La donna e mobile

Spent much of this week alternately gritting my teeth & feeling Deeply Inadequate. Nothing new there......

We were doing 'mobile learning'. Activity 1 was a big quiz about how we use our handheld mobile devices for teaching, work, learning, social interaction & entertainment. My handheld mobile device ownership extends to one phone, decidedly un-smart, vintage c.2005 (at least that's the date of the oldest saved text message). I use it for occasional voice calls & to text my family & friends. After considerable thought I remembered that I also use it to tell the time in tutorials, since I don't wear a watch & the local venue hired by the OU doesn't have clocks in the rooms. Not working ones, anyway. But I had a sneaking suspicion that this wasn't quite what was expected of educators in the brave new world of Mobile 2.0.

Then I read an article by Sharples et al. from 2005 (the same age as my phone!) Towards a Theory of Mobile Learning & that started me thinking. The authors confidently state their objective:

to offer an initial framework for theorising about mobile learning, to complement theories of infant, classroom, workplace and informal learning

Where, I wondered, was 'traditional' distance learning, of the sort offered by the OU for over 40 years now, in their list? Could it be that in the excitement about mobile learning, this had been overlooked? It certainly looks that way. Here's one of the major findings:

The control and management of learning can be distributed: In a classroom the locus of control over learning remains firmly with the teacher, but for mobile learning it may be distributed across learners, guides, teachers, technologies and resources in the world such as books, buildings, plants and animals

Replace 'mobile' with 'distance' & we've been doing that since the 1970s!

Here's another example of over-inflated claims. Sharples et al. appear shocked by the way mobile technology conflicts with traditional ways of learning:

children can subvert the carefully managed interactions of a school classroom by sending text messages hidden from the teacher

How dreadful! But wait... Did the authors never pass notes in class, or sneakily read a comic, or get on with their homework for another lesson?

So maybe much of the rhetoric about 'mobile learning' can be filed under 'true, but not new', along with other bits of myth & moral panic, & I don't need to be scared of it at all.

I know, I should stop being such a diva. Here's Pavarotti to put it all in perspective.

Stop pushing!

This week has seen a flurry of activity with social networking tools. On the whole, it's been fun playing around as a break from reading earnest scholarly articles, but at the same time I've found myself going round in increasingly self-referential circles.

Blogger X writes a new post & announces it on Twitter, where his followers re-tweet it. He also posts about it on Facebook, where it is shared by his many friends. Subscribers to his RSS feed are notified about the new post via their feed reader. If I was active on Google+ I would no doubt find it there too, & mutual acquaintances may well have added it to their social bookmarking site, which in turn would be notified to me......

By the time I've read about this post in half a dozen locations, the one thing I haven't done is actually read what he has written. The proliferation of tools can be counter-productive:  I find myself becoming hostile, muttering 'Yeah, yeah - you already said'.

I suppose the solution is to be more selective about how I use the tools. Perhaps I should only follow/subscribe to/befriend people in one place, to avoid duplication. I've already turned off most email notifications.

There was a lot of talk in the early days of the web about 'information overload'. Perhaps this is the web 2.0 equivalent. I'm starting to feel more sympathetic to my opting-out students!

[http://learningedgeadventures.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/2008_11_overload.jpg]

View from the VIP Lounge

As in Visually Impaired Persons...

This week we had to watch a video. I'd already watched it last week, knowing a hospital visit would leave me scrambling to catch up. I'm afraid I wasn't impressed. Well, I was, but probably not in the way its creators intended...
The video was Michael Wesch's 'A vision of students today'. Here's what it did for me:

Erratic camera movement, zooming in & out with writing on walls & furniture that I couldn't read, clips of software screens flashing up too fast to see what they were, with blurred content if I hit the pause button. Switched to rapid-fire shots of students in a lecture theatre holding up sheets of paper & laptop screens - most gone before I could see the messages. That sequence ended with what looked like it might be a quotation but it was white graphics on a white background?! I saw the date, 1841. Finally a man produced some blurred writing on a backboard. All to the accompaniment of some random plinky-plonky music that only served to distract & annoy while I was trying to work out what was on screen before it disappeared.

For me that was a total waste of time. It made me feel angry, confused, & like I didn't belong in this world of fast-moving information splatter aimed exclusively at those at the peak of their mental & sensory faculties.

 

By today, 4,827,840 people had viewed it. I expect some of them even enjoyed it.

Suspicious minds

Well, one suspicious mind, at least. I've been reading a study from 2007 which claims to demonstrate that students view online tuition unfavourably, compared with face-to-face. 

Price et al. reached their conclusions not by asking students who had experienced both forms of tutorial support to compare them, but by surveying & interviewing students (on the same module) who had chosen one form or the other, then comparing their ratings of tutoring quality.

That seems a reasonable enough approach to take. But it strikes me there are two major shortcomings in this study.

1. No account is taken of the students' reasons for choosing the online or the face-to-face option. In my experience, where students are offered this choice, the online option is taken by two main groups:

• those who are coping with less than ideal study situations - they may have a demanding carer role, long working hours, a disruptive health condition. This situation would be likely to impact negatively on their study experience regardless of the tutorial format.
• those who are reluctant to participate in tutorials at all & see the online version as easier to avoid ('This way, we don't have to go to classes - great!'). More of an opt-out than an opt-in situation.

Failure to take into account the possible distorting effect of factors that make students unable or unwilling to attend face-to-face tutorials weakens the study's conclusions.

2. No questions are raised about one rather startling statistic. Apparently large numbers of students surveyed agreed with the statement 'feedback on students' work is usually only provided in the form of marks or grades'. The average score for this statement (on a scale of 1 - 5) was 2.12 for those in 2002 face-to-face groups & 2.36 for the online groups. In 2003 the levels of agreement were 2.18 & 2.28 respectively. 

I find this quite extraordinary. The major part of OU tutors' contracted hours are spent providing detailed, personalised teaching feedback to students in the form of annotations on their assignment documents & a discursive overall summary. So why were the agreement ratings not zero?

I wonder how much faith can be placed in the testimony of students who seem either not to have noticed this feedback (suggesting a lack of engagement with the learning process) or to have taken a casual approach to completing the survey questionnaire. The study does acknowledge that the online students' disappointment may have stemmed, in part, from unrealistic expectations. It's a pity it didn't also recognise that, on the evidence of this example, the entire findings may be deeply flawed.

I wonder what Elvis would have made of the internet?

[https://twitter.com/InfoPresley]

Food for thought

Just emerging from a close encounter with a veritable alphabetti spaghetti of learning design tools. Each one would really need about a month of training to get my head round, so a dozen or so in a fortnight proved somewhat indigestible.

First up was an apéritif, the STARR template. Then we had a choice of starters: 4-Ts, 4SPPIces (a tasty mix of CSCBL scripts, within LdShake), ISIS, e-Design, CADMOS, web collage (with a side order of CLFPs, LMS & GluePS) or DPD.  Then on, relentlessly, to the main courses, CompendiumLD & the pièce de résistance: the PPC, lovingly crafted by the chefs of TLRP-TEL, an ESRC-EPSRC funded LDSE project. Those of us who hadn't yet slipped under the table were treated to a cheeky little dessert of either a four-facet mapping matrix or a three-dimensional framework. It was all getting a bit blurred by this point, as the brandy had started to circulate...

Still, at least it straddled the Easter break, so we could stuff ourselves with chocolate when we needed a break from the fancy stuff :-)

http://recyclefordorset.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/easter-egg.jpg

Head in the clouds

Block 2 started with exploring Cloudworks, the OU/JISC-funded project: in its own words, 'a place to share, find and discuss learning and teaching ideas and experiences'. Immediately there was a new language to learn, with clouds, cloudscapes & cloudstreams. 


As is often the case with such OU initiatives, Cloudworks seems to be rolling along nicely under its own steam, with a few enthusiasts left on board, but a bit wonky round the edges & largely ignored by the rest of the world. The About page's link to the Cloudworks blog, confidently promises to give 'current information on what we are working on and our plans for the site' but actually returns an error page. It turns out the blog is now somewhere else, but the last entry was in March 2012 & the one before that, in February 2011. Many of the cloudy worlds here are uninhabited, created by well-intentioned visitors who reneged on their divine responsibilities & never returned to carry out their seven days of follow-up work. Search attempts are frustrated by inconsistent tagging - I almost lost the will to live, ploughing through Mind-Maps, MindMap, Mindmap, Mindmapping, Mapping tools, etc., etc. to locate resources to complete an activity. An entirely innocuous comment I tried to post on an existing 'cloud' prompted a stern message informing me that my comment had been identified as possible spam & was awaiting moderation - not a very friendly reception.

My initial explorations concluded somewhat negatively. Invited to give the three words I would use to describe Cloudworks, I offered 'random, inconsistent, time-consuming', observing in my notes:

there's no guarantee a searcher will find anything useful or a contributor will reach an audience. I'm sure there are some treasures in there, but how many of us have time to rummage?  It has a kind of nosiness value, to see who is following who, like checking out friends of friends on Facebook, but I doubt that's why it's being funded!

Yet Cloudworks turned out to work really well as a platform for a clearly defined collaborative activity such as the one we were asked to carry out for H800 - posting a design narrative for a learning activity (as a cloud) linking it to fellow students' responses (in a cloudscape) engaging in dialogue around our postings & keeping track of that dialogue (via the cloudstream). 

I could envisage Cloudworks being mainstreamed in the OU as a way for tutors to share, compare, discuss tutorial plans & resources for the modules they teach. It's so much more efficient & consistent than the current clunky hotch-potch of VLE-based facilities we use.   Perhaps when H800 is over, & I have more time.............

Then, suddenly...

... Block 1 was over!

Life (not least a gathering of the clan for my 60th birthday) got in the way of working AND studying AND blogging: something had to give. Nevertheless, I enjoyed playing with metaphors & meeting the challenge of writing the first TMA. 

The final stages of Block 1 involved a leisurely, nostalgic ramble around terrain that used to be very familiar in the days of T171. Finally got to watch a whole episode of Triumph of the Nerds, but in one of those ironies that life sometimes throws at you, I was studying it as an Olde Worlde example of 'new technology' - a television broadcast made in 1996 & now, 20 years later, available to the world though YouTube. It seemed an appropriate coincidence, as T171 was my very first OU course, with Cringely's book (on which the TV series was based) as a set text, & I'd taken up OU study in a belated spirit of 'life begins at 40'... where does the time go?

Next up was the Interpersonal Action-Learning Cycle, which I'd never heard of, though it sounded oddly familiar. Light dawned as I realised this was the tarted-up postgrad version of Zimmer & Alexander. PCP2 Acknowledge before differing.... it all came flooding back, ingrained from marking dozens, nay, hundreds of student assignments dutifully trotting out the principles in between savaging each other in the forum 'browser wars'. Happy Days :-)

I see Block 2 begins with 'design narratives'. I wonder if story-telling will prove to be as thought-provoking as metaphors?

Here's a picture, for old times' sake:

Image from T171 website