IRRODL Special Issue: Emergent Learning, Connections, Design for Learning

A special issue of IRRODL – The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning -has just been published.

Vol 12, No 7 (2011): Special Issue – Emergent Learning, Connections, Design for Learning

This is a refereed open e-journal which you can access here: http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/index

It is great to see recognised names amongst the contributing authors and particularly of Sui Fai John Mak – who I have worked with on research in the past – http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1041

Congratulations John, Rita and Helene. I’m looking forward to reading your paper and all the others; emergent learning is a topic that really interests me.

Information abundance and learning

Erik Duval’s topic for Change MOOC this week was Learning in a Time of Abundance , which he equates to changes in connectedness (we can be more connected to people and information than ever before), openness and transparency (access and resources) and ‘always on’ (e.g. students access their online connections 24/7). See also – http://erikduval.wordpress.com/2011/11/13/change-11-learning-in-times-of-abundance/. Here are some notes I made during his session.

Abundance will not go away (at least not in the foreseeable future) and has implications for what we learn and how we learn. Erik Duval models this understanding in the way in which he teaches:

• He encourages his students to be connected during his classes, i.e. have their laptops and mobile phones on
• His classes can run for 5 hours, which gives students the time to find their own lines of enquiry and navigate a path through the abundance of information
• His students have to overcome analysis and paralysis by actively dispensing with discomfort
• His classroom has no walls – anyone can ‘break in’.
• Everything done in class is open to the outside world
• Students are encouraged to track their own progress and set their own goals
• Learning is about working with wicked problems as happens in the workplace.
• Learning is messy – that’s how life is – and messiness is OK, but incoherence is not
• Tasks are authentic and relevant
• He recommends that we don’t ask for permission, but ask for forgiveness if things go wrong

His main advice was to ‘Let go’ – of fake control.

Then he set two challenges – to post:

1. Any examples you find inspiring about how teachers or students leverage abundance for learning

2. Any examples you can identify or think of where openness would be more of a problem than an opportunity?

1. I think a learners’ ability to leverage abundance for learning depends on whether they have the knowledge, skills and strategies for pulling information in, rather than going out to go out and look for it – and this of course involves the ability to filter (beware the filter bubble –  http://www.thefilterbubble.com/ted-talk ) analyse and select. The pulling in also requires technical skills that are maybe taken for granted by those ‘in the know’ and knowledge of the softwares that will do this for us. It will also depend on a learners’ networks and connections.

The question does seem to assume that leveraging abundance is desirable and will lead to better learning. On what grounds can we take this stance? Could we argue that it will just lead to a huge muddle and confusion for the poor learner? I don’t believe this – just playing Devil’s Advocate.

As far as an inspiring example of where this happens – I don’t think we need to look much further than Stephen Downes, MOOCs and OLDaily.

2.Where would openness be more of a problem than an opportunity? I can see that the ‘filter bubble’ would be an example of this – but from a personal perspective I would say – any situation where the outcome would be harmful to society, the environment or the individual. Of course, determining what we mean by ‘harmful’ will be open to different interpretations and there’s the rub. How do we decide?

In discussing this with a close friend this morning, we thought of examples where this has cropped up in the past. One is a colleague who was a Principal of a Higher Education Institution, whose firm belief was that all information in his institution should be open – he didn’t believe that anything should be ‘hidden’. A second was a colleague who is working as a management adviser to a hospice, where the question of what information should be open and what should not has been a focus of recent discussions.

In having this discussion we realized that it depends on what you mean by ‘information’ – and whether there is a difference between information, data and knowledge.  And then of course there are ‘facts’ – or maybe not (ref. Dave Cormier who does not believe in facts). So I looked it up and came across this interesting site – http://www.infogineering.net/data-information-knowledge.htm but having listened to the Filter Bubble Ted Talk – I realize that Google might simply be feeding me what I want to hear 🙂

So I’m still thinking about all this – and looking forward to Erik’s next session, which I might not be able to attend at the time, but will listen to the recording.

Autonomy and accountability

Week 8 of the CCK11 course focussed on power and authority on online networks.

Overview
Networked technologies have changed power and authority. This, networked learning has a great deal in common with approaches to learning that focus on personal empowerment and freedom.

The speakers for this week were Frances Bell and Ailsa Haxell. Their session was recorded as was the follow up session by Stephen Downes and George Siemens. Both are well worth viewing/listening to again.

There were many thought provoking ideas in these sessions – but the one that caught my attention was the idea proposed by Ailsa that if knowledge and agency are distributed across the network then accountability must also be distributed. She asked, ‘Am I responsible for the ways that others around me act’ and answered her own question with a ‘Yes’ – there is networked accountability.

Given the activity on my blog for the past two weeks I have found this interesting to think about. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about ‘Attacks on Connectivism’ which to my surprise has attracted a lot of attention and comment. The interesting thing is that this attention and comment is not about me or what I have written, but about Stephen Downes, George Siemens, connectivism and those who have something to say about connectivism as a theory.

If we take the metaphor of blogs being a place where we can invite people to come and sit on our front porch, as opposed to forums which can be viewed more as a market place with lots of hustle and bustle*, then my blog has felt a little more like a market place recently – with a number of people visiting and holding their own discussions.

*(see Mak, Sui, Fai, J., Williams, R. & Mackness, J. (2010). Blogs and Forums as Communication and Learning Tools in a MOOC. In Networked Learning Conference, Aarlborg (pp. 275-284). Retrieved from http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/organisations/netlc/past/nlc2010/abstracts/Mak.html)

All this has been very interesting for me, but I have not felt the need to be involved in further  discussion about this – so to what extent am I accountable for the ideas expressed in the comments made on this particular blog post and does it matter?

I know some of the reasons for this post attracting such a lot of attention. First the ‘jury is still out’ on connectivism as a learning theory and there are plenty of people out there who are following associated discussions. More than this George and Stephen made reference to my blog post. That always results in increased readers on your blog. But mostly it was Twitter. For some reason there were lots of tweets about this post.  Am I accountable for all this? Am I responsible for the ways in which others have reacted to this? If I am, does this mean that the network has some sort of power over me and what I can post on my blog? How does this relate to autonomy, which is a key principle of connectivism?

Week 8 Readings

• Stephen Downes, Things You Really Need to Learn
• Henry A. Giroux, Paulo Freire and the Politics of Postcolonialism
• Gary A. Olsen, History, Praxis, and Change: Paulo Freire and the Politics of Literacy
• William H. Dutton, Through the Network (of Networks) – The Fifth Estate .pdf
• Infed, Ivan Illich: deschooling, conviviality and the possibilities for informal education and lifelong learning
• Helen McCarthy, Paul Miller and Paul SkidmoreNetwork Logic: Who governs in an interconnected world? (.pdf) (this is a book of essays; skim sections that you find to be of interest).
• Edgar Gumbert, ed., Poverty, Power and Authority in Education (.pdf) (this is a book of essays; skim sections that you find to be of interest).
• Mohamed Amine Chatti, Matthias Jarke and Marcus Specht, The 3P Learning Model
• Vance Stevens, Revisiting Multiliteracies in Collaborative Learning Environments: Impact on Teacher Professional Development

 

Learner Autonomy – First thoughts about Stephen Downes’ model

(Stephen Downes’ model in black font) Overall question which I shall come back to later is: How do the recent MOOC/open course designs foster learner autonomy and from the learner perspective, are they successful in this?

A – Factors affecting epistemic states

– empirical factors

– external

– past experience and memory

– current experience

– internal

– emotional state

– pain and suffering, etc

– fear

– psychological

– traumas

– phobias

– philias or needs

I interpret this to mean that any consideration of autonomy must recognise that learners bring with them prior experience on at least three levels. This has a ‘constructivist’ learning theory feel to it. The ways in which learners recognise, interpret and experience autonomy will be influenced by their prior experience. Learners can probably be helped with these by their ‘teachers’ because they are externally recognisable and ‘measurable’.

– cognitive factors

– world view or belief set

– frames or traces – recognition of ranges of alternatives

– metaphors or underlying models

– causation, spirit, or other mechanisms

– morality, sense of agency, responsibility

– reasoning mechanism (if any), including:

– logical capacities (including modal, probabilistic)

– mathematical capacities

– degree of certainty attained, required

– language – languages learned, vocabulary

I interpret this to mean that a learner’s experience of autonomy, or ability to act autonomously (bearing in mind that this is not a constant state) is influenced by their ‘internal’ mental state, frames of reference. This may not be visible to the teacher and therefore may be harder to influence, from a teacher’s perspective.

– external factors

– rewards and incentives

– financial

– intrinsic or non-financial

– punishments, sanctions and threats

– expectations

– professional standards

– organizational vision or strategy

From my initial and brief reading of related research, this is related to motivation. My personal perspective is that truly autonomous learning relies heavily on intrinsic motivation, in the absence of punishments, sanctions, threats and expectations. That’s not to say that these external factors do not exist, but that learners must be in a position to choose to reject the extrinsic in favour of the intrinsic or vice vers

B – Capacity to act on epistemic states

– physical factors

– mobility and location

– perceptual (can you see, is there light?)

– effective (can you project into the environment – do the buttons respond, do the pages turn, etc)

– physical support – housing, health, nutrition, etc

– time

This seems to relate to ‘independent’ learning – which has been raised in past research. Autonomy is interpreted in a variety of ways and independence is one of those. My husband is disabled and I know the importance of independence as a pre-requisite to autonomy. They are not the same thing. The conditions have to be right in order to be able to make decisions/choices. This is interesting and I am still thinking about it.

– social factors

– laws, rules and regulations, including flexibility of these

– peer pressure, mores, threat of sanctions

– mode of collaboration – authoritarian, democratic, consensus,         deliberative, etc

– leadership – capacities, temperament, inclinations, etc

– responsibility or authority

This relates to the social constraints of our personal circumstances – so for example my mother married an extremely Victorian man who believed that women should not go out to work – her role was to support her husband (which she did extremely effectively) – but her autonomy in terms of her choice over how she could express her talents was controlled by someone else. Whilst this particular example might not be so common today – autonomy can be restricted in these circumstances.

– structural factors

– predictability of the environment

– complexity of the environment

– barriers, locks, detours, traps, loops – eg. http://tihane.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/motivationalbarriers_seci.jpg

I interpret this as relating to organisational constraints. The organisation in which a learner works may not be able/capable of coping with autonomous learners. An example of this is when University staff are not permitted to use certain softwares within their courses. There might be good institutional reasons for this but it stifles innovation and learner autonomy.

– resources

– range and depth of resources available

– medium of resources – staff, money, equipment

– language and complexity of resources

– quantity of resources (eg., finances)

– mode of presentation of those resources

– sequence of presentation

– duration of presentation

This is similar to the above point in relation to organisations. My son who is doing music technology and cannot do the modules he wants to because of lack of University resources (staffing) is an example of constraints on learner autonomy. But there will also be other constraints on a personal level. In CCK08 and other open courses we have seen how participants whose first language is not English experience constraints on their autonomy. I’m assuming that mode of presentation might be related to ‘learning styles’ although I know that some people don’t believe that there are such things as learning styles. Shall we call them learning preferences instead?

C – Scope and Range of Autonomous Behaviour

– expression

– medium of expression

– language of expression, word use

– association and assembly

– definition of size, scope of social network

– directionality of communications

– selection

– of associates – can you choose your friends? Family?

– communication options – do channels exist? Can they be open?

– of tools, eg., of software, hardware

– resource allocation – spending, delegating, assigning, etc

– method

– operating principle, methodology, pedagogy

– background – influence over environmental factors generally, including:

– noise or music

– colour scheme or visual appearance

– lighting, air supply, mobility

– range

– tolerance – allowed range of results or effects

– quantity of choices available

– quality of choices available (cf. Hobson’s choice)

This section seems to me about the choices that learners can make and the extent of those choices. CCK11 has probably offered more choice than any prior open course. My brief reading of research however indicates that designing for autonomy does not mean that teachers abdicate responsibility for their learners and I will be interested to see how the CCK11 course design balances learner autonomy with ‘teacher’ facilitation and whether even minimum teacher facilitation will be perceived as a constraint.

D – Effects of Autonomous Behaviour

– impact (ie., the degree or scope of the effect)

– audience – range of persons affected by behavior

– efficacy – amount of change potentially caused by behaviour

– improvement (ie., the nature of the effect)

– internal

– psychological – satisfaction, lessening of pain,lessening of fear, etc

– cognitive – beliefs formed, knowledge acquired

– external

– material condition, employment, etc

– capacities, rights, autonomy, etc

– associative – improvements ascribed to others

– social – improvements to society generally

This section feels to me a bit of a departure – it is not about what autonomy might mean to the learner or how autonomy is experienced, but how we might ‘measure’ its effects. How will we know when we are autonomous learners? How will teachers know that their course designs which attempt to promote autonomous learning are successful?

This is my first response to Stephen’s model. I am aware that I have probably not done it justice.  I now want to see how CCK11 and other open courses have been designed with these ideas in mind and also how this model compares with the other models that Stephen posted on his blog.

Information overload and connectivity

On one side we are urged to increase our connectivity – we are told that all learning starts with a connection, to learn we need to be well connected, to keep up in a fast moving digital age we need to know how to filter, select, aggregate, remix, repurpose, feed forward. We are urged to be open and connected, and to become involved in global networks.  It is not enough to simply join these networks and observe – this is regarded as ‘taking’ – we must share, create for the benefit of others and reciprocate.

On the other side, when people stop to think about it, such as over the Christmas break, there is a realisation that all this connectivity can very easily get out of control and become an unbearable burden.  Blog posts by Will Richardson and Beth Kanter both discuss this from different perspectives. There has been a discussion on Quora to which George Siemens contributed and we have been reminded in some posts of Clay Shirky’s suggestion that information overload is a consequence of filter failure.

Of course, as soon as people have a break – such as we have just had with Christmas and New Year – it suddenly hits us that there must be more to life than …… whatever it is that puts our life out of balance – such as has been perceived in recent online discussions and posts as an imbalance between connectivity and information overload.

But I’m wondering whether it is information overload that is the problem. Isn’t it more a lack of understanding about what we mean by connectivity and what role connectivity should play in our lives and learning? It seems that it is often interpreted that more connectivity is better – more connectivity means more learning, more connectivity means being able to keep up. But is this true? Would an answer to this question sort out the information overload problem?

Connection is why we’re here

I want to thank Heli for posting this video link to a talk by Dr Brene Brown. Brene Brown is certainly a gifted speaker and as Heli discusses with John Mak on his blog – vulnerability is inside everyone. I think this would be hard to deny – especially in relation to online connectivity.

I have watched the video a couple of times and have thought about it a lot. I have also heard an alternative perspective from a valued friend and have come to the conclusion that the problem with these talks is that they play on our emotions to the extent that it’s difficult to see the wood for the trees.

Brene Brown starts her talk by saying:

Connection is why we’re here. It’s what gives purpose and meaning to our lives.

She then goes on to say:

… the ability to feel connected ….. is neurobiolically how we are wired – it’s why we are here.

And then she goes on to talk about the vulnerability of those who feel disconnected and the reasons for this. She is a very entertaining speaker, so it is easy to be swept along on the emotive wave of her talk.

But the thing is that her talk was based on the massive assumption that everyone wants connection. I can see that those who want it and feel disconnected might have the problems of vulnerability that she describes – but what if you don’t want it?

Or alternatively – what if your personal interpretation of connection is connection to concepts rather than to people. Brene Brown talks about us being neurologically wired for connection – but that does not mean that these connections have to be social.

To me it seems that the emphasis in connectivism is often on social learning and social connections. My friend and colleague Matthias, has discussed this on this blog (see for example this blog post – http://x28newblog.blog.uni-heidelberg.de/2008/11/23/cck08-conceptual-and-social-layer/ . Personally I very much enjoy discussions with close friends/colleagues about mutual interests, so I am not anti-social – but I am aware that the extent of my social connection is very small compared to others on the web. I have no need for a wide circle of friends or connections and I respect those who prefer to be connected to concepts rather than people.

So it seems to me, that if we are talking about connectivity, we need to first surface some assumptions about what it means.

In defense of lurking

A couple of days ago George Siemens made a post to his Elearnspace blog in which he strongly criticised lurkers as follows:

Creation, collaboration, and sharing are the true value points of a PLN. It’s not what it does for me, but rather what I am now able to do with and for others.

Being connected, without creating and contributing, is a self-focused, self-centered state. I’ve ranted about this before, but there is never a good time to be a lurker. Lurking=taking. The concept of legitimate peripheral participation sounds very nice, but is actually negative. Even when we are newcomers in a network or community, we should be creating and sharing our growing understanding. http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2010/12/01/my-personal-learning-network-is-the-most-awesomest-thing-ever/

What George has written seems to me to be a complete contradiction of what I perceive open learning networks or courses to be all about. Stephen Downes has outlined the principles of learning in networks as being openness, connectivity, diversity and autonomy. For me, autonomy lies at the heart of how this works, and has been central to the success of the open courses I have so far attended (PLENK, CCKO8 and CritLit). In other words, a key principle is that we have the choice of how connected, open, interactive or participative we want to be. We can therefore choose to lurk. Actually, I dislike that derogatory term ‘lurking’ and prefer to recognise that in any course, online or f2f, we will have active participants, but also those whose learning preference is to ‘read’ or ‘observe’.

Being connected, without creating and contributing, is a self-focused, self-centered state.

My question here would be what is wrong with that? PLN (personal learning network) is by its very name just that – personal. It is not for George Siemens or anyone else to tell me what being connected means in relation to my personal learning.

Lurking=taking.

Not so, or no more so than in collaborative creation and contribution. And just to remember here that Stephen Downes famously said at the ALT conference in 2005 that ‘Collaboration is the joining together of things that do not naturally want to be joined’. So there are two points here. First is that George’s rant against ‘lurking’ is an example of the ‘Tyranny of Participation’, written about by Ferreday and Hodgson and cited by me in a number of posts. Second is that there is no evidence that ‘lurking=taking’. By its very nature we do not know what ‘lurkers’ are doing. They are not present and therefore we have no evidence with which to judge them in this way. The responses to George’s post list many reasons why people might be perceived as ‘lurkers’. From my own experience of working as a tutor on international online courses, I know that participants may not be present for a whole host of reasons including access difficulties, technology difficulties, illness, significant family or work disruptions/distractions and so on. The best they can do in these circumstances is to read or observe. I also know that whilst these people may not be connected and contributing to my course, they are often heavily engaged elsewhere. It is not for me to make judgments about where their priorities lie. They have the autonomy to decide that for themselves.

The concept of legitimate peripheral participation sounds very nice, but is actually negative.

To throw out a comment like this about a well established theory of learning, without any further explanation is not helpful. My interpretation from reading Wenger’s work is that legitimate peripheral participation is about the development of competency and identity within a learning community and the learning trajectories that people follow to achieve this within a social learning situation. It acknowledges that when people join a community (or, I would suggest, even a network), they join at the edge and gradually develop their identity within it. In addition Etienne Wenger’s more recent work has a lot to say about learning on the boundaries of communities. At a recent conference he suggested that this is where there can be the most powerful learning experiences, where people at the edge straddle the boundaries between different communities and can feed information/learning back and forth across these boundaries. This relates also to Granovetter’s work on the strength of weak ties and suggests that far from being negative, legitimate peripheral participation can have positive consequences.

Even when we are newcomers in a network or community, we should be creating and sharing our growing understanding. (my bold)

Finally, although I have been guilty of this myself in the past, I do not think ‘should’ is a helpful word in relation to learning. Learning in any environment, network, community, course, classroom, is ideally about negotiation and learner empowerment. This also means allowing people to choose whether and when to interact with other learners, whether to read and observe (lurk) rather than be actively interactive and to decide for themselves what connectivity means to them personally.

#PLENK2010 PLEs from a PLP (personal learning perspective)

I’m wondering why the idea of personal learning environments (PLEs) has captured the attention of so many. Surely PLEs have always existed. I have been thinking about my father who died aged 79 and was born in 1914. He helped to install the first computer in his company and as I remember, it was the size of whole room – a large room.  My father did not know computers as we have them today, but nevertheless he had a personal learning environment. I can remember it clearly. It was a roll top desk in a tiny room in the attic of our house, where he did not like to be disturbed. He had a fountain pen and a bottle of ink on the leather top of the desk (which became visible once the wooden lid had been rolled back) and meticulously kept documents in the small wooden pigeon holes that lined the back of the desk. My father also had a public learning environment – a rather grand office in a modern building in a nearby town.  And he had both a personal and public learning network. Networking was very important, even in those days, and for my father consisted of entertaining the right people (my mother achieved this wonderfully well). Those pictures in films of small children looking through the banisters at dinner guests arriving, was more than just fiction for some of us.

So what is the fuss about PLEs and PLNs? It is not that they exist. They have always existed in one form or another, for people of all ages.

We might think from this PLENK2010 that the fuss is about technology. There is no doubt that there are now a wealth of technological tools at our disposal which we can use on a personal private level, i.e. just for ourselves, or on a personal public level, i.e. we can use them for connecting to others, sharing information and resources, discussion and knowledge creation. But perhaps to get too hooked up on the tools we use in today’s PLEs and PLNs is to miss the point –  and that is that the tools change the L in PLE or PLN, i.e. they change the learning or at the very least the approach to learning.

How do they do this? One overwhelming change is in the amount of autonomy they afford us. There are now so many open source tools that we don’t have to wait for an institution to provide them for us – we can go out there, get the tool we want/need and just get on with it. We can also circumvent traditional ways of going about things in education, if we so wish, and can even subvert them if we feel so inclined. We can learn what, where, when, how and with whom we wish. PLE now means something different to what it meant in my father’s day. I suspect I have more choices and more power/control over my learning than he ever did. But I am also probably exposed to far more information than he ever was.

So for today’s learners, a PLE involves using a wide range of tools to connect with a widely dispersed network of people and resources. Navigating this network is a key skill. Managing vast amounts of information is a key skill. Filtering, critical evaluation and selecting information and deciding with whom to connect are all key skills.  Knowing how to aggregate selected information is also a key skill. The autonomy afforded by today’s PLEs and PLNs brings with it many implications for the learner. I think it may be a while before we fully understand what these are.

#PLENK2010 Assessment in distributed networks

I have been struggling to clearly identify the issues associated with assessment in PLEs/PLNs – which are probably similar to those in MOOCs or distributed networks.

There seem to be a number of questions.

• Is it desirable/possible to assess learners in a course which takes place in a distributed network?

• Is it possible/desirable to accredit learning in a course which takes place in a distributed network?

• What assessment strategies would be appropriate?

• Who should do the assessing?

Whether assessment is desirable in a PLENK/MOOC etc. will depend on the purpose of the course and the learning objectives that the course convenors had in mind when they designed the course. PLENK2010 does not include formal assessment and yet has attracted over 1000 participants, many of whom are still active in Week 5. Presumably these participants are not looking for their learning outcomes to be assessed. CCK08 attracted over 2000 participants and did include assessment for those who wished it – but the numbers were small (24 – I’m not sure if the number who could do the course for credit was limited or only 24 wanted it) – so it was not only possible for the course convenors to assess these participants but also to offer accreditation.

Both assessment and accreditation are possible across distributed networks if the numbers are manageable. It is not the distributed network that is the problem, although this might affect the assessment strategies that are used. It is the numbers. Just as it is not possible for course convenors of a MOOC to interact on an individual level with participants, so it is physically not possible for them to assess such large numbers of individuals, and without this assessment no accreditation can be offered other than perhaps a certificate of attendance – but even this would need to be monitored and would be contrary to the principles of autonomy expected in a MOOC.

So how to assess large numbers. Traditionally this been done through tests and exams which can be easily marked by assessors. Whilst these make the assessment process manageable for the tutors, they offer little more than a mark or grade to the students – since very often there is no feedback-feedforward loop associated with the grade. Also tests and exams are not the best assessment strategy for all situations and purposes.

So what better assessment strategies would work with large numbers? Actually this might be the wrong starting question. The starting point should be what learning objectives do we have, what outcomes do we expect these objective to lead to and what assessment strategy will enable the learner to achieve the learning objective as demonstrable through the outcome. There is a wealth of information now available on assessment strategies, both for formative and summative assessment. Focus in the UK has for many years now (from the time of Paul Black’s article, Inside the Black Box, to Gibbs and Simpson’s article – Conditions Under Which Assessment Supports Students’ Learning, to the REAP project and the work of the JISC) been on formative assessment and providing effective feedback. In Higher Education there has been even more of a push on this recently since students are demanding more and better feedback (National Student Survey) – so effective assessment strategies are there if we are aware of them and know how to use them. These include a whole range of possibilities including audio and video feedback-feedforward between students and tutors, students writing/negotiating their own assessment criteria, peer, group and self-assessment. But how can these strategies be used with MOOC-like numbers whilst maintaining the validity, reliability, authenticity and transparency of assessment?

There appear to be no easy answers to this question. Alec Couros – in his open course – is experimenting with the use of mentors – is this a way forward? We know that there are many trained teachers in PLENK2010. Could they be possible assessors? How would their credentials be checked? Would they work voluntarily?

Peer assessment has been suggested. I have experience of this, but have always found that student peer assessment whether it is based on their own negotiated criteria or criteria written by the tutor – often needs tutor moderation, if a grade which could lead to a degree qualification is involved. Similarly with self-assessment. We don’t know what we don’t know – so we may need someone else to point this out.

The nearest thing I have seen to trying to overcome the question of effectively teaching and assessing large numbers of students is in Michael Wesch’s 2008 video – A Portal to Media Literacy – where he shows how technology can support effective teaching and learning of large groups of students – but he is talking about hundreds, not thousands of students and himself admits that the one thing that didn’t work was asking students to grade themselves. This was two years ago – so I wonder if he has overcome that problem.

So – from these musings it seems to me that

• Learning in large courses distributed over a range of networks is a worthwhile pursuit. They offer the learner diversity, autonomy and control over their own learning environment and extensive opportunities for open sharing of learning.

• The purpose of these courses needs to be very clear from the outset – particularly with regard to assessment, i.e. course convenors need to be clear about the learning objectives, how learners might demonstrate that those objectives have been met through the outcomes they produce and whether or not those outcomes need to be assessed.

• There has been plenty written about what effective assessment entails. The problem in MOOCs is how to apply these effective strategies to large numbers.

• If we cannot rely on peer assessment and self-assessment (which we may not be able to do for validated/accredited courses), then we need more assessors.

Would a possibility be for an institution/group of institutions to build up a bank/community of trained assessors who could be called upon to voluntarily assess students in a MOOC (as Alec Couros has done with mentors).  Even if this was possible I could see a number of stumbling blocks, e.g. assessor credentials, subject expertise, moderation between assessors, would institutions allow accreditation to be awarded when the assessment has been done by people who don’t work for the institution?  – what else?

#PLENK2010 The relevance of learning theories

I was interested to see what George would come up with re the relationship between learning theories and PLE/PLNs. The Moodle discussion forums have been much quieter – but perhaps this is because it is Week 4 of the course. Dave Cormier has posted somewhere – I think – that this is a hard week in a MOOC – probably made even harder by the subject of learning theories  🙂

I wouldn’t claim to know a lot about learning theories and certainly not all the learning theories that George mentioned, but I do know that they have strongly influenced my life as a teacher. For me, learning theories inform the way I teach. They are perspectives that I take according to the context/situation I find myself in;  I use them to inform my teaching according to my own and my learners’ needs. So for example:

I find myself usually opposed to behaviourism, e.g. I do not want my learners to ‘jump through hoops’. I do not want them to think only about the qualification, but to learn for its own sake. On the other hand I am realistic enough to know that their qualifications are important and that they need them – also I know that whilst I might do everything to encourage intrinsic motivation, they also need extrinsic motivation – particularly young children, who love those gold stars, but also adults who respond to those motivational strokes. With enough ‘rewards’, we can encourage even the most reluctant learners to reach their/our goal and they and we are satisfied and happy.

However, there are many occasions when I not only want my learners to simply achieve a given outcome, but also to think about how they have arrived at the outcome. An example would be to ask children to explain how they arrived at a given answer to a mathematical problem/calculation. I have always found this fascinating – if you ask a number of different children to explain how they each arrived at the solution to a given calculation/problem, they are all likely to have come to the answer differently. This cognitivist approach also helps children who get the answer wrong – as they begin to examine their own thinking.

As a science teacher (in the past) I was always interested in the constructivist approach to teaching and learning. This approach, for me, acknowledged that learners have prior experiences which influence how they think about new learning experiences. In the case of misconceptions, which are extremely prevalent in science education, learners need to deconstruct their misconceptions and reconstruct their thinking in the light of their new learning. In science teaching this usually involves a practical activity in which learners’ misconceptions are physically/mentally challenged by the evidence before them. For example, if a learner sees a metal ball and a polystyrene ball of the same shape and volume, dropped from the same height, reach the ground at the same time, then their misconception that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects is challenged.

Behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivist approaches can all be used with individual learners. They apply to the individual’s behaviour or individual learning. But in all my teaching there has very often (but not exclusively) been an acknowledgement that people learn from each other. This has involved learners in communities of practice, group activities and collaborative learning and has been context dependent. These social contructivist approaches engage the learner in development of knowledge and personal identity as they grow as much through their relationships with others as they do through engagement with the concepts being taught/learned. As George said today in his presentation – Week 4: George Siemens – Complex Knowledge & PLE/Ns – learning is socially negotiated and developed.

So where does this leave connectivism? Again according to George – in his presentation today, connectivism is driven by network formation – growing and pruning connections. The spectrum of learning from a connectivist view involves resonance, synchronicity, wayfinding, amplification, learning/knowledge symmetry. A while back I wrote another blog post about connectivism as a learning theory – https://jennymackness.wordpress.com/2010/07/02/some-notes-on-connectivism/ in preparation for the Networked Learning Conference and in an attempt to understand connectivism as a learning theory and how it be useful from a teaching perspective.

According to George a theory of learning should

• Explain what’s happening
• Predict what could happen
• Be a foundation for action
• Be a foundation for preparing for future needs

All the theories mentioned above seem to fulfil these requirements, including connectivism. They all seem to be useful for providing differing perspectives according to specific contexts. I definitely wouldn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater,  just because connectivism, PLEs and PLNs have come along.