Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

I am working on a couple of new papers on Personal Learning Environments. And getting asked by developers what we want them to produce as a PLE. Nota n easy question – in fact I am not sure it is the right question! But here are a few things I think I want my PLE to be able to do.

Access / search

One of the major things we use computers for learning for is accessing and searching information and knowledge. Whilst Google has greatly improved searching it is far form perfect. We need to be able to search inside documents in a way we cannot at the moment. And of course we need to be able to access and search our own computers and possibly those of our peer network. We need to be able to search inside audio and video, which is as yet problematic. And perhaps most importantly we need to be able to find people. Accessing and searching poses many challenges for developers. At present at a relatively simple level of educational repositories we are uncertain as to whether federated search or harvesting offers the best approach.
Aggregate and scaffold
A second use of a Personal Learning Environment could be for aggregating the outcomes of our activity – be it searches for documents, or other media, be it people or be it our own work. Aggregation is more than simply producing a database or of ‘learning objects’. Aggregation should allow us to bring information and knowledge together in a meaningful way. At the same time such a process of aggregation should assist us in scaffolding our knowledge, both in terms of growing on existing knowledge but also in terms of compromising what we know to accommodate the new.

Manipulate
Another possible use of a Personal Learning Environment is to manipulate or rearrange knowledge artefacts. This could be at the simple level of editing text or adding a note or tag. However with the use of different forms of media it may involve more extensive repurposing of such objects. Such repurposing may be for use within a personal knowledge base or may be for (re) publishing or sharing with others.

Another reason for manipulating media artefacts may be to render them usable within different environments and contexts.
Analyse
A PLE should be a place to analyse knowledge. This might involve the use of different tools. Alternatively, or additionally, it might involve the functionality to render information, knowledge and data in forms to allow analysis. It might also include the functionality to share and collaborate in analyses and to compare the results of such analysis with the research of others.
Store
A simple and obvious function for a PLE is to store data and artefacts. However, that storage function may not be so easy as at first thought with an increasing use of different storage media including external drives and web storage. Whilst some data and artefacts may be stored in a personal repository it may be that others will be stored within shared areas.
Reflect
Reflection is a central activity in developing learning. Reflection is particularly critical in an information rich (or information overload) environment. Reflection involves questioning, challenging and seeking clarification and forming and defending opinions and supporting or challenging the opinions of others. A PLE could provide (micro) tools for supporting these processes.
Present
We all have a need to present our ideas, learning and knowledge in different ways and for different purposes. It may be that we merely wish to present some work in progress for feedback from others. We may also wish to present parts of our work for a seminar or for a job application. A PLE could offer the functionality to select and summarise ideas and learning and develop a presentation in different formats according to need. Some forms of presentation may be unique instances – for example a presentation at a conference, others may be more recursive e.g a C.V. Tool also need to take into account that presentation may involve different media.
Represent
The representation of learning and knowledge within a PLE may be seen as a more complex functionality of presentation. Whilst a presentation will draw directly on artefacts within the PLE, a representation will attempt to show the underpinning knowledge structures of such artefacts. A PLE could include tools for visualisation and tools which allow the structures of the knowledge to be shown in a dynamic way. They might also allow the dynamic re-rendering of such structures either through the interrelationship of the artefacts and the underpinning knowledge structures.   The representation of knowledge might be an individual activity but might also form part of a wider community activity

Share

That a personal Learning Environment should support individuals in sharing their learning and knowledge almost goes without saying. However, what is shared, when and with whom is far more complex. Tools could be developed, for example, which allow sharing to be the property of any particular artefact. A PLE might also include tools to facilitate collaborative work and collaborative work flows.
Network and people
Networks lie at the heart of a Personal Learning Environment. A PLE might be defined at a personal or individual node in a networked collaborative learning environment. It must be emphasised that a PE is not a document management system (although of course documents may be part of a PLE). PLE tools might allow social representation of networks and networking interchange. Such tools might also allow social association between people, knowledge and artefacts.

We have a tracking plug in giving us basic stats about who is reading this blog. I’ve never worried too much about how many read it – after all it is my personal space – but I am more interested in the community apsects of trying to build the Pontydysgu web site.

In the last few weeks the numbers of unique visitors and the number of page hits have risen quite dramatically. All very gratifying – people like what we are doing. Maybe – I am getting suspicious.

The stats package tells us which are the most popular stories. As you would expect there are usually the latest posts, things like PLEs feature highly and then there is a very long tail. But for the past three weeks one post above all has dominated the lists. It is called “Hairdressing and Serious Games“. It is an OK post. I wrote it at a conference. It was more for me an excercise to improve my ‘live’ blogging than anything else. It links to a page which allows no access to the game it refers to. So, what is going on? Is the edublogospere being invaded by wanabe hairdressers? Are there hairdressing harvesting robots crawling the web? Or what? Anyone have any ideas? Or any ideas how I can solve this mystery of the hairdressing hits? Or should I just go to the hairdressing companies for advertising?

Funny – haven’t been to a hairdressers for years .

My Avatar Me – a great animation created by Steven Warburton. Soundtrack: Winds of Change by Jap Jap.

Yesterdays Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE was pretty popular. According to the stats we had 97 listeners. The problem is that the stats also show that we had quite a few people who were unable to connect becuase we had run out of bandwith (we also had a bandwidth problem from our studio which I will come on to in a bit).

How does the bandwidth work. We broadcast from Bremen in Germany using a DSL connection. We feed to the Community Media Association in Sheffield, UK. They have a commercial operation who sell us bandwidth. Bandwidth for streaming is not cheap. We presently have enough bandwidth for up to 100 listeners at 56kps. We would like to increase this to 200 but can’t really justify the expenditure at present. But we actually buy the bandwidth on a 24/7 basis. And we only use it for 2 hours a month. There is a pretty strong case for bandwidth sharing here. So – if you would like to use our spare badwidth for broadcasting something to do with learning please get in touch. It is a crying shame to see it there unused. And if anyone woudl be interested in coming in with some money we could all benefit from a better service. Just email me on graham10 [at] mac [dot] com. Whilst on the subject if anyone needs help in how to do live streaming radio do drop us a line. However, we use Macs – we do not know the setup for PCs or Linux.

Now for the dedicated techy reader here was our local bandwidth problem. Our present upload capacity is 24kps. This is enough for our stream and for a skype connection. But for yesterdays feature on Cwmglas School I was trying to bring in my colleague Jenny Hughes via a skype to skype line and the school through skype to telephone. And that was just too much. The result is that the stream kept rebuffering. After the show we got on to our ISP website and found we could treble our bandwidth with a package which costs less than we are paying at the moment. The ISP had upgraded their service but not told us and we had to apply on line for the new package. It may be worth you checking whether you can do this – I dare say ISPs are the smae the world over.

Probably not…
However, twittering (links to) blog posts is only one of the many ways in which twitter has served me in the last months.

Twitter, a micro-blogging free online tool, has become incredibly popular among web users in the last few months. It has also entered the educational world and it is surprisingly bringing people together over 140 character messages. Is it a case to say less is more? Or is it just the way we have become?
The most amazing fact yet is not really the size of the messages, but how it enables information to flow and the narrative to grow. And oh boy, does it do so.

I must say I was a really bit sceptic about it at the beginning. I always am. I am never an early adopter. It takes time for me to get into things. It’s just a reflection of who I am, I guess. Rather than my finding the tool, I need the tool to find me [if this makes any sense at all...]. I will explain….
I can’t even remember when I first created my twitter account, but I do remember thinking about why I should have one. It was too limitative for someone like me who has very little synthesis capacity. It would just take me ages to write a 140 character message, and I wasn’t sure I was going to get much out of it. Furthermore, not many of my online friends were in twitter…yet! I immediately put twitter in my have-an-account-but-not-using-it-tool shelf. And it remained there for a while until Carla Arena and the Blogging 4 Educators team spiced up my curiosity about it once again.They were twittering and I started following them.I was fascinated by the amount of relevant information, bits of personal insights and also some trivial tweets that were arriving at my desktop in a twinkling of an eye. It was fun and most times relevant. I started seeing the point of it. Twitter had finally been able to reach out to me – or better said – the people who were using it. And so I decided to give it another try. I shyly started twittering, hoping no one would notice me (what could I actually offer in a 140 character message?). To my surprise, I started getting more used to it (you need to create online twitter habits!!). I got better at short messages. I have to use “short-cuts” most times – not very scholastic, but it does the trick!! I also started communicating with others via twitter. I noticed that there were also people who actually read my messages, as I was getting some @me tweets too. It is interesting how people communicate directly and indirectly with others by sharing links, responding to questions, providing additional insights and sometimes even guiding in alternative directions, which they also find useful. All of a sudden micro-communication was increasingly entering my world. Because I started following more people, more twitters also decided to follow me – I still haven’t figured out how selective people are about who they follow, but I have ended up even following some of those who my twitter-fellows follow because of the tweet-conversations they are following (confusing, ha?).  In this sense twitter has enabled me to enlarge my connections and networks [even if in a rather lurking way, as I tend to communicate, not exclusively, but more often with those who I already knew from other venues]. Micro-blogging has largely contributed to my learning.

There is of course many questions that arise from this new practice and means of communication, sharing, networking…learning. Yes, Learning. That no one can deny! Many of the hot issues around twitter relate to the literacy theme. Are we becoming lazy at writing? Will this type of discourse ill-influence our essays? Will it give little-johnny bad writing habits? Are we destroying the language?, etc.

Well, I don’t think so. I believe that in learning everything counts. We don’t learn only from the most sophisticated prose [I am even tempted to say that it is where it has less chances to happen, although it can help refine it]. We don’t speak the way we write, and we obviously won’t be using a twitter register when applying for a job, for instance, although you might get to know about your future job through twitter!!
Different contexts call for different registers. It has always been like this, I don’t think it’s going to change now.  So, I have a hard time understanding why we should be so concerned or see it as an evil practice which will ruin the kids’ writing capacity.

Okay, I am being quite ironic now, but the fact is that in our daily lives we all express ourselves differently from the way we develop an academic speech, for example. By the same token we adopt different speech tones according to our target audience.
It doesn’t mean however that we don’t gain something from all the different situations we get involved in. We just have to be flexible and understand the differences of the several contexts in which we have a presence. Twitter is just one more application to add to the panoply of others means of micro and instant communication which make us reinvent the way we get our ideas across and interact. Through sms, instant message and now twitter a new language register (or a sub-set of it) has emerged – it’s a pure reflection of the immediacy of such channels. Preventing learners from using such environments is a lost battle. They are using it already. They have started doing so way before we did. It’s a dialect they master and which they enjoy.It belongs to their generations.Hence, there’s a certain magic in it.
I truly believe it can be accommodated as part of the teaching and learning experience. It has great potential, and some educators are already doing so, as it has recently been reported here.

More about group twitter note taking soon!

The podcast version of Emerging Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE summer special. This edition was produced for the Jisc Emerge conference on Exploring User 2.0: the shape of future users. The conference day theme was digital storytelling so we thought we would talk to users – old and young and from across Europe.

First up in the show is an all too short talk with kids from the computer club at Cwmglas primary school, Swansea. Sadly we ran out of bandwidth and had to curtail the talk but I have arranged to go back to make a podcast shwo at the school in a couple of weeks. And make sure you visit their brilliant website. (NB we are trebling our bandwidth next week).

Next up is John Pallister, who teaches IT in a secondary school talking about his discovery of Web 2.0 tools and his increasing fascination with the on-line world.

John is followed by Guenter Behan from Graz in Austria exoplaining the ideas behind the European funded Aposdle project.

Asley Healey from Glasgow in Scotland tells us about her research into communities of practice.

And Leila Gray – an 83 year old computer fan from Blackwood in Wales explains how she uses Web 2.0 applications. Leila was so good we have invited her to become our resident Sounds of the Bazaar Techno-granny (more about that soon).

And to wrap up taodays programme Margarita Perez Garcia reads us a poem in Spanish.

What a show. And between each item we have great music form an album called Cien Anos Despues by Magnolia Chile available free under a Creative Commons license from the Jamendo web site.

Enjoy. You are listening to Emerging Sounds of the Bazaar – the Sounds of the Summer.

Emerging Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE [ 45:04 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1220)

A brilliant guest post from my esteemed friend John Pallister.

“I dropped into a bar last night, well actually I listened in to some folks talking about where they were going to go and I decide to have a look there. I lurked around in a corner for a while, then sat down at the bar and watched. It was a bit strange, the bar did not have a barman, it looked to be a help-yourself establishment. People, who I have to admit did look a bit strange, were helping themselves to some strange things and seemed to enjoy jumping around a lot. They all appeared to know each other and were chatting about some music that was playing in the background. I attempted a bit of chit chat, although my natural reserved stopped me from dancing on the bar. As usual, I very quickly cleared the bar with everyone whizzing off with some feeble excuse about having to build a tower! I wandered a bit and got lost. I ended up in an adult area with a scantily clad Avatar jumping around in front of me and singing. Now that does not often happen to me often, was I dreaming? How could a grown man, who has a thousand and one real interests, find himself wandering around in a virtual world?

During the past two years I have been on quite a steep learning curve. The need, as a partner in the MOSEP project, to collaborate with colleagues from across Europe forced me to master Skype; Net-meeting; Eluminate Live; Media Wiki; blogging; social bookmarking and collaborative writing etc. I became engaged in a number of social networks and got into the habit of following people who had similar interests. I soon realised that it did not really matter if, having contributed something to a discussion, forum or a Blog, you did not receive a response. I realised that the vast majority of people were lurkers and that people were in fact reading what I was writing and occasionally, were using it to help them with their thinking. So there was a reason for me to participate and contribute. I also found that writing things down did in fact help to move my own thinking forward. I began to follow and contribute to communities, setting up a group and most recently experimenting with micro-blogging.

In the process of following the Jisc Emerge http://elgg.jiscemerge.org.uk/ community I ended up in Second Life last night. I teleported to a Bar on the Emerge Island. I had to apply all of my Functional ICT skills to master the Second Life interface, I did not really practice my Functional English skills but I did listen to others demonstrating their skills, with one person showing that she recognised her responsibility to move a discussion forward, attempting to engage me in the discussion by employing a range of techniques. The exploding Harveywallbanger was a new one to me! I listened to people agreeing how they would work as a team; reflecting on their own strengths; developing a shared understanding of what it was that they were going to work together to achieve; reflecting on their personal strengths and weaknesses and how they might contribute to the work of the team; etc. I was watching people, in a virtual world practising and developing their Functional and Personal Learning and Thinking skills. Had I managed to keep up with them, I am sure that I would have witnessed more as they built the Tower, although I suspect that they went on to a disco – ‘magic dance ball’?

I am beginning to see more and more potential in these environments for learning – but a bit like Twitter I am overcapacity!

An unexpected bonus here – an interview with Helen Beetham about Digital story telling. The story about the interview will follow!

Digital Storytelling [ 8:13 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1710)

Tune in tomorrow (Wednesday) for another LIVE Sounds of the Bazaar internet radio broadcast. The programme will go out LIVE at 14.15 Central European Summer Time (13.15 BST). Interviews, features, music, poetry and more. Guests include John Pallister from Wolsingham School, Gunter Beham from the EU APOSLE project, the kids from Cwmglas primary school in Swansea and Nicola Witton and Scott Wilson from the Emerge ARGOSI project. For full details of how to access the programme click here.

Been away from the blog for a few days – too much travel. But we are back with another LIVE Sounds of the Bazaar internet radio broadcast. The programme will go out LIVE tomorrow (Wednesday) at 1415 Central European Summer Time (13.15 BST). Interviews, features, music, poetry and more. Guests include John Pallister from Wolsingham School, Gunter Beham from the EU APOSLE project, the kids from Cwmglas primary school in Swansea and Nicola Witton and Scott Wilson from the Emerge ARGOSI project.

Please try and join us for some summer fun. You can listen to the programme by going to http://icecast.commedia.org.uk:8000/emerge.mp3.m3u in your browser. The programme should stream form your MP3 player of choice.

We will have a chat room operating alongside the programme – go to http://client11.addonchat.com/sc.php?id=302479. The chat will be hosted by Cristina Costa.

And if you would like to come on the programme just drop me an email – graham10 [at] mac [dot] com or skype me. Look forward to talking to you all tomorrow.