Lisa Harris Marketing

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

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

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