Lisa Harris Marketing

Next week I’ll be in Sunny Spain at the PLE Conference (@PLE_BCN)

What is a PLE you might well ask?

Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) include the tools, communities, and services that constitute the individual educational platforms learners use to direct their own learning and pursue educational goals. It represents a shift away from the traditional model of consuming information through independent channels such as the library or textbook, and towards a more active approach where connections are made and relationships are developed both online and offline. A PLE also puts learners in charge of their own learning processes, challenging them to reflect on the tools and resources that help them to learn best.

In a refreshing contrast to many academic conferences, this event looks likely to “practice what it preaches”:

• The keynote speakers ( including @courosa and @grahamattwell) have already posted up video and slides previewing their sessions and requesting comments and questions from the delegates.
• The conference hashtag (@PLE_BCN) has been active on Twitter for many weeks.
• We have been asked to design our own ID badges, with the instruction to “be creative”
• There is an active conference social network on Crowdvine 
• And a YouTube channel

Amongst all this innovation and creativity, are my boring powerpoint slides:

I will blog some feedback about the event next week

At Southampton a small group of us meet up once a month and take it in turns to present on something new and creative that we have been involved in. My turn this week, reporting on my recent experiences with the University of Liverpool Online MBA and the Open Online Course Social Media and Education:

I haven’t updated on Social Media and Open Education (ECI831) for a while but I’ve been keeping an eye on things, including the for-credit student blogs which are great and provide a wide range of perspectives. I particularly loved the networked student video which neatly summarises learning styles for the 21^st century.

Sue Waters did an excellent session in Elluminate last week. My key take away from the session was her reminder of the importance of getting student buy-in to blogging. Although the benefits of blogging may seem obvious to the ‘converted’, that is not necessarily so to newcomers. Sue showed some specific examples of her students’ blogs which clearly demonstrated how the writers had grown in confidence with their posts over time.

And another cool feature of Elluminate caught my eye during this session:

It allows participants in the real-time session to write their ideas on the whiteboard summarising their thoughts on their key learning points, as per the screenshot above.

The next session featured Alan Levine, who did a great presentation at the Open Education Conference in Vancouver this summer. However, Alan got stuck at the airport and so he was only there in spirit – but he has left a massive collection of fantastic stories and ‘stories about stories’ on the course wiki page that I am working my way through…

I was particularly interested this week in the video of a presentation by Danah Boyd. Key points:

The underlying dynamics of teen culture have not changed. The environment they are living in has changed – but teens can choose whether or not to engage with it, (or rather the extent to which they engage with it).

Danah confirmed our findings with students at Southampton that teens use social networks to hang out with their friends, not to network. It’s definitely not about meeting new people. This means that using Facebook directly for teaching purposes will probably backfire – it is an invasion of personal space. It’s ok to teach around the appropriate use of social networks, for example ethics, privacy etc, which is a more indirect approach.

Social media interaction with young people makes us rethink our position of power as adults – we certainly should not assume that students know it all (aka digital natives) but instead that we can each learn from each other. Again this confirms our own findings.

I also spent some time this week reading and commenting on the for-credit student blog posts. There seemed to be some concern about information overload (also echoed by participants in the chatroom during the Elluminate class sessions). I’m wondering whether an approach which introduces students to the various tools gradually through the course might help deal with this? Or is the idea to deliberately encourage students to find their own routes through the large amount of content in a way that works for them? Are the students perhaps given too many tech options at the beginning, would it be better to start with one and build in new ones through the course? Feedback on these points from any other course participants would be very welcome J

For those of you starting out in the School of Management this week, many of you newly arrived in the UK, I will be sharing with you some hints and tips to help you make the most of your learning opportunity. In preparation for this session, you might like to take a look at the following:

Igoogle

If you have a Google account (for example a gmail address) you can customise your page as I have done here, to keep up to date with topics of interest to you. You can organise under subheadings so that you group together all items relating to ‘dissertation’ or ‘Introduction to Marketing unit’ for example, and any new posts on your chosen blogs will automatically be pulled through so you can see these updates at a glance. Google Reader also serves the same purpose but presents the information in a different style.

Delicious

By scanning your igoogle pages , you may well find an article or video that you wish to keep and refer to again, in which case you can save it into Delicious and index it in a way that suits you. I would recommend that you include a few comments to remind yourself of the nature of the content and why you kept it, because once you build up a few hundred items you will forget what the earlier ones were all about J

Twitter

My main source of new material comes from Twitter. Follow people who share information that is useful to you – and be prepared to share what you find with others aswell. For Marketing students, a great place to start is Dave Chaffey’s blog post where he lists key people to follow on Twitter who are experts in various aspects of marketing.

Diigo

Diigo combines bookmarking and community building features. It allows you to highlight and add comments to web pages that you read, then save and share your findings as a slideshow. By tagging items of interest, you can connect with other users on a global basis who are commenting on the same material. Have a look at the explanatory video

Enjoy!

Week 2 of Social Media and Open Education has flown by. I was particularly interested in how the Elluminate session would work. Alec took the opportunity to demonstrate the various tools available in the course and it was great to track comments from the participants as the session progressed. For example, as Alec showed how he had embedded an RSS feed into the wiki to automatically update and display the shared Delicious links, the comment “clean up in aisle 4, exploding brain” could be seen in the chatroom J

The Elluminate screen displayed Alec’s desktop and he ‘wrote’ on the screen with a highlighter to illustrate the points he was making. There were about 70 people ‘watching’ the session live, and they could interact in the chat room or raise a question if passed the microphone. The big advantage for me (and other European participants, given the time difference) was that the full recording can still be accessed and replayed as required – it is linked from the bottom of the week 2 wiki page which summarises all the course activities.

It was a great idea to have a moderator in the chatroom to display links as they came up in discussions and respond to questions. Alec also managed to bring in comments and questions from the chatroom as he talked – who says men can’t multi-task?

Final points on Elluminate – the “passing of the microphone” to allow student voice contributions is clunky and resulted in a few lengthy silences, but the virtual round of applause that it permits the group to give to the speaker is a nice touch!

The reading for the week was Richard Schwier’s paper “pursuing the elusive metaphor of community in VLEs” and Richard himself presented the next Elluminate session. A number of interesting points arose from the paper and discussions:

· Some people are merging their F2F and virtual worlds, others maintain a clear distinction – “whatever works at the time” was one comment from the chatroom.

· Don’t mistake interaction for engagement. It is possible to interact without engaging, and to engage without interacting

· The technology can get in the way – if you are new to the tools, or if they don’t work well, then your focus is on the mechanics of sorting that out rather than on the actual course content

There was an intriguing debate about the role of “lurkers” or “social loafers”. Obviously, we cannot determine the opinion of total lurkers, but the consensus seemed to be that everyone should contribute in some way, but not feel obliged to respond to everything. In other settings, I’ve noticed how some (usually insecure) individuals feel the urge to dominate the discussion, but that is difficult in this type of course where there are so many parallel communication channels. Others chip in occasionally where they feel they can make a contribution that ‘pays back’ in some way for what they have taken out from others, but they are relaxed about dipping in and out without feeling the need to comment constantly.

Great stuff – I’m looking forward to week 3

There are a number of resources available to help you maximise the value from your course at the University of Southampton. Here are a few examples to get you started:

Prepare for Success is an interactive learning resource to help UK institutions prepare international students for university study. It has been developed in the Centre for Language Study at the University of Southampton. These interactive multimedia learning resources help you to discover what British academic culture is like, and what kind of academic skills you will need for effective study in the UK. The resource also provides considerable scope for you to improve your English language skills.

Also check out the resources available on www.elanguages.ac.uk which cover Study Skills, Academic Writing and Living and Studying in the UK

Academic Skills is a new resource which is all about helping you learn how to be a more effective learner and develop the research skills that will help you now and in the future. For example, included within the site are:

Podcasts - these audio podcasts will help you develop your academic skills. Each one lasts around 10 minutes and includes lots of advice and tips. A transcript of the audio recording is also available.

Study Skills Toolkit -this course comprises a set of short self-contained interactive ‘learning objects’ on specific topics – with the emphasis on learning by doing, so expect lots of activities, exercises and quizzes.

• Learning Skills
• Academic Writing Skills
• Reading & Critical Thinking Skills
• Aspects of Academic Language
• Academic Speaking and Note Taking

Getting Started with Academic Skills – start with these quick-reference guides to gain a overview and lots of practical tips.

Developing Your Academic Skills – use this series of printable activity-based study guides to improve your skills.

Advice from the Students’ Union Advice and Information Centre -publications on Academic Integrity and How to Study Successfully.

English for Academic Purposes – enrol yourself on this Blackboard course which is packed with interactive learning materials for international students.

A Guide to Academic Integrity – this is a set of interactive guides that aim to help you gain a better understanding of academic integrity and develop your skills so that your assessed work does not accidentally plagiarise the work of others.

A Guide to Research methods - a useful set of self-study modules introducing postgraduate research. Some programmes offer these modules as an accredited course, and you really DO need to complete the written exercises to gain benefit from the process.

A later post this week will introduce you to some basic social media skills that will help you to manage information, build your network and develop your personal brand.

I am participating in an online course run by Alec Couros called Social Media and Open Education. The plan is to blog the highlights on a weekly basis. The course starts today (well, actually “today” is really 2am tomorrow because Alec is based in Regina, Canada). The good news is that the weekly sessions are being recorded on Elluminate and so they can be viewed at a more civilised hour.

More good news – there is a course blog, a wiki, slides posted in Slide share, readings posted on Delicious, and comments and announcements on Twitter. Thankfully, much of this material is pulled together on a Netvibes page.

To obtain credit for the course, you need to register at the University of Regina. Informal participation is free, and so far nearly 200 people have signed up from around the world. You can see the full list (complied using the TweepML listing service) here and here

So far I have simply completed the week 1 reading and videos. The highlight was a video of a presentation by Michael Wesch titled “A Portal to Media Literacy”. It is rather long (over an hour) but Michael is an engaging speaker who hits the viewer with a barrage of facts. The first 25 minutes are particularly useful. I jotted down a few key quotes:

“Helping students create meaningful connections is what learning is all about.”

“You are in the same boat as your students – we are all stupid in this environment. It is a place to experiment. “

“We cannot assume students are media literate” (which certainly endorses our own experience)

Michael’s central message is that digital media destroys many traditional principles of education, for example that information is hard to find, that knowledge is about acquiring information, and that authorised information should not be challenged. By persisting with this model beyond the end of its shelf life, Universities now face the dissatisfaction highlighted so well in A Vision of Students Today Instead, he proposes a new model – take advantage of developments in technology to “harness, critique and create something new”.

So, lots of food for thought. Next step – I’m now going to check out http://diigo.com (adding post-it notes to web content) and then the recorded Elluminate session in the morning

As a new year is about to start, I thought I would get this little rant off my chest in the interest of generating peaceful and harmonious cooperation with my PhD and dissertation students …

Apologies if these points seem obvious, but they are based on recent supervision experience…and no names will be mentioned in order to protect the guilty J

If you have chosen your supervisor because your project matches their research interests, then it does make sense to actually read and comment on their blogs, follow them on twitter, attend their classes etc. They may well do the same for you in return, and you both end up learning something.

Do not expect to discuss a blank sheet of paper with your supervisor – be proactive and give him/her something in writing that they can feedback on. We do not expect perfection but we do expect initiative.

Please don’t refer to yourself in the 3^rd person throughout your work – in the 21^st century this is a privilege reserved only for royalty…

Please don’t use American English – unless you are based in North America, in which case you are reluctantly excused..

Please remember that apostrophes are possessive not plural.

If you are submitting drafts for feedback that your supervisor has already seen, please make sure you have used “track changes” so that exactly what you have changed since the last version can be established.

Plain English is fine – please note that strangulated sentences and outdated language do not add any value to your work.

Please do not annoy your supervisor by asking impossible questions such as “tell me what I’ve left out?” or “how many references do I need?”

Feedback on these points or additional comments from colleagues and current students would be most welcome!

Now that I’m back in the UK after Opened09 in Vancouver, here are some of the things that have stuck in my mind, in fairly random order…

• “it’s not about content” Providing open educational content is just the starting point…people are what make the difference
• “Cute kitten syndrome” – or “if it’s open it must be good”…this attitude can lead to a lack of critical evaluation of what really works and what doesn’t
• The enthusiasm of back channel (morning sessions were even followed by some attendees from their hotel rooms, but no names will be mentioned…) There were more than 3000 tweets using the OpenEd hashtag over the duration of the event
• The efforts of tech team were awesome – running 3 live streams concurrently, between 10am and 4pm every day, with 95% uptime. If you check out the daily conference programme on http://openedconference.org/ and select any session title, you can link to a synopsis of the talk, the presentation slides, trackbacks to blogposts that have mentioned the session, comments on the session and the full video of the presentation…wow!
• I heard the word ‘awesome’ a lot…J
• Great breakfasts, with enormous cakes and pastries, comfy chairs, wifi and access to powerpoints J
• Relaxed presenters with a lot of humorous interaction with the audience
• There were lots of mentions of Clayton Christensen, applying his principles of ‘disruptive innovation’ to education. This theory centres on the notion that established industries are not best placed to adapt to change, and may not even notice the need for change. They will eventually lose out to newcomers who start off outside the system with a basic product aimed at a different audience that can acquire critical mass under the nose of the incumbent (think of the first PCs on the desk providing simple consumption of computing vs the complexity of usage of a minicomputer….)
• Even this audience of enthusiasts seemed to baulk at the model where content is created by the students themselves, but such a system is already up and running in the USA (see the learning model adopted by Brigham Young University, Idaho)
• Gardner Campbell of Baylor University warned against “digital facelifts” (a term coined by Clay Shirky). This means ”we will do what we did before but we will put it on the web” …you can check out his entertaining presentation here
• A number of participants who are far more efficient than me have already blogged about their OpenEd experiences, see for example the reflections of Cole Camplese and Dave Cormier

Many questions emerged from the discussions, for example:

Sustainability – how to grow and manage online communities beyond the initial funded phase?

Where is the student feedback, as users what do they think of open education resources?

For open education to become mainstream, do we need a new education system or is it possible to amend the old one?

Are new elites of the “hyper-connected” emerging? (for example we heard a story of Wikipedia editors forming an exclusive club)

As early adopters are well and truly on board, how can open education now appeal to the next wave of more mainstream tutors? Is a new language required?

How many of these OpenEd initiatives reflect their broader institutional culture, and how many merely operate as isolated pockets of openness within a sceptical traditional system?

In summary…the best event I have attended, well done to all the organisers and volunteers. I’m looking forward to Barcelona next summer J