In what ways have you found that H800 incorporates each of these functions of interaction and through what means?

• Learner control – by TMAs and ECA, by weekly mode of course, by regular Elluminte meetings which are no obligatory but we should draw on discussion in our TMAs.

• Facilitating programme adaptation based on learner input – via FC forum especially, personal e-mailing also. From facilitator/tutor point of view also TMAs.

• Varied forms of participation and communication – mail, OU StudentPage, Elluminate, FirtClass, blogs, wikis

• Interaction is also ‘fundamental to the creation of learning communities’ (Anderson, 2003, p.2) – definitely. Without interaction learner-learner and learner-facilitator (guide on a side) the sense of community is hard to create.

Based on your experience of H800, would you agree with the first claim in Anderson’s equivalency theorem?‘Deep and meaningful formal learning is supported as long as one of the three forms of interaction (student–teacher; student–student; student–content) is at a high level. The other two may be offered at minimal levels, or even eliminated, without degrading the educational experience.’ (Anderson, 2003, p. 4). At the same time Anderson claims that:

1. Interaction with a teacher is often an important component of a formal learning experience (p. 2) and that ‘Student-teacher interaction currently has the highest perceived value amongst students, and thus commands highest market value‘ (p. 4).

2. From the other hand he provides argumet drawing on May (2003) and Kramarae (2003) that ‘there is an evidence that many students deliberately choose learning programs that allow them to minimize the amount of student-teacher and student-student interaction required’ (due to high flexibility and freedom) (p. 4) so for them interaction with content is most valuable.

3. Later Anderson provides argument that ‘Student-student interaction is critical for learning designs based upon constructivist learning theories, but less critical to cognitive and behaviorist learning theory based approaches‘.

So based only on this three arguments there is no possibility substitute one type of interaction for one of the others (at the same level) with little loss in educational effectiveness. Apart of learning approach (behavioral/constructivist/cognitive) I think that level of learning process is also important here: lets take Salmon model of online learning. In light of her model I understand that interaction with a teacher/facilitator at the very beginning of the course is important.

According to H800 experience I think that interaction only with content become after some time less engaging and has influence on students creativity, reflection, activity. Human factor is definitely important and it is motivator! Interaction with teacher agents instead of human being is sth that I really and trully avoid in my learner’s and practitioner’s learning/teaching experience.

Student-content interaction may be effective in courses that give hard skills like software usage. Videotutorial and effective designed activities, as well as technical support in my opinion are sufficient elements for effective learning expericence.

I found the Haythornthwaite (2008) ‘Ubiquitous Transformations’: Proceedings of the Networked Learning Conference really interesting and perspective.

Social media led to radical transformation in who learns from whom, where, under what circumstances. It indicates transformation to ubiquitous learning – a continous anytime, anywhere, anyone contribution and retrieval of learning materials on and through the Net and its technologies, communities, niches and social spaces.

These transformations are captured in ideas that e-learning signifies a transformation in learning rather than a transition from off- to online. Educators’ fear that among those who have spent years on achieving teaching certification, doctorates and tenure is that they will be obsolete or unimportant in the classroom. Learning changes from transfer of knowledge from one to many to exchange of knowledge among many. What is more from transfer from expert to novice to collaborative, peer-to-peer learning and discovery. For educators learning online means gaining new skills: how to teach and learn in multi-time zone, multi-institutional and multi-cultural setting.

Here is a list of evidences of shift towards taking responsibility for learning by the learners themselves:

Evidence 1: an autonomous learner is responsible for and in many cases alone in creating own learning context and content as they search the Net for materials to support their needs.

Evidence 2: critical media literacy for individuals: vetting sources, sorting facts from fiction and distinguishing commentary from original data fall to individuals (searching by user-genarated tagging in social bookmarking or via search engines). Google dominates as the retrieval mechanism for information on the web while using only one or two algorithms for searching information leads to missing some information. As more info goes online, the learners have to establish what is correct, truthful, balanced and worth paying attention.

Evidence 3: required skills for further job; certificate of a degree from particular uni may still matter but to whom will it matter?

Evidence 4: in a new paradigm (learning is not longer transfer the knowledge form expert to novice but collaborative, peer-to-peer learning and discovery process) novices help each other make sense of the information they are receiving. Where appropriate, participants come to shared definition of meanings through collaborative, conversational interaction. However, the level of expertise is an issue in social networks and communities. Multi-level interaction suggest a limit to the unity of a single forum, leading to factions and splinter group (for a negative connotation) or to speciality group (for a positive connotation).

Evidence 5: records of learners activities on web are accessible long after they leave a community or network.

Evidence 6: idea of local community and network is changed. Community can be locally online – where we engage with friends around the work or personal interests. But our local can become global as the entire-web reading comminity gains access to our text or as distant others come to support us.

In the light of your own responses and experience, does this ‘new paradigm’ indicate the redundancy of the practitioner? Or, on the contrary, does it indicate the need for a practitioner with in-depth knowledge of how new technologies can be harnessed and with the time to provide facilitation and support to students as they take on these new responsibilities? In definitely chose the second assumption! Learners who are engaged in formal education need them! I know it from my perspective – even if learners are technology and digital-savvy they need a guide who has appropriate skills to support their learning needs! Guide on the side rather than sage on the stage! In one course we provided once on innovations in e-learning (it was about social software in education, new web, new paradigm, etc.) we designed it having learner and his self-direction in mind. We gave them a lot of flexibility and freedom, however they complained about it very much! I now can think about two reasons: 1. that they were not used to learn in that way (digital immigrants) 2. the presence of facilitator in course is definitely on of learning need.

I’ve just noted that I have posted 100 posts on my MAODE study blog Small anniversary.

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Originally published here

For me this is an interesting conception in context of designing learning. According to de Freitas et al. this model can be applied at multiple levels, in a nested manner. It could be used to plan a lesson or a series of lessons forming a course.

1. What are the two main ways in which interventions intended to change how teachers teach actually attempt to do this?
   Interventions are the idea of modeling practices of teaching with technology. This assupts improvment of practice:
   - it can be used to create and idealized type of practice which can then be planned for or implemented
   - it can be used by teachers to represent their own practice so that they can be shared, negotaiated and revised.
2. What are the six main ways in which practice has currently been modelled?
   
   • Practice models developed to describe or prescribe specific approaches by practitioners [e.g. Salmon's (2000) five-step model of online learning; Laurillard's (2001) conversational model].
   • Other practical accounts that don’t fit any modeling framework such as case studies, action research reports, project findings and staff development materials.
   • Theoretical accounts designed to provide coherent explanations of learning activities and practice (e.g. systems theory, activity theory, cognitive/constructivist theories).
   • Taxonomies and ontologies (structured vocabularies) developed to provide systematic ways of labeling and organizing features of the learning situation.
   • Standards and specifications such as Instructional Management Systems Learning Objects Model and Learning Design or ISO SC36; also representations such as workflow diagrams, Unified Modeling Language models or instantiations of standards in working systems.
   • Organizational models designed to ensure an institution’s processes make best use of learning systems and best practice standards, such as quality assurance documents.

   Practice models and theoretical accounts are most popular.

3. What are the five main factors that Sharpe (2004) identifies as influencing the success of interventions intended to improve practice?
   • usability – learning resourses should be understanable and accessible
   • contextualization – involves customizing or adapting resources for the intended audience
   • professional learning – propose that change in practice usually involved changed conceptions of teaching and learning.
   • idea of community – there is no proposal to create a new community, but to link to working with exisisting communities.
   • learning design – interpreted as helping practitioners to base their practice on an understanding of student learning, designing to support this.
4. What do the authors mean by ‘reverse engineering’ of their practice by the participants on the workshops?
   I understand this term as activity of re-shaping the original model which is not fully understandable for teachers and translate it for language appropraite to the level of knowledge and skills of a group of teachers in particular learning context. The group finds it more productive to use the representation of the model rather rhan the model as given in a complete form.
5. How does Wenger’s concept of reification help you to understand why pedagogical models cannot just be ‘given’ to practitioners with any hope of their being implemented successfully?
   No matter how good a model or how sophisticated it is technically, simply handing it to practitioners will not lead to understanding, engagement or impact. Practitioners need to be supported in engaging with the model or tool in order to understand its relationship to their own practice. Tool or model can be interpreted in a way that even designers might view as undesirable. Model has to create a link between its abstraction and what it is trying to represent.
   Reification is sth that a community produces through its shared practice.
6. Nevertheless, why are reifications necessary for sharing practice, particularly between practitioners from different contexts?
   Reification is sth that a community produces through its shared practice. It may be an outcome of practice or may reflect the process of practice. Important feature of reification is that they can act as boundary crossing artefacts so they can be given to others in a way that a practice cannot.

We have to listen to Wenger’s ideas in his presentation and consider whether they can be applied to practitioners of technology-enhanced learning who interact online but do not share a professional role or workplace. In such practitioner groups, conversation interactions online often cross the boundaries between academic study and workplace concerns. The lecture was interesting, however in some part hard to understand and reflect on. Here are some interesting fragments from his speech:

• ‘the quality of the community that you belong to actually makes a difference to the quality of the knowledge that you can produce’
• ‘knowledge is the property of a community and the act of knowing is always an act of participation even if it’s an act of contestation. Even if you disagree with your community, it is by participation in that process that you actually can claim to have engaged in the production of knowledge’.
• ‘if a university is going to engage in professional development or practice-based learning it’s going to have to fundamentally take these two premises as a point of departure: that knowledge is the property of communities and that meaningfulness, meaningful engagement in a communal enterprise of service has got to be the foundation of professional identity’
• ‘it’s also a learning friendship because if you look at what they are saying, they are exchanging ideas about what to do when your skin itches, you know. . How to deal with your doctor when your doctor prescribes a new kind of treatment. Is this a good idea? What about this … genetic research that is happening? Is it important to us? Is it going to make a difference to our life? How do we deal with the information – the plethora of information on the Net that is related to our fears and our hopes? How can we be partners in that process?’
• ‘how can you call this a community? These people have never met. These people will never meet, probably. They use a technology that’s super simple – basically just email. How can you call that a community? And, I had to think about it. In fact, they are a community because they recognise each other as learning partners. They recognise each other as co-practitioners. Yes, it’s a very thin connection that they have and yet they can see in each others’ postings you are one of those. You are a true practitioner’.
• ‘because I can recognise the practitioner in you, I can trust that what you’re saying is going to be meaningful to me in my own learning, in my own trajectory. So that connection of practitioner to practitioner that creates a learning partnership is actually very important even with a simple technology like a list serve’.
• ‘traditionally, at least, in many people’s minds, I think, distance learning is kind of second cousin to on-campus learning. But, if you start thinking about learning as engagement in a system of practices, then distance learning could be viewed as actually closer’.

Based on Introduction to the book Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age (Beetham and Sharpe, 2007) there is a question about nature of designing. Authors describe how pedagogy and design are affected by changes in technology.

What is the relationship of teaching and learning?
These terms are in opposition to one another. The term ‘teaching’ underlines the active role of teacher and suggests that individual learner should be passive, so it denies his/her capability to learn. Teaching assumes that a learner acquires knowledge which is transformed from the teacher to the learner. This relationship should be re-thought and re-built towards putting ‘learning’ as a central concern of pedagogy. Such approach leads to change the focus from content that is taught and led to unhelpful habits of instruction to seeing learner as active participant in the learning process. 

Is pedagogy a useful term in the way suggested in the reading?
Authors use the term pedagogy in the original sense of guidance-to-learn: learning in the context of teaching, teaching that has learning as its goal. They claims that guiding sb is demanding, creative and unique activity and that education concerns not only how people learn naturally from their environment but also from social interactions, institution and practice around them.
Between teaching and learning is a dialogue that is heart of pedagogy. This help reclaim the idea of teaching from negative associations with dominant, repressive form of instructions.
Pedagogy involves ways of knowing as well as ways of doing > centrally concerned with how people understand the practice and how they apply that theoretical understanding in practice again.

Why authors use the term ‘design for learning’? What is my view on relationship between learning and design?
Design for learning is the process by which educators, teachers, designers arrive at plan or structure of design for a learning situation. This situation may be small as a task, or large as a whole course. In my understanding design for learning is design the learning experience which should be gained at the end of the learning process, as an outcome. It is definitely not design the learning path that learner should follow to find exactly knowledge which is right for a teacher. Learning is social process however highly individualised. It would be hard if we had to design learning for individuals.

Also nice explanation of design for learning post Kevin on his blog, where he focused on learners responsibility for designing their learning process. Designers can only design learning environment.

In this activity we have to read Mary Thorpe article ‘Technology-mediated learning context‘ and answer the question: in relation to student task on the course ‘The Environmental Web’ in what ways does the online activity differ from anything students might have expericened face to face in a campus context?

The most significant issue is that people from different countries can engage in the variety of forms of interaction that campus-based university offers.

Students gave to engege online in order to be able to complete their first assignments which helped them feel differ from others and made resonable claims. Students manage the problems themselves – moderation of tutor is not needed, because of clearly defined activities. This effects in playing constructive role by students.

In relation to the second case study, based on the National College for School Leadership: Why is the talk2learn online ‘community’ referred to as a hybrid?

Because it was built on online interactions from the place-based community of schools, generating emotional identification and egagement online. From the one hand people who created such hybrid community, were members of practice communities offline, and from the other they casual drop-in nature of online interaction did not build a coherent online community of practice.

What characteristics of communities and of networks are identified?

Community – knowledge creation; social context is significant, main features in strong ties between its member.

Network – makes connection between weak links possible. It is not a weak form of a community but as an organizational form in its own right. Weak ties through connections with those far outside close community contacts may prove the most useful where we need to change perspectives or learn radically new ways of practising.

Because of lack of the time and my late submission for this week, I decided not to use Compendium and use the Freemind tool for designing my PLE mindmap. I decided to choose several categories which are my purposes in using each tool. It is hard to categorise a tool only to one category.

I’m wondering about including here Moodle (VLE) as part of my PLE. Moodle is my institutional LMS as well as OU background system so including it here could be reasoable. However Moodle is huge learning system so it is hard to classify and categorise here. Anyway based on my opinion from the previous post on the debate on VLE vs PLE that VLE should evolve to background system of PLE, I think that Moodle could be added to this mindmap.

No mobile technology, apart from iPod which I mostly use for listening music than educational podcast, is included. A lot of web 2.0 techology can be found in map. However I decided to include here all tools I use regulary, no matter if I use them as active creator or passive reader.

The podcast is part of the debate about idea of VLE and PLE. John Pettit discusses with Niall Sclater and Martin Weller their approach to learning environment.

How much do they actually differ in their views?

Both agree that boundaries between VLE and PLE is graduall blurring. The VLE is becoming the background system, a kind of hosting platform which have to allow for exporting its data into other systems. VLE will become kind of central hosted system, where functionalities of other tools as well as content from other systems are embedded.

They both feel frustared by the restrictions of the centrally provided systems, which are never as feature as the systems that they can access freely on the internet.

Both researcher agree that the authentication and integration is a big issue in learning (eg. a lot of way of submitting assignments). Weller claims that perhaps what we want to have is some kind of default learning environment first of all (to communicate, collaborate, assess), which is a number of these tools combined together, but then allow students to swap in their own preference.

Assessment is a big issue for Weller and Sclater. Sclater confirms that activity is assessed it should be done on internaly hosted system.

Note down the main arguments being put forward by Weller and Sclater.

Scalter:

• a good reason why you want them to use a university-provided tool (eg. blog, wiki) – accessibility and robustness of the system (externally hosted systems may go down and the content and activities are lost).
• robustness issue links with the assessment of the activities. The university is then responsible to some extent for ensuring that those systems are up. If the university’s hosted system goes down, then the university can give extensions for that assignment.
• students have got to remember a whole lot of different user names and passwords, potentially, and frequently they’ll forget them. This has been proven by lecturers who’ve tried to set up their own personal learning environments comprising a whole lot of different tools around the web
• get more up-to-date tools freely over the internet than universities will be able to provide in their virtual learning environments BUT institutional VLE can provied the same tool with functionality needed for educational purposes which is in most cases more appropriate than providing up-to-date tool with a lot of features that make students confused
• He doesn’t see that as advantageous to try and host that sort of stuff internally, because both of those companies are prepared to do that for us for nothing and offer a service level agreement which is 99.9 per cent uptime, which is actually more than we can manage ourselves for our own internally hosted systems

Weller:

• robustness of VLE is not an argument for him. He thinks that there are no evidence showing that system creating PLE more often go down.The robustness issue could be argued in a way that if VLE go down all data are lost, and if studnets have distributed content among different social services they may lose only part of the data if one og the system will go down (this is a distributed risk)
• no VLE which tries to comprise all these tools will ever kind of match each of those individual tools
• accessibility issue is an exuce for not using X technology because of its inaccessibility. By having distributed tools people can find the tool that best suits their particular needs, rather than everyone having to use the same tool and trying to force everyone to use a kind of common set of tools.
• in education, we don’t need to try and battle this stuff. We can just take the stuff that’s there.

What is me perspective?
I agree that institution should provide a kind of default learning environment first of all (to communicate, collaborate, assess) and in the same time allow students for using their own tools if they want to. A lot of aspects of formal education needs unification (assessment, communication, support, recordings). In the same time, I agree that learning artefacts produced by students are their ownwership and should belong to them after finishing studies. Studies at OU is good example: it provide common learning environments but in the same way allows for using external tools. So it gives students a choice and provides alternatives. In contrast to VLE of my institution, OU also allows for more independent activities within VLE eg. setting own wiki or discussing on Elluminate, which is helpuf – students do not need to find commonly used synchronous tool for discussions.
Providing external tools depends also on affordance of these tools. For instance if students use social bookmarking tool, it doesn’t make sense to provide institutionally hosted tool. On social bookmarking tool students create their own personal libraries so they own them.