How do people keep blogging when they have their fingers in so many pies. I just can’t seem to do it.  The more I have on, the more difficult it becomes to blog. Where should I focus?

Recently I have been:

• keeping an eye on CCK09 and trying to keep up with how CCKo9 participants have been taking learning into their own hands
• tutoring on two online courses – one an international course and one a course for company graduates
• working to support eight JISC projects
• posting to the http://www.networkedlearningconference.org.uk/ Hotseats
• attending (albeit as a lurker) the JISC online conference - at least two great keynotes in this
• working with a colleague from Birmingham University to develop an online resource to support working in communities of practice
• attending CPsquare online research Fests to see how ‘people out there’ are working in CoPs.

And all this doesn’t include listening to, supporting and learning from my three grown up children in all their wonderful projects and interests, visiting my 84 year old mother and hoping that I take every opportunity to keep close to her and learn from her  in her declining years, keeping contact with my wider family and all their interests, keeping connected to my friends and ensuring that I don’t let these connections lapse, keeping connected to my wider interests which are mainly to do with art, choral music, gardening and travel.

Am I alone in wondering how I can keep up with all this? Recently I have felt that there is so much going on out there amonst so many really talented people, that I’m not sure what I could offer?

I thought the most recent CCKO9 participant Elluminate event (I didn’t attend  – but listened to the recording), organised by participants, was a wonderful example of how a diverse group of people from across the globe can come together, share and learn from each other. Thank you to Frances, Ulop, Roy, John, Leila, Ailsa, Heli, Eduardo. I learned a lot from this session.

Still trying to work out what I am learning from all this – but I feel as though the fog is lifting slightly!

Many online courses now require students to collaborate, but we know that just putting people together in the same space isn’t enough? What should a tutor do to prepare students for collaborative tasks?

Gilly Salmon’s 5-stage model provides very good guidelines on how to prepare for collaborative tasks online. These are usually designed into Stage 4 of the model after it has been established that everyone has successfully accessed the learning environment (Stage 1), participants are socialising easily and the learning community norms have become apparent (Stage 2) and  information is being freely exchanged and a culture of open sharing exists (Stage 3).

Up to Stage 3 activities centre around helping participants to feel stimulated by and comfortable in the learning environment. Relationships are beginning to be established. Students who are not comfortable with each other and the learning environment will not be able to collaborate effectively, so it is worth spending time on the early stages of accessibility, socialisation and information exchange.

Tutors also need to decide whether the collaborative groups will be self-selected or whether students will be put into groups by the tutor. My personal view on this is that it depends on whether the collaborative group tasks are to be assessed and assessed for what, and whether it is a short course or a longer course. If the task is to be assessed, then if I was a student I would want to be in control of the outcome of that assessment as much as possible and therefore choose my own group. If it is the ability to work in a group that is being assessed then maybe random mixing of students is appropriate.

Nowadays I often work on online non-assessed short post-graduate professional development courses. In these courses there isn’t a lot of time for students to get to know each other, but as a tutor, having done quite a bit of ‘back channelling’ and being able to see the student log in statistics, its fairly easy to create groups made up of a mix of very active participants and lurkers – so that these student characteristics are evenly distributed across groups. Even then a tutor only knows what s/he has been told by the students, so there’s no way of knowing whether a very active student who you are relying on to get a collaborative group going, is, for example,  going to be on holiday or away from the course at the time of the collaborative task, unless that student tells you. So your carefully planned groups can still go awry.

Once the students have started the collaborative task, a tutor can do a lot to help them be successful by making the norms of online group collaboration explicit – so ask the students to inform each other about when they will/will not be online, when they will/will not be able to work on the task, what roles they would each like to volunteer for and so on. Encourage them not to be ‘backward in coming forward’ and not to be shy of taking the lead.

Having worked on online collaborative tasks myself as a student in the past, I know what powerful experiences these can be. It’s surprising how well you get to know each other in these circumstances, even though you are only meeting online and have never met each other face-to-face  - but often these collaborative activities do lead to long-term working relationships.

But I also know from personal experience that group work can be a ‘nightmare’. On my face-to-face Masters degree we had to do a group presentation and I remember having to argue for an educational philosophy to which I was  opposed simply because I was the only person in the group to hold the opposite view (this was about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation and the use of rewards) – and everyone else wanted to do a presentation on something I didn’t believe in - so groups do require a lot of compromise.

This raises an interesting question for tutors about whether you would allow a student to opt out of a groupwork assignment and do an individual assignment instead, if they could make a sufficiently persuasive case, or should we insist that all students engage in collaborative group work.

I once heard Stephen Downes – at the 2005 ALT conference, describe collaboration as – “the joining up of things that do not naturally want to be joined up”, which challenges the whole notion of collaborative learning. But then David Jacques and Gilly Salmon’s have published a quite substantial text on Learning in Groups: A Handbook for face-to-face and online environments which really promotes groupwork.

So is it possible to collaborate online – Yes, of course and very definitely. Can tutors prepare students for this – Yes, of course – good teaching doesn’t change just because it’s online. Obviously there are things that you can do face-to-face (like a science field trip to study rock pools on a Northumberland beach) that would not be possible to capture in exactly the same way online, but an awful lot of what we do face-t0-face can now be done online.

The question is not whether we can get students to collaborate online – the question is whether we should. Are we asking them to do something that is worthwhile and that will enhance their learning.  Are we offereing them opportunities that they would otherwise not have? What is it that students can get from collaborative learning that they can’t get from individual learning? What specific challenges does online collaboration bring?

I don’t think there are necessarily any right or wrong answers here. If you want students to collaborate online, then there are tried and tested ways of making this a successful learning experience, but if you don’t then there will be equally effective alternatives that might suit the situation, context and culture better.

How do you ensure that learners engage with the technology?

This is the second question from my list and my immediate response is similar to my initial thoughts about the last question. My primary concern, as a teacher, is to engage learners with learning. Technology is only a tool – a means to an end.

Most of my career has been spent in teaching face-to-face and I have taught all ages from four year olds to fifty-four year olds and older. I like to think that I have been a successful teacher, although teachers are never satisfied with their work. But I was never a ‘performer’ type of teacher – so I didn’t engage students through the sheer weight of my personality. So how do I engage my students with learning?

Sometimes we just can’t engage our students – we and they for some reason are together in the wrong place at the wrong time. But mostly I think teachers can engage students through their own passion and enthusiasm for and expertise in the subject, through always having the students’ learning interests at the forefront of everything we do, through recognising learners as individuals and building mutually respectful relationships (although this is tough with large numbers of students, it is not impossible) and through ensuring that the activities we plan for them are worthwhile. Humour, or a sense of fun is also very useful!

So how do we do this, if we can only meet our students online? First we need to establish an online presence and obvious though it may sound, we can only do this by being online. It still surprises me how many tutors will set up online courses and then disappear, leaving the students to get on with it. These tutors then complain that their students won’t engage online. I think it is possible for tutors to take a back seat once the course has become established but not at the beginning!

Overall we have  to be there as much as we would in a face-to-face situation. I always think that the beginning of an online course is critical – that’s the time when I work the hardest to engage the learners – I model and demonstrate (Stephen Downes’ definition of teaching - see Slide 36); I ensure that students get all the technical and ‘wayfinding’  (Darken and Sibert) support that they need (100% access throughout the course is paramount to a good learning experience), both through my actions and through the information I provide; I negotiate and so make explicit the norms of the online learning community; I socialise and build relationships and encourage students to socialise and build relationships with each other; I do a lot of ‘back channelling’, checking on students who haven’t come on line, asking if there is anything I can do to help; and I recognise that for some students they will be doing two things – getting to grips with the subject matter at the same time as becoming comfortable with an unfamiliar environment. I also have to ensure that all this happens within worthwhile and meaningful activities, so that students don’t think – this is a waste of time – and go away never to return!

Writing this has reminded me that when I used to teach school children, I would allow at least one week and sometimes two at the beginning of a new term for this process of familiarisation with my expectations – introducing the classroom norms, my expectations of how we would interact, negotiating classroom rules and learning about their expecations. When I moved on to teaching undergraduates, I would spend  the first session doing this – although sometimes their initial behaviour wasn’t a lot different to that of school children and I would need to spend more time establishing norms!

Engaging students with technology is similar to engaging them with the library, or introducing them to the students union activities, taking them on a campus tour and so on. We need to do the same things online, because without time spent on this famialiarisation process students will not feel safe enough or sufficiently comfortable to engage fully with the learning process.

So have I answered the question? To summarise - the key points for me are:

• focus on learning before technology
• use all the strategies that you would in a face-to-face situation

But a final additional point is  that I wouldn’t dream of using a technology that I wasn’t familiar with myself, unless I had negotiated with the students first that we needed to learn about it together – and for that to happen, the technology would need to be at least as important as the subject being taught, or enable the learning of the subject to be enhanced.

I think I have rambled a bit. Hopefully I will be more concise and succinct when I am actually asked this question!

In an interesting recent post Stephen Downes  has pointed once again to the four elements that  ’distinguish a knowledge-generating network from a mere set of connected elements.’  - Diversity, Openness, Autonomy and Interactivity and Connectedness.

I have been thinking about the question of  ‘Openness’ quite a lot in relation to research networks. Currently I am involved in a community of e-learning researchers – ELESIG and have co-authored a paper which explores the issues being faced by the community following withdrawal of funding. This paper has just been accepted (subject to amendments based on the reviewers comments) by the International Journal of Web-based Communities.

I am also currently working with John, Matthias and Roy Williams  from the CCK08 course on a research project to investigate learner preferences for communicating in blogs or discussion forums.

In his post Stephen wrote the following about the need for ‘Openness’ in a network

Openness – does communication flow freely within and without the network, is there ease of joining (and leaving) the network? In a community, this means, are people able to communicate with each other, are they easily able to join the community, are they easily able to participate in community activities? In practice, what one will observe of an open community is that there are no clear boundaries between membership and non-membership, that there are different ranges of participation, from core group interaction through to occasional posting to reading and lurking behaviour. If a community is open, then it sustains a sufficient flow of information to generate new knowledge, but if it is closed, this flow stagnates, and no new information is generated.

I’m wondering just how open is open, particularly in relation to researchers. The problem is that too much openness could invalidate the research, couldn’t it?

For the paper that has just been accepted, my co-author and I have worked in isolation from the ELESIG community. I think only two other members of the community (403 members) even know that we have done some research based on the work of the community. As yet nothing has been shared, despite the fact that the community has been set up with the explicit purpose of sharing research.

In the research that John, Matthias, Roy and I are working on, related to the CCK08 course, we startedoff with very good intentions. John set up a community wiki on the Community Ning site and invited others to join us. Currently we are designing a questionnaire and we quickly realised that we would not be able to openly discuss this design process with the community for fear of invalidating the research – the community is the very group that we hope will respond to the questionnaire. So we have moved to another wiki, in order to design our research. We intend to post our findings to the community wiki and hopefully stimulate discussion.

So I’m wondering if ‘Openness’ just doesn’t work in research communities, or have I misunderstood what Stephen meant. I seem to remember reading somewhere (although I can’t find it now) that Stephen was encouraging more ‘Openness’ in research communities, but how exactly would this work?

Dilemmas, dilemmas!

Thanks to John and Matthias I am still thinking about if blogs might offer a distinctive type of conversation compared to other types of online communication and if so how are they distinctive?

A quick internet search has shown that people have been writing about reasons for blogging, and characteristics of bloggers for the past 5 years. Stephen wrote an article  about it in 2004  and more recently there have been blog posts exploring the characteristics of successful bloggers. So why would anyone want to research this now, when a lot has already been said? Is there anything new to add?

I think the CCK08 course suggests that there maybe is something new to add, because the course offered participants the choice of whether to blog or not and a range of alternative possibilities. This is very unlike the way in which many blogs are introduced to students on more traditional courses, where this choice of communication possibilities is not on offer.

Matthias has commented on why blogging might be a disticintive form of communication:

I suspect it is a distinctive place on the orality vs. literacy spectrum, on the reader vs. participant spectrum, and (especially) on the synchronous vs. asynchronous spectrum.

…and I can see that these spectra might apply to the choice between blogging and an Elluminate session, or blogging and joining a Second Life group, but I find it much harder to apply these spectra to the choice between blogging and the Moodle discussion forums, which is a choice that I made myself on the CCK08 course.

At one point – or maybe even more than once – Stephen was really encouraging people to blog rather than hold their discussions in Moodle, partly because there were some rather aggressive conversations going on in the Moodle forums, but I also got the feeling that he felt that blog conversations would be more productive (I will have to go back through the forums and check what he said).

I would be really interested to explore the reasons behind people’s choices of where to communicate on the CCK08 course and in particular why some people blogged in preference to other forms of communication, although not necessarily to the exclusion of other modes of communication. I think this might be a new way of building on what has already been written about blogging and might offer insights into how communication for learning works online.

Reflecting on this whole experience, the first thing that occurs to me is that I did manage to get connected even if only temporarily. So I have taken the question mark out of the title of my blog. Connecting took quite a bit of persistence and I had to ‘go for it’. Public blogging is a new experience and I never really expected anyone to comment on my blog. But some people have - a sincere thank you to them for taking the time.

In addition I managed to stay the course for the full 12 weeks. Sometimes I did wonder why I was putting myself through this. The amount of time I was able to put in did drop towards the end. I think I can already say it was worth it, but it will be a while before I can say what I have learned.

Frustrations

That blogging doesn’t allow you to keep a record of where you have commented on others’ blogs. I know I have failed to follow through on some comments. Apologies to people who I have failed to respond to.

Having to miss some of the live sessions due to technical problems or other commitments. Listening to the recording is not the same. Twice I had Elluminate cut out on me to the point where I wasn’t able to follow the session. I don’t think we should ever forget that acccess will not be the same for all participants.

Not having the multi-tasking skills to be able to chat and listen in the live sessions. I can’t cope with parallel conversations going on at the same time. In the last session there was a conversation about George hitting a deer with his car at the same time as Stephen explaining something about the course. The deer conversation was so distracting that I can’t now remember what Stephen was talking about. Reminds me of cocktail parties, which I hate for this very reason – you always get pulled off to meet some new people just as you are getting into an interesting conversation with someone! Fortunately I don’t go to many cocktail parties these days!

Not feeling able to participate in the Moodle forums. I didn’t feel that I had anything to contribute.

Things to try out in the future

• Mike style video chats.
• Digital storytelling – Lisa style presentation, although I currently don’t have the technical skills
• Youtube video a la Wendy
• Matthias style Flash presentation – this would be a huge technical jump for me. Not sure if I would ever get there.
• Keith style blogging

…. and more – too much to mention

Surprises

Trolls. A new word for me. The first comment I received on my blog was from Catherine Fitzpatrick.  I was delighted and naively didn’t know what I was getting into. Within the blink of an eye I was being accused of ‘grooming’ which I always associate with paedophiles so that came as a bit of a shock!

The amount of emotion in the network. Despite protestations that connectivism and networks are about reason rather than emotion, many people seemed very emotional- even Stephen himself. Interesting that in this blog the posts that attracted the most attention were the ones about the affective side of learning in networks, e.g. the post about my mother’s connections.

The amount of posturing, hot air and pontification there has sometimes been in the Moodle forums. I appreciate that this is a very personal perspective and may simply be that a lot of it went over my head, but given that I don’t think that connectivism is fundamentally a difficult idea, why did so many people seem to want to make it incompresensible?

The reactions to Stephen’s demonstration of power. It really upset some people.

Stephen’s slapdown of Lisa in one live session, where he practically told her that if she couldn’t ‘hack it’ she should get another job. An amazing thing to say to someone who was arguably the ‘best’ student, or at  least the one that the ‘tutors’ seemed most intent on listening to.

A tendency towards evangelism in some parts and from some on the course.

Things I want to explore further

• The implications of learner autonomy
• To what extent students can negotiate their own curriculum
• What open assessment means
• Criteria for finding and working out who is worth listening to in a network
• The relationship between identity and learning
• Meaning making in a network
• Whether a course could ever really be true to the principles of connectivism as I understand them
• Aggregation. It was rather assumed that we would all know how to do this. I didn’t and I’m sure I missed a lot as a result.

Things that intrigue me

How many people were there on the periphery. Were they learning? How did they learn?

What implication does this have for the teacher, i.e. teaching ‘invisible’ people?

I think the evidence from this course is that for a lot of people being connected to the concepts alone is not enough. For many people learning is about being connected to people that they feel they know and can recognise, along with the reciprocity and responsiblity that that entails.

Things I have appreciated

George’s ability to explain things so clearly and his masterly presentations

Stephen and George’s huge generosity of spirit in making their materials freely available and opening up their course to the world

Dave’s moderating skills

Some excellent presentations – Valdis Krebs, Terry Anderson, Howard Rheingold, Nancy White

The generosity and kindness of many who have visited my blog and encouraged me with their comments. I have also received emails of encouragement. I don’t need to name people. I think you know who you are.

A big thank you to Stephen and George for the opportunity.  This post and these sentiments seem inadequate.  I’m sure there is a lot I have missed and I know there is a lot more I could say.

 I have just dipped in here tonight and come across Dave’s post on his blog. When the word community appears, my ears prick up, because throughout this course my perception is that what many people have been seeking is a learning community, whereas, in fact, what connectivism as explained by this course offers, is a learning network (please correct me if I am wrong, Stephen and others) and like Dave, I think there is a distinction between community and network. 

Also, like Dave and Nancy, I see this distinction as one of responsibility to the community, i.e. within a networked community we are responsible for each other’s learning and well-being.

A while ago (I don’t quite remember when and haven’t the energy or time to look it up – sorry), I noticed that Keith was discussing reciprocity on his blog and if I remember correctly we had a brief discussion about it – or it may have been by email. Keith, Maru , Matthias and John are for me people who have really enacted the spirit of reciprocity within the blogging community of this course. There are of course many others, but my ties with others are at the moment slightly weaker. Although it would be great to have stronger ties I know that we are all busy with the many connections that we are trying to keep alive through reciprocity, both on and offline, so I have no expectations of anyone at all. Apologies to anyone who I have excluded through my comments. Despite my inability to be as responsible to the community as I would like, my feeling is that community and responsibility to each other is more important for learning than simple networking. I am still not completely clear where connectivism stands in relation to this.

So back to Dave’s point and Stephen’s response in the form of a question about whether responsibility to a community is voluntary or not and the meaning of voluntary responsibility.

I see responsibiity to the community as being voluntary, but if you want to be part of the core community, a leader, an influencer, or simply a voice that is heard, then I think there is an unspoken requirement that this responsiblity be taken seriously and that it involves reciprocity. If you are happy to be, or your circumstances dictate that you be only an observer or a legitimate peripheral participator, then responsibility to the community is not such a necessary requirement.

To follow up on Stephen’s response to Dave’s blog – I don’t think responsibility can be imposed, nor do I think it is a contract. But, like Stephen,  I do wonder on what basis responsibility evolves?

What makes one person take this responsibility more seriously than another? Is it in order to fulfil a personal need rather than to benefit the community?  And how do notions of responsibility to a network of learners fit with ‘connectivism’?

This is my question for Stephen. If you venture here Stephen and have time, I would be really interested to hear your thoughts about this.

I have finally managed to get into a live session  (today’s Ustream) after missing the last three and it’s amazing how much more connected I feel! There’s a lesson in there somewhere for online learning and learning in networks!

Discussion this week obviously focussed on power, authority and control in networks. I still haven’t mastered keeping up with the chat and the presenters at the same time, and the recording hasn’t yet gone up for me to check this, but at one point, when talking about power, authority and control, Stephen said:

It has nothing to do with what I say and everything to do with what I do.

Now – surely that can’t be completely right.

What I really like about Etienne Wenger’s work on communities of practice is that he always talks in terms of dualities and not in terms of dichotomies. The more I read of his work and the more I listen to him speak (live and in forums), the more it seems to make sense to me not to speak in terms of dichotomies.

So in terms of dualities we would be looking for both elements to be present and trying to ensure balance. So sometimes power, authority and control will be to do with what we say and at others about what we do, and the way in which we exert power, authority and control will be constantly changing according to the circumstances and context.

I am aware of the saying – ‘Actions speak louder than words’ – but I was also very aware when bringing up my children, that I could probably do them far more harm with a few ill-chosen words than I could with inappropriate action.  As I write this – I’m thinking – is this true and am aware that it’s all relative. However, I think what is true, is that its wiser to think in terms of dualities than dichotomies. And this is from the mouth of someone whose husband is still (after 40 years of marriage) telling her to beware of thinking in terms of black and white and to keep looking for shades of grey.

So do power, authority and control, need to be thought of in terms of the balance between instigator and receiver in relation to teacher and learner, parent and child, actor and resistor and so on?

This is another thinking aloud post, I’m afraid. It’s not something I’m going to get a handle on during this course – or maybe even not in a lifetime!

It has been an interesting experience returning from being away (where I have not been online) to a deluge of emails. It has also been interesting to read the range of different responses, from those who thought Stephen made his point well, to those who just thought it was a bit of a laugh, to those who were either irritated, upset or annoyed. And finally it has been interesting to see the number of people who have suddenly turned up in Moodle – myself included. I know that a lot of bloggers are not posting to Moodle (I myself have only made a handful of low-key posts to Moodle), but I had somehow forgotten that there would be a lot of people participating in the course from the periphery, observing rather than interacting.

As an aside – I have been wondering recently how many people of the 2200+ are still engaging and at what levels, i.e. how many post in blogs or Moodle, how many meet in SL and various other locatons, and how many simply log on and read.

My own reaction to being subscribed to the forums, after initial amusement, has been to think about the extent to which Stephen made his point and how effective it was. In one way it was effective - Stephen has the power to set up the Moodle forums in such a way that, if you have subscribed to the course,  you receive an email copy of forum posts whether or not you are reading them – and he demonstrated this power.

But the course isn’t about whether we receive emails or not. It’s about whether we learn. We all received the emails, but how many read them?  And even if we did read them, did we learn very much about power, authority and control in networks? So, although we can see that Stephen did exert his power – a power that can affect the daily work/life of 2200+ people, I’m wondering if he chose the most effective way to model and demonstrate this. I suppose it all depends on whether or not he considers himself to be a teacher in this course. If not, then the ‘quick and dirty’ act that he took, suffices. But if he considers himself to be a teacher then I wonder if a different context might have been more appropriate for learning about power, authority and control in networks. I’m not sure what though!

I do know a lecturer, who when teaching a group of students about the management of change, resistance to change and the change curve, went into the lecture which was about the change curve and told the students with a completely straight face that their assessment had been changed from an assignment to an exam, which would take place later that week. Needless to say the students went through the initial stages of the change curve and learned experientially. Thinking about it now, I suppose this was also a demonstration of power.

As I see it, we had the power to resist the effect of Stephen autosubscribing us to forums in a number of different ways. Quite a few bloggers have mentioned the fact that they filter out these emails. If Stephen hadn’t turned off the function as quickly as he did, I wonder if we would have taken power into our own hands, by simply not posting to the Moodle forums? My life experience tells me that probably not, because it is very difficult to get people who don’t know each other to work as a cohesive group, particularly in a short time. Is this an argument in favour of groups rather than networks?

So did we all have the power to stop being subscribed to the forums and if so why didn’t we exert it more effectively? Did we feel powerless? I suspect this is linked to knowledge – those who are technically savvy  knew how to get round the system. Was it that we didn’t know how to grasp power when we had the opportunity? It was interesting on tonight’s Elluminate call that when Stephen didn’t speak, most people were reluctant to take the mic. Or was it that we couldn’t mobilise ourselves as a group? Does the fact that we are learning in a network rather than a group, mean that we are less likely to be in positions of power?

Returning to the point about whether or not the lesson that Stephen was trying to teach us was appropriate and wisely chosen ……. In this instance Stephen chose to demonstrate status power. If I was concerned about Stephen’s power, I wouldn’t be interested in whether or not his actions could result in my inbox filling up – I’d be much more concerned about the influence he could have on my thinking, i.e. his knowledge power, and whether that influence was appropriate for my learning and development as a human being.

But ultimately, I think I can choose to resist power, however hard that might be.

I have finally managed to listen to Grainne Conole and view the slide presentation (thanks Kristina) and was interested in her Slide 100 with three questions, which I have been thinking about.

1. How can we encourage a culture of sharing ideas and designs?

A lot will need to change in HE before a culture of sharing ideas and designs becomes truly established if it ever does. Currently the whole system is geared to promoting individual advancement, in research, teaching and management. I think Stephen has the answer when he says it needs to be done through modelling and demonstration, which is just what he and George have done with this course. They have shown that it can be done. It would be interesting to know how many of their colleagues at the University of Manitoba freely share their ideas and designs. And how many people on this course will go back to their universities/institutions and request to be allowed to start open courses with free access to their ideas and course designs. My experience is that you can’t even take your own work to a new job in another institution, as work done for an institution is regarded as the property of that institution!

2. Why has there been little uptake of educational repositories?

My feeling is that the answer to this question lies in what I was trying to get at in my last post – and here I want to thank Rodd Lucier for his comment.

Although there wasn’t mention of commenting on Cloudworks products produced by others, the use of a common template would make such projects easily recognizable, shareable and editable. I think that’s what makes the WebQuest model of rich project development such a useful framework.

Another benefit to the tool Grainne shared, is that it walks teacher-designers through a thoughtful process of building a lesson, unit, or course. Educators are forced to consider a relevant lesson components from expectations thru roles and activities.

I don’t disagree with anything Rodd has said, but his points don’t answer my original concern and that is that a teaching idea is only of use when it can be practically applied in the classroom and that that is context dependent. Having listened to Grainne’s talk and it seems that she considers Cloudworks to be a social network, but I can’t see on the site where the discussions are going to take place. I suspect they will take place off the site, which could lead to a site which people take from, rather than give to and take from. If there hasn’t been an uptake on educational repositories it’s because they don’t provide what people need.

3. Can we apply web 2.0 principles to an educational context?

I think this course is proof that we can, but there has been plenty of discussion this week about the gap between the web 2.0 principles and many educational contexts. I thought Stephen overstepped the mark a little in tonight’s Elluminate session when he all but suggested that Lisa would either have to be content with only applying web 2.0 principles to her own learning, or might have to choose to leave her job if she couldn’t apply them in her current situation. He did retract rather quickly after this (I wonder if he heard my sharp intake of breath!). Of all people Stephen will know that there is a big gap between our traditional education systems and the principles to which web 2.0 technologies aspire. This is not going to go away and I think it’s probably a preferable option to try and change a system from the inside rather than from the outside (although loads of politicans seem to manage it from the outside!). Stephen himself has said that teachers need to model and demonstrate and this makes perfect sense to me. We just take small steps to begin with, modelling and demonstrating in small ways what can be achieved and celebrating success as we go along and gradually things start to move, but it will be a slow process. Rome wasn’t built in a day – as they say!