I-learning

Here are my views on the benefits of e-learning, a topic for discussion on the e-tutoring course I am on this month. I am afraid this post is long (apologies) and some of the statements might be seen as ironic (if you decided to continue reading this, bring your sense of humour – I know that I am in breach of one of the recommendations for online communication).

In addition to what has already been discussed, e.g. international aspects, widening participation, flexibility, etc., I do believe that e-learning is very personal, regardless how large the group of learners is:
§ You are facing the computer, reading text that is addressed to you and you are not aware what the rest of the group are doing at this moment of time, even is you’ve seen how many are online (the loneliness and bliss of the online learner) .
§ It is your choice where and how long you study and you can express your feelings about the long lines of text you have to go through, without your body language revealing how ‘fond’ you are of plain text when you are a visual learner.
§ When you contribute to discussion boards you inevitably compare your thoughts and contributions these with others and as a result build your confidence (or angst) about your ability to express yourself though the written word. And, if you manage to stay positively focused after a long day at work, you praise yourself for your perseverance and developing your knowledge and understanding.
§ There is more time to think about something before you say it/write it and more time to question whether this is written using the correct grammatical person (i.e. first person singular or second person). And as you have forgotten the correct grammatical term, you quickly ‘google’ key words that bring in a few suggestions that help.
§ It is great as it allows materials to be available at anytime of the day at any place with Internet connection for as long or as many times you need them. It does not mean that you can’t have the face-to-face – you can, if your tutor(s) provide video messages/materials.

From a tutor’s point of view, the latter is time-consuming and could be nerve-wrecking if you want to get things perfect. I spent about 3 hours of recording and deleting to produce my 5min welcoming message to my online cohourt before I accepted the fact that I am not Audrey Hepburn and would never be her, neither will have her diction. But my students know (if their infrastructure supports Flash files and can cope with bigger file) now that I exist in the physical world…

Traceability is another benefit that I, as a tutor, am so grateful to. I would not refer to this as e-learning, as it is about the management and monitoring of the learners. The VLE (Virtual Learning Environment, e.g. Blackboard, Moodle et al) duly reports that students have accessed the materials (or not) even if they have not contributed to the exercises. This allows for choosing a more appropriate tone for the tutor’s messages. Needless to say, this presents a reliable evidence of the support offered and given that helps in addressing any unfair/false accusations.

You''ve been warned - this was a long message. Yes, e-discussions could be very time consuming for both learner and reader, if the topic strikes a cord. But it was your choice to read it till the end. ;-) For which I thank you warmly.

Nine great reasons why teachers should use Twitter

Laura Walker's paper on Nine great reasons why teachers should use Twitter is a great starting point for considering the role of Twitter in education. Still, is this a practice that would exclude some of our students? Could this be integrated with the VLE and/or SMS service?

Some of my favourite TED presentations

TED stands for Technology, Education, Design and have some brilliant presentaitons. Today's choice to watch included:

• Clay Shirky's presentation to TED on the new media (incl Twitter, Facebook) & politics (http://bit.ly/swtw3)
• Evan Williams's (co-founder of Twitter) TED presentation about Twitter, its uses and how its developments happen,
• And just for fun: Raves's TED presentation on texting with emoticons. Strange, but good braintraining ;-)

Cycles & lifecycles

It started with thinking about how to balance the latest urgent and importnat tasks (and not Iasm writing, as it is important to me to clear up my mind, to be able to concentrate on the urgent things later... this night/morning).

I was wondering which of the blogs to post to and the decision cycle kicked in:
- Is it worth doing it? Can I change/use it or shall I accept 'no change' ? [see * below] - Is it relevant to this group? (Shall I post it?)
- How much level of detail is needed & how much time I can afford to spend on providing the content? (Sadly, the time is often exceeded, and the quality of the final product is only 80% of the desired perfect version)
- Shall I do it NOW, or postpone it for later and spend the time on a more important/urgent task?

Then it was the turn of my typical workflow & development cycle:
Act, reflect and move on to the next act enriched by the experience of the previous...and staying positive because of the learning that has taken place. (yes, it reminds of Kolb's lifecycle)

Still, often it is not so easy to stay positive and the emotions cycle is in full force:
I started trying to formalise this cycle: curiousity, confusion, frustration, exhaustion, or excitement... It did not look right; reminded me of Kübler-Ross's grief cycle, but had a positive start and then I found this model of the Market Emotions cycle, which helped me with this task (I had to think of a context to test whether it is 'correct': i.e. when I pilot/test a new web tool or gadget). And here is my emotions cycle:
- Curiosity;
- Thrill/Excitement;
- Euphoria/Anxiety;
- Recognition of reality;
- Desperation/Satisfaction;
- Despondency/Relief;
- Urge to talk about the findings, the impressions and the feelings in search of conceptualisation of the value of the 'object of my affection';
- Quiet observation (depression?hope?Optimism ?);
- Acceptance;
- Satisfaction with the ooportunity to test object and self.

I wish I had more time to find what theory is available on these cycles... [Action point]

And through this journey throught the cycles, here is what else was 'discovered' :

* I did not know that the prayer to have "the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, the courage to challenge those you can, and the wisdom to know the difference" is attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr? I thought it's much older than 1934...

** some beautiful thoughts on human curiosity and ingenuity required to go through the lifecycle experiences (heroic qualities? :-) ).
"Some of the transcendent qualities that underline scientific inquiry become focal: curiosity to know just for knowing’s sake, knowledge sought regardless of its utility, and ingenuity and persistence in the search".

I am a student (again ;-> )

I have started my first formal online tutoring course with Oxford Brookes. I have attended many workshops (both online and face-to-face) related to different tools, techniques and approaches to e-learning and e-tutoring, but most of them were 1-4 hours long. This course lasts 1 month and the most exciting thing so far is the fact that the groups is so diverse in location and background.
There is another great point about this course - it encourages the use of a learning diary, which is a great news for my blog - finally I will give a higher priority to this little 'corner' of the virtual universe and will make time to post on a more regular basis. My major reason for not writing here as often as I want is that I still struggle to find the balance and the right approach. Currently, at this very quiet time (in terms of teachign responsibilities) I have 2 blogs within the University VLE, one for my online students on Research Methods and another one as a member of the BU community (OK, in fairness, I has posted only a couple of messages there, of which one was to direct people interested in my life and posts to this blog). I have resorted to maintain separate blogs for the benefits of my students - I am sure they would either be confused if they see a comment that relates to another course, or would have to sieve through a lot of other posts that are nor concerning them prior to finding some useful for their unit post. Yes, I can hear the comment that they will learn more from reading other posts, e.g. the Diigo one, but the reality is that my workload will increase due to the number of questions/complaints on the difficulty to use this source of information. And, yes, I have given due consideration as to whether discussion boards and announcement boards could not be used for some of these details, and the answer is that blogging is the best option. With 180+ students on some units and 4+ units to teach + a general research blog as part of my day-to-day life, I am trying to find some pragmatic and effective way of managing these blogs.

Any advice from those who are familiar with this problem and have found their optimum solution will be very welcome.
[OK, sadly, it's time to stop and get kids ready for school. They need to be there in time and the most frequent cause for this goal being missed is me and my work. If there is anyone that really works hard and has achieved some progress in improving my time management, these are my daughters. Setting all watches 4-5 min ahead does not help in my case... Time for coco pops :-)]

The power of the web (Twine & Diigo)

I am a fairly new member of Twine.com and am fascinated by the power of collaborative working. It was only yesterday when reading one of the posts in Educational Technology I came across a very interesting post on using technology to improve literacy and critical thinking.  

And I was immediately 'hooked' on Diigo. I love the simplicity of the interface and the power of its functionality. It does for me what EndNote or any other referencing tool provides - an opportunity to sort out your favourite web pages, annotate them with notes, highlight important parts of the text and even share with colleagues and friends. 

• I am thinking of how this could be used for sharing references, thoughts and developing critical thinking. 
  
• My biggest challenge is to work out how to integrate Twine, Diigo, this blog and myBU. I love the OpenID concept and wish @BU there was some more flexibility and/or guidance on achieving this. 
  
• I will probably use the Facebook account mostly for friends and family, and former students (but I will be looking at making this blog accessible to both Facebook and myBU).

I am keen on exploring options for using Twitter @work. I am not entirely sure how it differs from the Facebook feature 'What are you doing now?' . I just found out that one of the focii of the JISC project on academic social networking that David alerted us to is on how to use Twitter with colleagues. Whilst the last two ideas will present a great opportunity for knowing the latest, how many people are going to adopt it? And how many people will be alienated, purely because the e-fatigue is taking over (or they just don't want their life to be dominated by 'the power of the Net'). Anyway 

• this will be another short-term project to explore and (may be) pilot. 
  
• I need to enrol as a follower to Stephen Fry's twitter - his sense of humour is amazing. We need a doze of this medicine - even if (even more because) it comes in an e-form. I was so glad to find that he is a twitter. 

Talking about Stephen Fry, he mentioned that rather than listening to music whilst walking, he listens to audio books. I have to check whether this works for me. Here are a couple of experiments in the pipeline:

• upload a few audio books on the MP4 player to take with me to the gym (you never know a  Stephen Fry's book might be better than Brian Tracy's work, or may be I will get something totally different - The Twelve Chairs in original will be funny :-) )
• try the same with lessons in French - recent research proved that people can learn the language even if they don't focus on building the vocabulary first). May be Michel Thomas or LiveMocha will have something I can try. 
  

Well, all this is exciting, but should not take priority to:

• revising the paper on e-research supervision
• researching the latest tools for business performance evaluation 
• and competing the detailed feedback for I2M with Waypoint (that's should be the topic for one of the next posts). 

The content matters more than the presentation/communication channels (yet, it is the presentation and the novelty of the task that feeds our motivation).   :-)