Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

Here is the second part as promised of my post “From Current to Emerging Technologies for Learning”. In this part I raise the issues for the training of teachers.

Moving from a technical to a socio-technical approach

Although research has often focused on the impact of new technologies per se on teaching and learning it may be that it is the socio technical developments that will have more impact on education in the longer term. In a more diverse landscape of learning opportunities, there are different options for how to develop curricula and institutional arrangements. However, this implies a need for all members of the education community to develop understandings of the potential of such socio technical change and increased creativity to explore such potential. How should initial teacher training and Continuing Professional Development be designed to develop such understandings and practice? How can we design programmes that allow a focus on innovation in process, rather than a reliance of prescribed outcomes?

Overcoming the initiative fatigue

Education has been subject to a long series of reforms over the past ten years, with new initiatives and targets being released on a regular basis. Teacher complain of ‘initiative fatigue’.How can we respond creatively to socio-technical change and promote novel approaches to curriculum, to assessment, to the workforce and governance, as well as to pedagogy whilst promoting confidence and security in the LLL workforce? What does this imply for institutional management? Is it possible to we bring together Continuing Professional Development with continuing development of curricula and pedagogic processes?

Valuing and promoting creativity

Creativity and and the willingness to explore, model and experiment with new pedagogic approaches may be seen as critical to developing the effective use of technologies for teaching  and learning. How can we foster such competences within ITT and CPD? Do we need more flexible Initial teacher training programmes to allow the development of such creativity? How can we measure, value and recognise creativity? Do present teacher training programmes allow sufficient spaces for exploring new pedagogic approaches and if not how could these be developed?

Promoting an informed debate about educational futures and involving trainee teachers in that debate

The development of new pedagogic approaches and more creativity is predicated on an informed debate of educational futures and educational values. Do present teacher training programmes support such an informed debate? What should the contribution of teacher trainers and student teachers be to such a debate? How can we ensure their voices are heard?

I’ve been thinking lately a lot about how to motivate students to work with enthusiasm not only inside the classroom but also at home when they don’t have anything better to do than watching TV or being on Facebook.
Teenagers spend quite a lot of time in front of their computer nowadays and if they are active on a social network then most probably on facebook. Social networking is just another way for them to interact with their friends and family. However, I think a teacher can use this to make a learning tool out of it.

Ning is a very famous and popular social network where you can create a private social network and administer everything on it. However, Ning is not free anymore so I had to find an alternative to it. Moodle is great but it just gives me a strange feeling…it just has such a bureaucratic look to it…anyway, this is just my personal opinion. Nevertheless, I think I found an appropriate alternative for Ning at which is Grou.ps.

On Grou.ps you can create your private social network, strictly for your class but also for anyone whom you invite.

To find grou.ps just type in the name in Google and the first page that pops up is what you need. This is what you’re supposed to see when you first open the page:

In order to start your own social network, you have to give it a name:) If you get a green tick on the right side of the name then you may continue….if it’s a red X then you have to try a different name. When you’re ready typing in the name, just click on create social network and 6 steps will appear on your screen for creating the network:

In the first step you just have to give it a name and a title. And make sure you tick Private if you want it for your class only. If it’s private, it means that only people whom you invite may enter the network.

Step 2:

Just choose a template which you like best. You can click on their names to see how your network would look like.

Step 3:

Step 3 is more for people who want to make their network as personal as possible. Here you can customize your the look of your network from fonts to colour…anything. Of course you can always choose to leave it as it is and make absolutely no changes in this step.

Step 4:

At this step you can get to know your students a bit better right from the moment when they join the network. You can type in a question for anyone who joins the network. You can choose to make the questions mandatory therefore each of your students will have to answer the question:) You can add more than one question….you can actually add as many questions you want.

You can also use this as a questionnaire at the beginning of a course if you want to because you can choose the types of the answers the students can give. Your options for the answers are:

• one line answer
• longer answer
• multiple choice
• date
• or even a website address

Step 6:

The sixth step is for your profile information. You can enter your name, birthday, nationality, gender and a picture if you want to.

When you’re finished just click on the ‘Finish’ button under the picture.

Now the real fun can begin:)

When you’re network is finished you should see this:

In order to start working with your network properly, you should add some modules to it. Modules are the places where you can upload videos, music, files, wikis and more. To do this you have to add them by clicking on the ‘Plus’ sign next to the ‘Invite’ button:

When you do this you will get 3 options of what to add:

The option that is important for you is ‘Modules‘. If you click ‘Modules‘ you can choose from a list of modules to integrate into your network.  You don’t have to add anything if you don’t want to and you can choose which one to add. I personally think that you should have a module for files, videos, wikis, music, links and maybe events and blogs. These are the ones that I added to my network.

After adding these modules your network should look like this:

When you’re done with adding modules you can start using your network as a virtual classroom.

Inside the classroom:

• you can ask your students to upload a video, picture or music for their presentation in the class. They can then talk about the video/picture/song in the class…why they’ve chosen it and what importance it has for their presentation.
• if each students has a laptop, you can ask them to work on a project together using a wiki.
  
• they could also practice some language skills for comparing and contrasting. You can upload a video/picture/song and ask your students to comment them by using appropriate language for comparing and contrasting.
  
• you can ask them to upload their favourite songs onto the music section and play it in class while their working on a project or other similar task which don’t require absolute silence in the classroom.
  
• IMPORTANT: If you want the students to upload something, you have to make them admins. However, you can always make them only members again and take away their admin rights. In order to make them admins, just go to the ‘Members’ section by clicking on ‘Members’ in the top right corner of your screen:

In the members section just change the members rank to administrator. When the students are finished uploading stuff you can always change their status back to members only….or you could leave them admins.

How to change member to admin and vice versa:

Make sure you save the changes by clicking on ‘Save Roles’. If you want someone out of your virtual class, just select a member and click ‘Kcik Selected Members Out’ and he/she is out:)

Outside the classroom:

• A private social network has of course more advantages for home use. You can ask your students to discuss and plan an event by using the wiki module on the network. This allows them to work on it asynchronously. If some of them have other more important things to do on the day other students are working on the plan of an event, they can edit the plan the next day or hours later until the deadline for the event.
• you can ask them to send any written homework on your private network by uploading them in the file module. This way you have their homework stashed online. You can always give them feedback on their homework on the network and you get to keep each piece of their homework without having to keep an actual printed version of them stashed up all around your desk in your home or at your workplace.
• you can upload a video/picture/song and start a discussion or a debate on them as a lead in to the topic of your next lesson. Students will feel more safe talking and learning about a certain topic after having already shared some thoughts on it.
• you don’t have to create an email group anymore. You can send any messages or reminders on the newsfeed which is the start page of your network.
• you can ask them to start a class blog by writing about what they’ve learned every week in your lessons.
• you can ask them to share any interesting links they might have used and feel they’re interesting for the class. You could ask them to write a short review of each website they upload so the person who sees it can decide whether it’s important for him/her or not. You can then grade or rank the reviews in class.
• you can add a subgroup module to your network and create a groups inside your virtual classroom. You can then give different tasks to different groups when working on a project. This way not everyone in class can see what the others are doing…this is the difference between posting something in your group or posting something on the newsfeed. When finished, the ca add their work in a wiki and compare what they’ve done

Personally, I think this tool can be a very nice alternative to other social networks and if you don’t want them to be a total outsider from facebook, grou.ps still allows you to add facebook applications (but if you want more information about this then let me know…post a comment).

It’s ad free so it’s great for educational purposes. You can edit almost anything in it thus you can make it as visually attractive as possible:)

Of course, you need to put some time into it at the beginning and administer is maybe weekly by uploading tasks and assignments otherwise your students will get bored of it.

Great stuff from Ken Robinson in this RSA Animate production. Central to Ken’s argument is that school is modelled on the basis on Enlightenment thinking and industrial production system organisation. For many this culture is not conducive to learning!

Found via @grahamBM in the latest edition of the Graham Attwell Daily.

Great presentation by Steve Wheeler from the EDEN Research Workshop, 2010.

This is the first of a two part blog looking at future and emergent technologies and their implications for learning and teaching and the training of teachers. In this part we look at emergent technologies, in the second we will examine a number of key issues arising from these trends.

Technologies are rapidly evolving and although there is evidence to suggest education lags behind in its adoption of new technologies for teaching and learning  emerging technologies will inevitably impact on education.

This raises a whole series of issues, including how we can train teachers for the emerging technologies they will use in the future rather than those technologies presently in common use. Furthermore, as new technologies are implemented in work processes, this will change curricula demands. We have already commented on changing ideas of digital literacy and the possible impact on pedagogy and student expectations.

The emergence of new technologies cannot be separated from wider issues impacting on education and training. The present economic crisis is leading to new demands in terms of education and at the same time is likely to lead to financial restrictions for institutions.

Emergent technologies also have implications for future infrastructure requirements and may be expected to impact on institutional organisation.

Rather than focus on technology alone, it is more useful to examine the possible social effects of technologies – the socio-technical trends.

Given the fast changing evolution of technologies there is difficulty in predicting future trends and developments within the education sector. This is exacerbated by an increasing tendency to appropriate technologies developed for other purposes for teaching and learning, rather than develop bespoke educational technology. There are many possible future trends and in the literature review accompanying this study we provide an extensive overview. Here we mention but a few.

Each year since 2003, the New Media Consortium, in conjunction with the Educause Learning Initiative, has published an annual report 2002 identifying and describing emerging technologies “likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative inquiry on college and university campuses within the next five years.”

In the 2010 report (Johnson, Levine, Smith, and Stone, 2010) they identify four trends as key drivers of technology adoptions for the period 2010 to 2015:

• The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators in sense-making, coaching, and credentialing.
• People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to.
• The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized.
• The work of students is increasingly seen as collaborative by nature, and there is more cross campus collaboration between departments.

As well as trends they also report on key challenges:

• The role of the academy — and the way we prepare students for their future lives — is changing.
• New scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching continue to emerge but appropriate metrics for evaluating them increasingly and far too often lag behind.
• Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession.
• Institutions increasingly focus more narrowly on key goals, as a result of shrinking budgets in the present economic climate.

They look at three adoption horizons for new technologies in education “that indicate likely time frames for their entrance into mainstream use for teaching, learning, or creative inquiry.”

On their near term for the next twelve months are are mobile computing and open content.

They predict that in the next two to three years out, we will begin to see widespread adoptions of electronic books and simple augmented reality.

In the longer term future, set at four to five years away for widespread adoption are gesture-based computing and visual data analysis.

Steve Wheeler (2010) says we are moving from Web 1 where the web connects information web 1 to social software connecting people with Web 2 and to the semantic web connecting knowledge with Web 3. He predicts the metaweb will connect intelligence in what he names as ‘Web x’.

The technologies which will enable this include

• distributed cloud computing
• extended smart mobile technology
• collaborative, intelligent filtering
• 3D visualisation and interaction (Wheeler, 2010)

In this vision learning content is not as important as knowing where or who to connect to to find it. Such a move is facilitated by the growing trend towards federated repositories of Open Educational Resources (OERs), which can be freely reused and re-purposed.

A further trend, in part based on these emergent technologies, is the possible move away from Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) towards Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). PLEs are made-up of a collection of loosely coupled tools, including Web 2.0 technologies, used for working, learning, reflection and collaboration with others. PLEs can be seen as the spaces in which people interact and communicate and whose ultimate result is learning and the development of collective know-how (Attwell, 2010). A PLE can use social software for informal learning which is learner driven, problem-based and motivated by interest – not as a process triggered by a single learning provider, but as a continuing activity.

It is notable that predictions of emergent trends for education tend to be more focused towards schools and higher education. There is limited analysis of their potential impact in vocational education. In reality, emerging, socio-technical developments could be mobilised to create widely divergent education systems.

Ceri Facer (2009) says “The developments in remote interactions and in disaggregation of content from institution; the rise of the personal ‘cloud‘; the diagnostic potential of genetic and neuro-science; the ageing population; all of these, when combined with different social, political and cultural values lead to very different pedagogies, curriculum, institutional arrangements and cultural dispositions towards learners.”
Facer (ibid) suggests that “the coming two decades may see a significant shift away from the equation of ‘learning‘ with ‘educational institutions‘ that emerged with industrialisation, toward a more mixed, diverse and complex learning landscape which sees formal and informal learning taking place across a wide range of different sites and institutions.”

Facer (ibid) says that rather than try to develop a single blueprint for dealing with change we should rather develop a resilient education system based on diversity to deal with the different challenges of an uncertain future. But such diversity “will emerge only if educators, researchers and communities are empowered to develop localised or novel responses to socio-technical change – including developing new approaches to curriculum, to assessment, to the workforce and governance, as well as to pedagogy.”

This approach, if adopted, would have major implications for the training of teachers in the use of new technologies for teaching and learning. Firstly it means a move towards an understanding of the social impact of technologies and of socio-technical developments, rather than a focus on technology per se.
Secondly it places a high value on creativity and and willingness to explore, model and experiment with new pedagogic approaches. In this respect competences cannot be based on prescribed outcomes but rather in innovation in process. Furthermore it implies a movement towards creativity and innovation in the training of teachers and trainers and freedom to develop more localised and novel responses to the socio technical change, rather than a standardised curricula response.

The approach also is predicated on an informed debate of educational futures and educational values. Teachers and trainee teachers need to be part of that debate.

References

Facer, K. (2009) Beyond Current Horizons: for DCSFBristol: Futurelab www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk

Johnson, L., Levine, A., Smith, R., & Stone, S. (2010). The Horizon Report. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.

Wheeler, S. (2010). Web 3.0: The Way Forward? http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2010/07/web-30-way-forward.html.

“Crossing Boundaries: The multiple roles of trainers and teachers in vocational education and training” Trainers in Europe Network Conference

This conference took place from the 14^th – 15^th of October in Kostelec near Prague. On the first day we had a Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE radio programme from the conference venue in the “Big Knight Hall” in the Castle of Kostelec. Now you can listen here to the podcast of the live programme.

More information about the conference you find here: www.trainersineurope.org.

The music at the begining and the end is from the song “pixel song1″ by The Dada Weatherman of his album “The Green Waltz” to be found on the great music site Jamendo.com.

Sounds of the Bazaar LIVE from Kostelec [ 28:05 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (522)

W tym semestrze prowadze na Universytecie Beuth, na którym pracuję, zajęcia z zakresu “socjologii techniki” (prosze bardzo o pomoc w tłumaczeniu – po niemiecku dziedzina ta nazywa się Techniksoziologie – po polsku?). Kurs, który prowadzę nosi tytuł “Web 2.0 i społeczeństwo” i ma za cel wprowadzienie w świat Web 2.0 oraz uświadomienie zakres wpływu technologii sieci socjalnych na różne obszary życia społecznego, dotyczących m.in. form pracy, nauki, komunikacji medialnej i organizacyjnej, zarzadzania organizacjami, wiedzą i projektami, procesów politycznych oraz aspektów prawnych związanych z używaniem narzędzi sieci społecznej. Kurs oparty jest na zasadzie wirtualnych wykładów gościnnych, które są nagrywane i udostępniane studentom i wszytkim innym zainteresowanym. Raz w tygodniu pojawia się wpis na blogu kursu z krótkim streszczeniem oraz linkiem do nagrań wykładów gościnnych (Seminar-Blog). Oprócz publicznego bloga stworzyłam w ramach tego kursu przestrzeń do pracy dostępną tylko dla studentów biorących udział w kursie. Jest ona zbudowana na bazie wiki i umożliwia wspólną pracę w grupach oraz dokładną dokumentację przebiegu kursu (Seminar-Wiki). Głównym wewnętrznym kanałem komunikacyjnym jest mikroblog (Edmodo), w którym zapowiadam wykłady gościnne, przeprowadzam krótkie ankiety dotyczące oceny zajęć oraz dowiaduję się od studentów o ich aktualnej aktywności w ramach kursu (Seminar-Microblog). Wymiana ciekawych linków dotyczących tematów poruszanych w ramach zajęć odbywa się w otwartej grupie do zarządzania zakładkami internetowymi założonej w serwisie Diigo (Seminar-Bookmarks).

Kurs podzielony jest na dwa etapy. Pierwszy etap (04.10.10 – 01.12.10) poświęcony jest teoretycznemu i praktycznemu poznaniu sieci społecznej, tzn. iej zasad funkcjonowania, narzędzi i procesów, oraz zmian jakie oberwujemy w społeczeństwie. Drugi etap (01.12.10 – 14.02.10) obejmuje pracę w grupach mającą na celu opracowanie konceptu na rozwiązanie wybranego konkretnego przypadku (case study). Praca w grupach będzie obejmować wymianę ze studentami z Monachium we wspólnej społeczności internetowej (Seminar-Community).

Aktualne informacje dotyczące kursu można znaleść również na Twitter pod hasłem #aw448

Jakie są Państwa doświadczenia związane z wpowadzaniem sieci społecznych w ramach wykładów uniwersyteckich?