Social media, the democratisation of knowledge and physiotherapy. Can they play nice together?

I’ve been to a few conferences and presentations in the last few months, and there seems to be this idea that e-learning is all about putting your lecture notes and Powerpoint slides into your institution’s Learning Management System (LMS) and then you’re done. Now you can say that you use “e-learning” in your teaching practice.

There seesm to be an obvious flaw to this approach. How is forcing a student to go to your LMS and download a document to read that content on their computer, any different to forcing a student to go to class to receive a document to read that content on paper? It seems to miss the point a little bit. Isn’t e-learning more about finding new and innovative ways to change the teaching and learning experience? It seems to me that an LMS just moves the same classroom online.

The other problems I have with the LMS include:

• They are usually closed (few institutions use Moodle), which means that my learning identity is locked into the system.
• Following on from this, there’s no data portability. What happens when I graduate? I lose 4-6 years of learning objects.
• Because they’re inherently closed, there’s no internet facing component of my profile. Why can’t I choose which aspects of my student identity I want to open up to the world?
• It isn’t possible for students to connect to anyone outside of the network / LMS. Thus, there’s no space to develop a community or network of practice outside the narrow boundaries of that institution.
• They are slow to adopt new technologies and therefore lack the flexibility of using readily available tools (I can install laconica on my own server, but my university isn’t even close to incorporating this functionality into the LMS they’re building)

It seems to me that a Learning Management System is more about controlling the learning process, and less about choice.

Yesterday I attended the morning of a workshop around a Health OER Network for Africa that’s currently in development. It’s a project that’s sponsored by the South African Institute of Distance Education (SAIDE) and includes participants from all over the continent. The objectives of the workshop were to share lessons from the first phase of implementation, introduce new institutions to the project, identify future partnerships and discuss the principles upon which the network should be based.

Unfortunately, I was only able to attend one morning of a three day workshop, but based on what I saw, I’m excited at the prospect of what this project could bring to health education in Africa. After a few presentations, we broke into groups to discuss how to operationalise the network, looking at the following questions (taken from the programme):

• What principles should underpind the Health OER Network? What should be non-negotiable?
• How will the network connect to broader issues of curriculum planning, adult learning and assessment theory?
• What activities should the network not engage in? Why?
• What policy implications will participation in the network have for institutions / faculties (drawing on experiences of participating institutions)?
• What should the conditions for participation in the network be, if any?

I enjoyed the discussion and regret not being able to participate in the rest of the workshop. I’m hoping that this idea of open content and open educational resources grows within our institutions of higher learning. Unfortunately, there’s still a focus on protecting intellectual property using extreme copyright and many academics have a hard time imagining that there is academic integrity and value in opening up intellectual property.

Earlier this year I gave my final year physiotherapy students a blogging assignment as part of their Professional Ethics module.  The goal of the assignment was to read a selection of articles that were relevant to coursework that had been discussed in class, to reflect on those readings, and then to post a blog entry as a reflection.  Others in the class could then read those posts and provide feedback in the form of comments, hopefully stimulating further reflection and discussion.

In general, the assignment was a great success among the students, with many of them reporting high levels of satisfaction with the project.  For my own part, I’ve learned a huge amount, not only about the technical aspects of co-ordinating and supporting a project like this, but also in student behaviour and attitudes towards the use of blogging as part of the curriculum.

I presented the process we went through during this assignment at the SAAHE conference earlier this month, and you can see my presentation here.   I’m also currently supervising an undergraduate research group who are evaluating the results of the platform as a means of facilitating reflection among students.  Hopefully the results of that study will be published at some stage in the future.

Here’s a link to the project.  I’d love to hear any feedback you might have.  Please bear in mind that for many of these students, English is not their first language and prior to this assignment, none of them had any experience with blogging.  In addition to that, about a third of them didn’t have access to the internet at home, and another third only had a dialup connection.  In light of these challenges, I’m very proud of what they managed to achieve.

Quick post to mention the new 0.9 release of Mendeley.  I’m not going to go into too much detail, because the blog post announcing the release covers it all quite nicely.  I just wanted to mention my 2 favourite new features: the internal, tabbed PDF viewer and the ability to annotate and highlight documents (see image below with arbitrary notes).  Unfortunately, the ability to sync those highlights and annotations will only come with the next release.

All in all, this is a great package that’s well worth the effort to upgrade.

I just registered for the Connectivism and connective knowledge (CCK09) course that’s going to start in September.  I first came across it when I did the Mozilla open education course earlier this year and have been keeping an eye on it in the meantime.  It’s a massively open online course that so far has 1000+ registered participants, and is hosted by George Siemens and Steven Downes.

From the 2008 course outline, the Connectivism and connective knowledge course is a “…twelve week course that will explore the concepts of connectivism and connective knowledge and explore their application as a framework for theories of teaching and learning. It will outline a connectivist understanding of educational systems of the future.”

Here’s the syllabus for the 2008 course, and the Moodle outline.  If you register for the CCK09 course, let me know so that we can keep in touch.