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!

I can’t make up my mind whether I’m a visitor or resident. As Dave White says in his presentation its not a dichotomy – but rather a duality (which is very much Wenger’s approach to communities of practice). In his presentation Dave makes some comments that I have been thinking about:

Visitors leave no trace – my feeling is that this is not possible. Maybe they hope to leave no trace. I can see that they could leave an absolutely minimal trace, but not no trace. It’s a bit like when someone briefly enters a meeting and leaves quickly – their leaving and absence still affects the meeting. In relation to this, I believe that ‘lurkers’ can affect what is going on through their absence.

Visitors worry about identity theft – I would say that visitors might worry about identity full stop, particularly if the visitors are novices. In fact isn’t it possible that visitors may be visitors not by choice but because they are novices in the online environment.

Residents try to keep visible by continually feeding the machine – have residents subjected themselves to the ‘tyranny of participation?’

Remaining visible is important for residents – Why? What is in it for them, particularly if a lot of what they post is banal? Isn’t being perceived of as banal counterproductive?

The word ‘nebulous’ can be used to describe residents – Dave didn’t talk about this and I’m not sure what this means.

A resident is less likely to have their own blog – this seems to contradict the research that John, Roy and I did where we equated residency (we called this a ‘home’) to a blog. This brings up the complexity of the way in which we use language and metaphors to describe the way in which people learn and interact online.

The visitor is no more or less technically adept than the resident – this depends on whether the visitor is a visitor by choice

Visitors take an individual approach to working online – I don’t see an individual approach or autonomy as the preserve of visitors. The question of autonomy is complex and not easy to understand or unpick.

Lots to think about. I’m looking forward to the session tonight – Elluminate Conference

I am posting this invitation on behalf of Roy Williams, Dave White, Sui Fai John Mak and Gus Goncalves.

Please join us

You are invited to join us in the Elluminate conference on Wednesday 4th November at 20:00 GMT to discuss the title question with Dave White from Oxford University.

The Link for the conference is: Elluminate Conference

You can also find it in the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (CCK09) course.

We will be holding a conversation about Dave White’s vandr (visitors and residents) model. We are all trying to understand the new networked learning media, as users, but also as academics, teachers, trainers, and researchers. So we need frameworks to describe what’s going on, and that’s what this conference is all about: none of us has the final answers, and I guess most of us find networked learning is so interesting precisely because there are no final answers.

We have asked Dave to take us through an overview of some of the key points of his model. Then we will get some feedback on how you see yourself, in terms of his model. After that we will ask Dave to take us into more of the detail. Interruptions are welcome.

Networking

We have set up a twitter site (vandrcck09) where you can add additional comments, outside the chat channel in Elluminate. We are trying to make space for more substantial responses to the conversation in Elluminate, and it looks like the only way to do so is to write a longer comment in a forum post, or blog, and then post a tweet in ‘vandrcc09′, which includes a link to your blog or the forum. We’ll see if it works.

Models and Resources

Please feel free to use the vandr twitter site, from now on, to post ideas and links to aspects of the vandr model, or any other models and research, that you find useful to describe what goes on in networked learning.

I keep coming across great questions which really make me stop and think.

George Siemens  asked four really thought provoking questions in the Networked Learning Conference 2010 Hot Seat

1. What skills/attributes do learners need in order to learn effectively with networked technologies?
2. What role will educators need to fulfill in networked learning environments?
3. Can learning networks (partly) replace the teacher?
4. Given the prominence of networked technologies and the growth of networked learning, what types of research questions does our field need to pursue?

In fact I think George must be in question posing mode as in this week’s CCK09 course he has asked another great question

• This week is an opportunity for you to reflect on what openness means to you, what benefits you get from being open, and concerns with transparent learning (as well as how you expect to overcome those concerns).

And in this post George has alerted us to D’Arcy Norman’s question:

• How do you connect to people online?

These are all questions that I have been thinking about for some time but haven’t been able to articulate so clearly. They are all relevant to my life and work. So where to start in answering them?

My online PGCert group (for which I am a facilitator)  is currently studying a module on the emotional intelligence of teams. Had I not worked on the connectivism course in 2008, I might not have even thought to question whether working in teams/groups is a good idea and also whether working in teams/groups leads to group think and stifles creativity.

As a result of CCK08 I have been able to play devil’s advocate with my teaching group and question these assumptions that they might carry with them into the workplace – i.e. that working in teams is  the way to go!

One thing I have learned from Stephen and George (and others such as Stephen Brookfield)  is that it’s worth surfacing  assumptions, even if it means challenging the assumptions of CCK08/09 – rightly or wrongly. Who’s to say?

Mike Bogle’s reflection on his presentation skills – http://techticker.net/2009/08/27/self-assessment-of-my-presentation-skills/ – strikes a chord with me. I always unpick my ‘performance’ in detail after a presentation or a course, either online or offline – but I tend not to do it in public as Mike has done. Through a long career which has involved being interviewed, seeking promotion etc., I am still very cautious about who I reveal my weaknesses to. I think they are probably evident enough without having to point them out to people and I’m not as brave as Mike!

But Mike’s post has reminded me that since I have been working almost entirely online for about 5 years now, I find face-to-face work increasingly difficult. I spent many years teaching face-to-face and have done loads of presentations in the past. I used to do them so frequently that I never thought twice about them. These days I scarcely ever do face-to-face presentations, so it could be that I have simply forgotten how to do them – but I don’t think it is that. I think it’s much more that through working online, my whole approach to teaching and learning has changed. Like Mike, I don’t want to be the ‘sage on the stage’. I strongly believe that learners can learn as much from each other as they can from a ‘teacher’ and that part of a teacher’s role is to ‘set the scene’, so that this is possible.

A couple of years ago, I was asked to run a short face-to-face course and decided to try out taking my online approach into the face-to-face environment; it wasn’t 100% successful. I didn’t use any powerpoint, or a whiteboard (i.e. any form of presentation), but structured the session around a series of questions which I used as starting points for discussion. This is how I work online. Whilst the course participants engaged with the discussion that the questions stimulated, it was not the approach they expected and I could see that they weren’t completely comfortable with it. They were expecting something more from me, rather than being expected to create knowledge between us according to the needs of that group at that time.

This might sound as if all I did to prepare for that session was list a few questions. That is not so. I probably did more preparation for the course than I would normally, because I was not sure which direction it would take. But what I found really interesting and a bit unnerving was that it takes more than a short course to change people’s attitudes to what might be expected of a teacher or a course, and that what can work wonderfully well online, might not transfer into the face-to-face situation.

I realise that there are people who seem to be equally effective on and offline, but I wonder if a good face-to-face ‘presenter’ also ‘presents’ when working online, and if a good online ‘facilitator’ is also a ‘facilitator’ rather than a ‘presenter’ when working face-to-face. Of course it won’t be as cut and dried as this, but I do wonder whether there is a tension between these two ways of working.

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.

Here is the next set of questions (following on from previous posts which have raised questions about teaching with technology – for me teaching with technology means teaching online).

How has your daily routine changed?  What changes have you had to make to how you organise and manage your time?

I have to say that I hate routine and resist it as much as I can! So I prefer to think about how the patterns of my work have changed rather than the routines. This question is a little difficult to answer objectively as my work now is almost entirely online – I read online, I write online, I have meetings online, I attend conferences online, I research online and I socialise online. I don’t think I would be this much online if I wasn’t working as an independent consultant.

I chose to work independently because I knew that I could maintain my contacts and work through the affordances of technology. I could not do what I am doing now without technology.

So do I have any routines? Not many – but I do check my email consistently throughout the day – unless I am travelling or on holiday.  I haven’t yet succumbed to being accessible wherever I am and whatever I am doing and despite my love of working online, I hate phones, both landline and mobile. I’m in the dark ages as far as mobile phones go, although I do possess one – for emergencies!  I also check my social networking sites and RSS feeds most days – so I suppose these are almost daily routines.

I think technology has had more effect on how I organise and manage my time than on my daily routines. I am probably at my laptop for at least 8 hours each day and so I am very conscious of the sedentary nature of this existence. As such I make sure that I go to the gym at least twice a week and get out for walks as much as possible. Because my work is online – the eight hours don’t have to be consecutive – I can work at any time in the 24 hour cycle and if I work between 4.00 and 8.00 in the morning,  then I can take some time out during the day! So technology offers me a lot of flexibility and freedom in organising my time.

I have to be quite disciplined about managing my time to avoid procrastination – it’s very easy to go off task when online - and I have to be even more disciplined (as mentioned above) about taking regular breaks and making sure I am sitting correctly, maintaining a healthy diet, keeping my fluid intake up etc.

So I suppose the main change for me in relation to daily routines is that I no longer have a work/life balance issue, unlike when I worked for an institution. I am in control of how much I work, when I work and where I work and the boundaries between leisure and work are much more blurred as some of the things that I really enjoy - such as digital photography – require technology and can be used in my work.

It’s interesting attempting to answer these questions as it is becoming increasingly evident that the answers to them are very context dependent. My working context is quite specific. Although I work with post-graduate students, my days working from home 100% online and my uses of technology are, I know, very different from how I used to use technology when working face-to-face. But I do like the flexibility that technology offers me.

My third question in this series (from the list I posted) is: How has your role changed as a result of working with technology?

Recently – it hasn’t changed a lot, since I have been working and teaching online for a number of years now. Just writing this has made me wonder whether I am in a rut. Could I be in a rut when technology is changing so fast?

When I first started to work online (a number of years ago now), there was a marked and startling change in my role as a teacher. It crept up on me – but was none-the-less powerful in  its effect. At the time I was a face-to-face teacher trainer, teaching students how to teach science to school children. We had a heavily content-laden curriculum, where we crammed in as much content to our face-to-face science sessions as possible. The only relieving factor was that science is a very practical subject, so there was always a lot of hands-on practical activity in the sessions – but even so, we felt we had to cover the content of the curriculum – facts, facts and more facts. The introduction of a VLE into our institution released me from this heavily content driven teaching. I quickly realised that I could put as much information as I wanted up onto the website, and I could add as many links to as many websites as I wanted to, which meant that I was freed from covering this content in teaching sessions. What an amazing release. This changed my approach to teaching. I no longer worried about whether I had covered the curriculum, but focussed instead on eliciting and discussing students’ misconceptions. We were no longer learning facts, we were learning how to learn. So technology completely changed my approach to face-to-face teaching.

When I began to teach online, my approach changed even more. There was a lot of talk at the time of changing from a ‘Sage on the Stage’ to a ‘Guide on the Side’, to a point where people began to say ‘never let me hear that expression again’. Whilst the expression became a bit of a cliche, it did make people think about their role as teachers and whether or not we should be centre stage. It suited me very well not to be centre stage as I was never a ‘performer’ type of teacher (as I mentioned in a previous post). It was such a relief to me that I no longer had to be ‘the font of all knowledge’. In online classrooms it is so much more possible to access each individual classoom participant’s knowledge than it is in a face-to-face classroom. As an online  teacher I have far more contact with each of my students than I ever did face-to-face and it was a complete revelation to me, when I participated in my first online course as a student, how much I could learn from my fellow participants rather than from the teacher.

All this made me rethink my teaching role. There are still times when I might need to be ‘Sage on the Stage’, but not very often, because there are so many more qualified easily accessible (through technology) ‘Sages’ out there than I could ever be. I am much more likely to be a ‘Guide on the Side’ and even more likely to be a learner in a learning community with responsibility for ensuring that my fellow participants learn to their full potential.

Viewing myself more as a learner than a teacher means that I now have much greater respect for learner autonomy, that I like wherever possible to negotiate how the learning will take place with my students and offer lots of choice, that I try to listen more than speak and to ask questions rather than influence my students’ thinking with my opinions.

So I think I might describe my change in role as having become a ‘backseat driver’

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!