Wk12, A2: Richardson (2005)

All in all, I enjoyed reading a concise and well-cited article. I think Sharon mentions in Emma’s blog, in a reply to one of her postings, that Sfard’s Acquisition and Participation metaphors were apparent in the Richardson (2005) article too. I picked up on this too, and I think it makes sense, as both of those pieces of writing refer to the work of others, and come to similar conclusions about how beliefs in knowledge are understood. I think Sfard conceptualizes this more than Richardson, although there is perhaps a danger in just seeing AMs and PMs.

My focus was more on the approaches to study rather approaches to teaching, not sure why, I just found it more intersting. And what I found very interesting in Richardson, was that it appeared that learning approaches seemed to have a link to the perceived value of “the content, the context, and the demands of particular tasks.” (p.674) What I mean by that is that if student exhibit different approaches to learning, whether it be surface, strategic or deep, they choose that based on their understanding of what will be valuable to them.

In another serendipitous happenstance, earlier today I attended a lunch time seminar with Dr Cathal O’Siochru, a psychology lecturer from Liverpool Hope, who was talking about ‘Belief and belonging’. (I read the Richardson article about two hours later). He referred to a link he believed existed between student’s individual epistemological beliefs about knowledge in subject disciplines, and the way teachers perceive knowledge in subject cultures. His argument was that where student’s beliefs aligned with the culture of the subject, they would achieve better grades. In other words, those students who ‘understood’ the teaching culture of their discipline performed better.

For me this raised questions about the value of teaching to learners. What is it that they value? Does this change from subject area to subject area? Do different teaching and assessment approaches affect the way that learners’ approach their work? My thoughts on this are a little rough and ready at the moment, not sure if it even makes sense yet and its probably way of topic because I haven’t really referred to the activity questions! Nevermind… I may return after tonight’s Elluminate session to add more.

–

Richardson, J.T.E. (2005) ‘Students’ approaches to learning and teachers’ approaches to teaching in higher education’, Educational Psychology, vol.25, no.6, pp.673–80; [online] Available from: http://libezproxy.open.ac.uk/login?url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01443410500344720 (accessed 6 May 2009)

Wk 12, A1

A1: This reminded me of something that I was taught during my PGCE. My tutor was really good, and she practised some exemplary sessions to which the whole cohort was thoroughly engaged. During one topic, we went through a discursive process of identifying the factors of written publications that might impact on the way we should interpret it. So things like bias, historical and cultural perspective, political stance, personal beliefs, whether it’s current and so on were all included.

One thing that did not crop up, however, was subtlety of semantics in publications – how is it written? I’m glad this activity has brought it to light. I can think of many examples of this in practice, where ‘creative’ rhetoric has had significant impact (off the top of my head I’m thinking about Gilly Salmon’s ‘Media Zoo’ analogy). It is a feature that is very familiar to me when it comes to visual fluency – for example, there is a culture amongst graphic designers (my background) that everything needs to ‘look good’.

The Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Art, Design and Media get their publications ‘designed’ in order to reach their target audience – for example, http://www.adm.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/publications/entrepreneurship-education-report Interestingly, in the most recent publication of ADM-HEA Networks magazine that I received in the post this very morning (it’s not online yet but I’ll post a link here when it is), there is an article exploring the rhetoric of creativity in writing. (Readman, 2009)

Looking back to Block 1 of this course, there were some good examples of attempts at written persuasion. Some of the features of what I saw as a convincing piece of writing were: - Appropriate and through supporting citations - A well crafted ‘story’ of the processes and findings (journey) - Authoritative language used to reinforce strategic documents - Matter-of-fact tone in writing strategic documents - Masking of flaws in work by focusing on interesting findings or ‘golden quotes’.

PS: it happened again! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader-Meinhof_Phenomenon

–

Readman, M. (2009) ‘Don’t mention the ‘c word’: the rhetorics of creativity in the Roberts Report’, Networks, Issue 7, Summer 2009, Art/Design/Media Subject Centre

Wk11, A3a

Response to Dynarski et al (2007)

• The evidence suggests that training upskills teachers in the use of tools and technologies.

• Given that technical difficulties are reported as being minor, this suggests that technical difficulties or upskilling are not a significant barriers to engaging with technology. Therefore if engagement is not occurring, it must be something else.

• Students using technologies benefit from more personalized relationship with their teacher, but lose some of the peer interactivity.

• The mode for comparison between the two examples (with and without ‘products’) was to determine a difference by the students’ test results. However, there are many problems with doing this. Firstly, there will be natural variation in test scores anyway, and even a average may be misleading. Secondly, this only takes into account what the student has remembered through the different modes of delivery, not any of the higher order skills that a traditional test might not pick up, such as critical thinking, reasoning, cognitive or meta cognitive development such as forming concepts or reflection, etc. (p.xix)

• The evidence overall suggests that the effect of the ‘products’ was negligible.

Wk11, A2c

Please debate the proposition ‘OER will reduce the digital divide’

As part of this activity I chose to read the OpenLearn report from the resource list:

Due consideration has been given to underpinning infrastructure and design of the OpenLearn site and its principles to ensure that access to resources is maximised. For example, the resources themselves, the tools employed by the OU including the VLE, and licensing are all designed with ease of transferability and sharing in mind. Whilst, by acknowledgement, this was seen to be a big (and brave) step, it is perceived as a step forward and is backed up by evidence that within five months of launching, 800,000 learners (p.3) had benefited from the OER content.

OpenLearn has ambitions to support the development of new non-formal learning communities by considering the ways that self-initiated learning can be supported through things like self-assessment, topic forums and personal learning journals (p.12).

I do not believe that OER itself can reduce the digital divide. Fundamental infrastructure and skills development are prerequisites to even accessing the content available. It is possible that OER may provide users with a motivation for working with technology, thus reducing the digital divide, “changing the way people think about opportunities for raising their competencies and abilities” (p.17). However, I would suggest that OER is about making learning more accessible through use of technology. For me, the development of OER enters the debate of widening participation, not the digital divide.

–

OpenLearn (2007) Creating a new world of learning, Open University [online] Available from: http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/about-us/our-story.php#3 (accessed 29 April 2009)

Wk11, A2b

Table 1 - South America

Wk11, A1

Wk11, A1

My initial response to this debate was to disagree with the proposition, but after a few minutes consideration, I could see the other perspective too making it difficult to vote for or against. As my understanding of teaching and learning matures, I realise more and more that it is the role of the teacher and learner that enhances quality of education, not the technology and resources. That is to say, it’s not what you’ve got, it’s what you do with it that counts, so I opted for the proposition on that basis.

Frauke’s excellent contribution (Constable, 2009) raised several questions about the debate for me, and one in particular – how do you define quality? I think that the conversation in the debate and our forum has suggested that perhaps even the debaters were unsure of the answer to this.

For me, there are many facets to the ‘quality of education’ and lots of ways to measure these. Quality of the learner experience, or evidence of learning and achievement are two examples. If the emphasis of quality in education is about provision of resources, or enhancing the learner experience, then I think technology has a fundamental role to play. But I think much of what technology enables teachers to do refers to its affordances, for example, the differences between synchronous and asynchronous discussion.

—

Is knowledge advanced by these means?

Yes. But, that doesn’t mean to say that it could not be advanced through other, non-technological mean also.

2. Do you think the debate was affected by the electronic format?

A note on the process of debating: It was in the same way that discussions take place between this cohort online. Asynchronous online discussions enable a more considered and reflective response that can be researched and supported by other perspectives from literature, creating an opportunity to yield a far more ‘academic’ discussion. As Pat identified, (Shearer, 2009) Kozma took this opportunity, whilst Daniel opted for a more informal one which perhaps mimicked a more traditional face-to-face encounter. To an extent Kozma proved his point by the way that he approached the debate.

3. Were you surprised by the results? (Pro 44% / Con 56%)

Not really as I struggled to come to a conclusion myself, and I think the debate was confusing in that, although it raised some very interesting topics and discussions, I’m not sure how much of this was actually an aligned response to the proposition.

—

Constable, F. (26 April 2009) ‘Re: A1b – A1e’, conference message to H800 les6 09 W11 A1

Shearer, P. (25 April 2009) ‘Wk11 activities a-c’, conference message to H800 les6 09 W11 A1

Economist debate (2007), Technlogy in education, ‘This house believes the continuing introduction of new technologies and new media adds little to the quality of most education’, Available from: http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/120 (accessed 28 April 2009)

Wk 10 A2: Wikipedia/Citizendium

Some thoughts on Wikipedia > leading to academic validity / professionalism

I’m torn between two things on the issue of academic validity. On the one hand I agree with the policy mentioned by Emma in the forum – ‘if something is published then it is citable’. But on the other I think that there is much to be said for peer-reviewed approaches.

Wikipedia is an odd one because you could argue that it is peer-reviewed by the global community. The problem with that is that some reviewers may not have the expert knowledge with which to review content effectively, so there is always a doubt over its validity. I suppose this is the problem being overcome with Citizendium.

The content of these sites is developed by multiple authors rather than a single authority. This would indicate that the whole could be greater than the sum of its parts, which may well be the case. But as has been alluded to, I wonder if this does have an impact on the academic status of individuals who traditionally ‘owned’ knowledge. Does it come down to ‘What I think’ versus ‘What we think’? I’d like to think that both are perceived as equally valuable and that each can feed the other, but realistically traditional academia still favours the work of the individual because of its past culture and continuing requirement to assess the individual. An emphasis on the latter may marginalise the ability of the individual to make ground-breaking discoveries.

Other things that popped into my head whilst writing

Curtis Bonk – Someone once told me about this guy who had done an experiment with Wikipedia. He got his students to create  a new page with a new subject in Wikipedia and if the content on that page survived intact for a week then they passed. I have no idea where the paper is, although I did find this: http://www.publicationshare.com/#b – useful!

Wisdom of Crowds – I was writing a minute ago about ‘What I know’ versus ‘What we know’. I think it is definitely an area worth pursuing. It asks questions about the form of knowledge, how it is created and where it resides. One thing that came back to me was the idea of the Wisdom of Crowds (Surowiecki 2004), which would fall in the ‘what we know’ category but relates strongly to the basis of Wikipedia. It’s based around the idea that the information aggreagrated in groups is more effective than that derived by individuals. Interesting concept!

Self-organizing systems – Prof. Sugata Mitra of ‘Hole in the Wall’ fame spoke at a conference I attended in Jan 09. He was talking about his work and included his thoughts on ’self-organizing systems’, things that occur out without intervention – e.g. a traffic jam, or the stockmarket. (Interestingly, traffic was also used as an example of a wise crowd.)

I shall find references to these soon!

–

Surowiecki, J. (2004) The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations

Wk10, A5: Blogging, thoughts

So I’ve been reading through the article (wk10, A5) on blogging and found it to be really interesting. I’ve been a blogger for a whille, and have strived to use blogs in a number of ways. The use of blogs has been encouraged on all the MAODE courses I’ve been on so far (including The E-learning Professional referred to in the artcile), and each time it is raised I attempt to describe some of the ways that I have used blogs myself, and how this has varied depending on my intentions for the blog’s content. For example, a public-facing annotated bilibography that uses tagging and categories to make it more searchable (http://del2admlit.wordpress.com/). The uses of blogs have evolved for me as I have learnt about the features availble. Identifying that postings can be made private, for example, has helped in the use of this blog as a journal.

I have also begun to use it as a ‘base’ for the development of what is essentially a patchwork of texts that I will summatively stitch together when it comes to submitting TMA02. (This entry may well become a starting point for an entry in that assignment)

This arose as a development of the first assignment in this module, where I felt that trying to revisit activities several weeks later was problematic. Although there is a benefit to returing to my learning a while after, I struggled to recollect some of my knee-jerk reactions to actvities – just as important as I then have a benchmark against to which consider my learning and development. The learning and teaching unit I work in at University of Cumbria have been doing something similar with PGCE students, and the feedback form them is that this has some potential in helping with workload management.

Anyway, back to the point, and that is that I until reading the Kerawalla et al (2008) article I had not fully recognised or understood other potenital affects of blogs. It was fascinating recognising myself in the article, but made me realise that I have built up my own ways of working, and a confidence over time.

I think I certainly consider myself as similar to the students who “conceptualised their blogs as being a collection of resources” (p25) (resource network builders) and saw the sense of community as important. However, I do not see this as being the central benefit to my own own blogging ’style’. I think I am predominnatly a ’self-sufficient blogger’ like the students mentioned in the article who “stated explicitly that their blog was mainly for themselves and that their audience was not of great importance to them.” (p29)

Whilst I recognise the blogging behaviours identified by the authors, I got the impression that the five styles were seen as distinct and that individuals adopted one type of behaviour. I’m not sure that is the case as I know that I err towards at least two, so I imagine it’s the same for others. As I previosuly mentioned I think this also has to do with the context of the blog – it’s intended audience, it’s usefulness to the owner, it’s purpose. The authors observed that students “devised their own (individual) ways in which it [blogging] could support their learning.” (p32) And I think that this is critical as my own experience has been that my blogging style has evolved continuously throughout my blogging career.

–

Kerawalla, L., Minocha, S., Kirup, G. and Conole, G. (2008) ‘Characterising the different blogging behaviours of students on an online distance learning course’, Learning, Media and Technology, vol. 33, no. 1, March 2008, pp. 21-33

Interpersonal action learning cycle – Notes

If I understand the ‘trap’ correctly, it is that whatever is presented, may be perceived differently depending on who reads it? So the issues that arise from it are:

-    That difference of opinion sparks debate at the expense of collaboration
-    I assume what I’ve heard is what is meant
-    That I might not listen to others at all.

Ways to mitigate this are:

-    Offer my understanding
-    Offer perception of others’ understanding
-    Listen to responses, get own perceptions included.

Underpins collaborative learning.
In assessment of learning, use of the cycle clarifies the distinction between:
1. teacher-centred assessment, wherein the learner is required to show understanding of the teacher’s thinking
2. learner-centred assessment, wherein the learner is invited to share his/her own perceptions and thinking.

A7: Simon A: To invite thinking, attentive comprehension

“As participants increasingly come to see themselves as consumers, it appears to me that they expect to have knowledge delivered to them in this way… They expect to be taught rather than helped to learn.” (Zimmer, 2008, p282) <– I liked this.

Even putting the ‘IALC’ aside, I think Zimmer’s chapter brings up some really interesting points. It helps clarify a perspective of learner-centred vs teacher-centred, which is very useful, particularly when linked to assessment. I had never thought of assessment as something that is designed to gratify the teacher before – It seems so obvious now that in some instances the learner is assessed purely on their understanding of what the teacher has told them – spoon-feeding. I had a GCSE geography teacher that did this once. She used to spend the lesson copying the text-book onto the blackboard and then getting us to copy it into our workbooks! I got a decent grade, but maybe that highlights a problem of using exams as a method of assessment – do you just need a good memory?

–

Zimmer, B. (2008) ‘Using the interpersonal action-learning cycle to invite thinking, attentive, comprehension’, in Luppicini, R. (ed.), Handbook of Conversation Design for Instructional Applications, pp 264–88. Hershey, PA, Information Science Reference (IGI Global)

A6 Simon A: Triumph of the nerds

Not sure about the whole nerd videos. I think if you make it past the first episode you’re probably a nerd! I made it through 2 ½ of the 9 minute shorts on YouTube and that was only because I got the ‘Due to a problem, we’re currently unable to display your course content’ message yet again.

In response to some of the questions in the activity though, I think you do get a flavour of the mentality of those ‘responsible’ for the rise of the machine. Seeing the guy in the office barefoot, and the coke fridge at the back of the room are quirks that you wouldn’t necessarily get across in the written word. That informality – ”the laid back silicon valley working style” seems to be quite important to them! But as a few people reflected, it seems to be a side effect of having an understanding of what they’re trying to achieve – the social and worldwide notions.