ins etc.
Since many (most?) HE institutions in the UK now have a VLE installed then having tools and spaces embedded would seem to reduce the technology learning curve for users and make things appear seamless. I’m agreeing with your final 2 points Dave, but I do think it would be useful if HE (at least) supported innovations and opportunities for their students to learn by providing the infrastructure ... Or maybe I'm wrong and perhaps we should just let our students discover and use these places with no intervention?
"Elgg might be student driven but then where does it’s long term hosting and data storage happen if institutions aren’t installing it? I would like to see unis and colleges making available online spaces for students and staff to freely use in whatever way they saw fit."
So would I - in fact I think this could be one of the ways to really test out new technologies like Elgg. Use the carrot not stick approach. Make the systems available and let those that want to use them do so.
These sorts of tools are not going to be for everyone and neither should they be - everyone has different ways and methods of learning and exploring. What is a shame is if institutions do not even let those students and staff who want to experiment do so. What happens is they end up using hosted services like this one - something not everyone feels comfortable with.
"The tools don’t have to be bundled all together – but they do need to talk to each other or at least co-exist without lots of navigation, log-ins etc."
Good point - this is something we are working on. We have a developer at the University of Southern California reworking the authentication system to make it easier to use single sign on solutions. This is really quite important.