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

• Gilly Salmon’s Five Stage Model: a useful referrence « Mollybob Goes To School

  • Salmon’s model moves away from the increasingly dated notion that the effective eLearning can be achieved through static learning objects (Downes 2005), and takes a social learning perspective with particular emphasis on communities of practice, providing a framework to support Wenger’s assertion that “learning cannot be designed: it can only be designed for – that is, facilitated or frustrated” (1998, p. 228).
  • Salmon’s model is also reliant upon scaffolding, extending Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (in Attwell 2006) proposition with the model’s structure implying that the moderator acts as an initial scaffold who gradually shifts responsibility for development to the learning community under their guidance, with learners developing their own scaffolding based on relationships with many within the community, and eventually, beyond the community.

• Building Trust in Your Online Community | Remote Access

  • Lead by Example
  • It is an essential part of our jobs to model what we would like to see
  • Get Personal
  • Be willing to share of yourself. Share your stories and your life
  • be willing to be open
  • Be Honest
  • you need to be willing to share your thoughts and opinions about things
  • Accept that You’re Human
  • Learn for mistakes and move on
  • Be Knowledgeable and Share
  • Share of yourself and of your passions. Make your presence in a space one that has personality and share what you have
  • Share the things you find online
  • Maintain Consistency
  • Maintaining consistency will allow your students to be comfortable in your space, understanding what happens there and able to concentrate on what they are being asked to do
  • Let it Go
  • Be prepared to see cycles between students and even within the contributions of single students
  • Don’t Give Up
  • How can we change what we are asking them to do in order for them to grow into their roles

• Personalizing Learning – The Important Role of Technology — Open Education

  • “My job is to present the material in an interesting and meaningful way,” he would say. “It is the student’s job to learn that material.”

    Implicit in his statement was the idea that it was the student’s role to adjust to the various styles employed by different teachers. Whether the teacher featured a lecture format or a hands-on approach was immaterial – the assumption was that students were the ones who needed to be flexible

  • any failure on the student’s part to master the material was not the responsibility of the teacher
  • students moved along as a group, each doing the same set of assignments, each expected to master the exact same set of learning objectives by a date set forth in the syllabus
  • differentiating for a specific learner was perceived as showing favoritism
  • today’s teacher is expected to adjust to the varied preferences of students so as to maximize the learning potential of each individual in the classroom
  • Personalizing learning involves differentiating the curricula, including expectations and timelines, and utilizing various instructional approaches so as to best meet the needs of each individual
  • The challenge is not so much what those elements consist of but how to piece the elements together to form a cohesive strategy
  • But technology also plays a more important role in the personalization process. Ultimately it is the conduit for teachers to move to a learning approach that features materials developed for each individual student
  • One of the critical elements to a cohesive strategy involves the concept of a learning platform
  • First teachers must have a clear understanding of the learning needs of each student
  • teachers must monitor and assess student progress intently
  • Learning paths must then be created that match the aptitude and learning styles of every individual
  • One of the first elements is increased communication among educators themselves as well as with their individual students
  • That means increased use of email
  • Better yet, it means posting that assignment online for students and parents to access directly
  • No one educator could possibly create unique learning materials for every single student
  • An expectation that all teachers are ready for such steps is destined for failure

• Accessing e-learning resources in the NHS « e-LiME

  • Whereas in Africa limited infrastructure is producing an information bottleneck, access in the UK is restricted by ‘denial of service’ restrictions placed upon a competent and fast modern system
  • how do we go about managing the risks more effectively to allow NHS staff to access online learning resources and tools which many of us take for granted

• Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning – Educational Research

  • what processes people perceived as important for knowledge maturing within their organisation and how ell they though these processes were important. The two processes perceived as most important were ‘reflection’ and ‘building relationships’ between people. These were also the two processes seen as amongst the least supported
  • The issue of ‘reflection’ is more complex. e-Portfolio researchers have always emphasised the centrality of reflection to learning, yet it is hard to see concrete examples of how this can be supported

• We Must Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education

  • the amount of redundant, inconsequential, and outright poor research has swelled in recent decades
  • 40.6 percent of the articles published in the top science and social-science journals (the figures do not include the humanities) were cited in the period 2002 to 2006
  • As a result, instead of contributing to knowledge in various disciplines, the increasing number of low-cited publications only adds to the bulk of words and numbers to be reviewed
  • The avalanche of ignored research has a profoundly damaging effect on the enterprise as a whole. Not only does the uncited work itself require years of field and library or laboratory research. It also requires colleagues to read it and provide feedback, as well as reviewers to evaluate it formally for publication. Then, once it is published, it joins the multitudes of other, related publications that researchers must read and evaluate for relevance to their own work. Reviewer time and energy requirements multiply by the year
  • The pace of publication accelerates, encouraging projects that don’t require extensive, time-consuming inquiry and evidence gathering
  • Questionable work finds its way more easily through the review process and enters into the domain of knowledge
  • Aspiring researchers are turned into publish-or-perish entrepreneurs, often becoming more or less cynical about the higher ideals of the pursuit of knowledge
  • The surest guarantee of integrity, peer review, falls under a debilitating crush of findings, for peer review can handle only so much material without breaking down. More isn’t better. At some point, quality gives way to quantity
  • Several fixes come to mind:
  • First, limit the number of papers to the best three, four, or five that a job or promotion candidate can submit. That would encourage more comprehensive and focused publishing
  • Second, make more use of citation and journal “impact factors
  • Third, change the length of papers published in print: Limit manuscripts to five to six journal-length pages
  • and put a longer version up on a journal’s Web site
  • what we surely need is a change in the academic culture that has given rise to the oversupply of journals
  • Finally, researchers themselves would devote more attention to fewer and better papers actually published, and more journals might be more discriminating

• Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning – Educational Research

  • the present ‘industrial’ schooling system is fast becoming dysfunctional, neither providing the skills and competences required in our economies nor corresponding to the ways in which we are using the procedural and social aspects of technology for learning and developing and sharing knowledge
  • Personal Learning Environments can support and mediate individual and group based learning in multiple contexts and promote learner autonomy and control
  • The role of teachers in such an environment would be to support, model and scaffold learning
  • Such approaches to learning recognise the role of informal learning and the role of context
  • Schools can only form one part of such collaborative and networked knowledge constellation
  • institutions must rethink and recast their role as part of community and distributed networks supporting learning and collaborative knowledge development
  • the major impact of the uses of new technologies and social networking for learning is to move learning out of the institutions and into wider society
  • This is a two way process, not only schools reaching outwards, but also opening up to the community, distributed or otherwise, to join in collaborative learning processes
  • At the same time new interfaces to computers and networks are likely to render the keyboard obsolescent, allowing the integration of computers and learning in everyday life and activity

• @physiopedia Nice idea, looking forward to the results in reply to physiopedia #
• The state of e-learning from 2009? Mostly disappointing, by Tony Bates http://bit.ly/8Tyr0K. I agree with most of what he says #

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OK, so I’ve been back for a few weeks now and have had a little bit of time to gather my thoughts regarding the HESS conference, and thought I’d make a note of some of the highlights from my limited perspective.  If anyone from the conference feels that I’m way off the mark, feel free to drop me a line.

One of the key themes that emerged was the idea that research should be taken down off of it’s pedestal and integrated into the curriculum as a functional, useful and exciting aspect of teaching and learning.  Dr Angela Brew established this idea in the first keynote of the first day.  That research should not be seen purely as a series of steps to be undertaken in the lofty towers of higher education, but should rather be seen as an integral part of teaching and learning.  The phrases “research-based learning” and “inquiry-based learning” cropped up regularly over the three days.

This idea that research should become part of the curriculum, rather than something tacked on, moved the conversation into another strong theme, that of the “scholarship of teaching and learning”.  In order to teach in your field, it’s no longer enough to merely know your subject.  The move towards evidence-based practice doesn’t only apply to our own niche fields, but should be applied equally strongly in how we approach the way we teach.  The concept of “communities of practice” came through strongly in this realm.

Martin Oliver’s keynote negotiated the fine line between technology in education as an all-powerful saviour, and a potentially misleading mindset that puts the technology, rather than pedagogy, first.  While e-learning was generally lauded as a powerful tool, enthusiasm should be tempered with optimistic caution.  With technology changing so quickly, it seems that a predominant focus on the tools themselves, rather than pedagogy, will be met with failure.

There were a few presentations I attended that urged educators to become more aware of students social lives, which came with evidence of the fact that they are not always as we imagine them to be.  Realising that students often have significant difficulties in almost every aspect of their personal lives can (and should) change how we relate to them.  As educators, we should understand that not only do we bring our own personalities and quirks into the higher education space, but so do our students.

Here are the notes I took while at HESS 2008:

Summary of HESS 2008 (OpenDocument format)
Summary of HESS 2008 (MS Word format)

Just a quick pointer to what I think is going to be a great read.  “The Tower and the Cloud” is a new publication by EDUCAUSE, which looks at the impact of cloud computing on higher education.  The book is divided into broad sections, each containing several chapters, with each chapter written by a different author who is a prominent figure in the field of e-learning.

I’m particularly keen on the section, Open Information, Open Content, Open Source, containing the following chapters (I’ve linked to the downloadable chapters):

• Cultural and Organizational Drivers of Open Educational Content
• Challenges and Opportunities of Open Source in Higher Education
• Who Puts the Education into Open Educational Content?

The book is available as a free download, as well as a paid-for hardcopy that can be shipped internationally, and is published under a Creative Commons license.  I’m really looking forward to reading this.

Note: EDUCAUSE is a “…nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology”.

Other books available from EDUCAUSE include:

• Educating the Net Generation
• Cultivating Careers: Professional Development for campus IT
• Learning spaces

This morning I presented an overview of e-learning at a small colloquium at my university.  I didn’t know who would be in the audience so I decided to take a step back and have a look at the e-learning landscape as I see it.  I tried to look briefly at the following:

• The current generation of students (the so-called Net Generation)
• Education as it is and why that won’t work
• Education as it will be and it’s implications for teachers
• Social media and why it’s important
• Examples of specific technologies and the implications of using them
• Challenges faced in e-learning
• The way forward
• E-learning in the mobile space

Clearly with such a broad area of discussion, it was difficult to deeply explore each topic.  As I said, this was a broad overview of the e-learning and potential applications in the higher education space.

Download the OpenDocument version here: e-learning_an_overview