So what happened?I introduced Bonnie and Suzy to the class, eight of whom attended the session on Elluminate, and then encouraged the class to introduce themselves to the presenters. Half the class had microphones so the rest were asked to introduce themselves on the chat facility. However this was probably unnecessary as I had also initiated introductions on the Whiteboard, and most people had written their name and area of work there for everyone to see. I felt this worked quite well and next time, I will do the same with the Whiteboard introductions and only introduce the presenters using voice.

The class will get their chance to ask questions after the presentation, or during it if the presenters prefer this, and I will need to ensure that everyone gets a chance to speak. Anyone who asked a question on chat, was either responded to by the presenters or I asked the question on their behalf.

Bonnie and Suzy had a short PowerPoint presentation describing the evaluation project which was easy to follow. They explained how they used a mixed methods approach (survey and online discussion) in a formative evaluation to investigate a new DVD resource which had been designed to enhance an \”online nursing module in the Bachelor of Nursing (BN)\”.

They investigated the \”student’s feelings and opinions about the design and ease of use of this resource\”, so they could make recommendations about improvements which could be made to the design. My understanding is that the DVD provided students with guest speaker presentations. This was trialled as a way to reduce costs and travel for guest speakers.

The sample size for their evaluation was quite good with 20 respondents. They used likert scales in the survey and collected quantitative data which was analysed using a tool in the Moodle Learning Management system. It would have been good to see some of the graphs they produced – I may be able to obtain them from the presenters. Qualitative data was collected from the discussion forum, and the comments were very positive. Overall, the presenters found that the students believed the DVD was effective.

It turns out there is lots of support students can obtain to help them access learning opportunities. As well as note-takers, peer tutoring and arrangements for taking exams, students may also need support to access online materials and use computers.

For example, Dragon Voice Recognition software is useful for people to use to create electronic documents, if they are unable type on a computer for long periods, or even if they want to work more efficiently. It does take a while to train yourself to use this software but there are some very skilled trainers offering this service e.g. Brian Treanor at otago Polytechnic.

JAWS (Job Access With Speech) is a screen reader software which people who are visually impaired can use to have an online page read to them (Wikipedia, 2008.) I know my father-in-law uses something like this for his emails and searching on the Net. He does a lot of work on his computer and is for official purposes rated as blind. Being a Veteran in the USA means he gets lots and lots of government support, and special training to use the products he is supplied with…..off the track here, but I do wonder if there is a similar service in NZ which is just as comprehensive – special Veteran hospitals etc. Anyway the support he has had for computing means he has been able to record the family history and write books.

There is a raft of products available to help people who are visually impaired with their computing needs. You might like to take a look at some of them on the Freedom Scientific website.

Training can be organised in different types of software by the Disabilities Service. One thing Pam has asked is that lecturers provide easier access to documents for people who are visually impaired. For example, make sure documents are in Word-like formats (we prefer Rich Text Format) as well as pdf because the font can more easily be increased for printing.

Staff at the Disabilities Service are available to give advice to teachers as well so they can find out how to better support their students. One thing I think that lecturers at the polytechnic do quite well is providing extensions for assignments for students with or without health problems – sometimes life just gets too busy. However, the Disabilities Service is available to negotiate extensions on behalf of students.

This leads me to the idea of flexibility for assessments – how important is it that students have to submit assignments under strict deadlines? My belief is that due dates should be a guide only, and throughout my years of study I have been very lucky to have flexibility with my studies. I would never have been able to complete anything otherwise. Due to flexibility and being treated as an autonomous learner, I have completed a Diploma of Teaching (Tertiary), a Certificate in Clinical Teaching, and nine Doctoral courses and a pilot research study. No flexibility, no completion. 😦

Is inflexibility in assessment conducive to learning? 

I think we need to design assessments that enable learners to document what they are learning rather than encourage rote learning. Exams have long been a thorn in my side and yet there are people who believe that some subjects can only be tested through exams. For example, bioscience which is very fact-based. However, I have used \”open book\” formative quizzes and learning portfolios very successfully for this subject. The students preferred these types of assessment to exams because it took the stress off them, and they were really able to think about how the bioscience facts they were learning could be applied in real, clinical situations. Their learning was more holistic, and the formative self-tests enabled them to work through facts step-by-step as well.

However some NZQA assessments for unit standards encourage the use of Mastery learning – I am not a fan of this method as you may have guessed. Repetitive practice for certain skills is necessary for safety, e.g driving and flying, but critical thinking skills are much more important in the long term. When the crunch comes and you have to decide for example, how to land the plane which has gone out of control or has been hijacked.

Do you agree with me? And I ask the following questions as well and hope some of you can continue this discussion on here.

I like the ideas they were discussing e.g ignite teams with \”big questions\” to explore and solve – innovative teams are where there is a small core of people and \”volunteers\” come in because they are passionate about the project. Hence a team leader\’s role becomes not so much to direct and choose and but to inspire. The ability to cooperate is the most important characteristic for people to have in modern times so they can work collaboratively in teams. The focus is on the good of the team not on the individual\’s needs. Also the ability to be able to make connections with others, locally and globally. Graduates with these attributes are highly sought after in big companies.

People in a business if left to their own devices will sign up to project teams which excite and inspire them. eg. Google. Innovation is created when people who are very different share their ideas and they often do not agree with each other but they can cooperate.

So perhaps the idea of the teams and committees we have in the poly may not be the best for cohesion and for spreading the passion eg. the quality in teaching team was chosen – perhaps if people were invited to join and did so because of their passion about quality in teaching and learning, a very different mix would have been created, perhaps a more innovative (no offence meant here) combination may have been achieved. Having \”experts\” or higher levels of staff on a team is not necessarily more productive and effective – you need people to challenge because they have a different perspective.

Big teams can be very productive and everyone has the chance to shine. Gender and ethnicity mixed teams are much more productive. Some of the examples discussed were interesting such as Google, Nokia, BP and a Scottish bank. If they can do it surely we can as well.

One of the things which made my job in eLearning more exciting in the early days was the collaborative projects and networks I was involved in. Being able to have the freedom and autonomy to choose projects means I can be part of several teams, and I have learned so much from working collaboratively. The networked learning team is an excellent example of a collaborative association where ideas are discussed and shared, and people join because they are passionate about the area and want to develop resources to share with students and staff alike.

Now we have the Digital Information Literacy project and collaboration across Otago Polytechnic, Manukau Institute of Technology, University of Otago and Massey University. Watch this space for the project wiki page – it will be appearing soon.

I attended a DEANZ web-conference (Elluminate) presentation by Wayne MacKintosh from the Commonwealth of Learning today – WikiEducator: DE reincarnated or new innovation? I realised after Wayne mentioned how Otago Polytechnic was a leader in OER in NZ, how far behind other organisations actually are in this area. The whole thing has taken on a life of its own since we started developing courses on WikiEd.

I agree with Wayne the structure of WikiEd does enhance asynchronous interaction. For one thing in the Designing for Flexible Learning course, participants can study self-paced using the course schedule as a guide, and they can leave each other messages in the Discussion (Talk) area. So far I haven\’t experienced many students using the wiki collaboratively though some participants in the Facilitating Online Communities did create pages for an assignment though I am not sure what will happen in the next iteration.

Wayne mentioned that social phenomenon of our time – Wikipedia – and how well it does in providing free access to the sum of our human knowledge – well it is the largest encyclopedia in the history of human kind. Well it is looking like WikiEd might be getting even bigger. Their strategy of access to free education for all countries by 2015 is phenomenal and worthy of our attention. He explained how community is pivotal – and involves content, capacity, connections;
sustainability is important for the OER project or they will fail.

Some stats
More than half of the registered users on WikiEd are over 50 yrs, and the majority are educators. Wayne\’s slide show has all the detail. A very interesting statistic – 12% of Wikied users are actively editing whereas in Wikipedia only 3% of the users are active editors – probably because more people access it than develop the articles. WikiEd is the first wiki platform to enable generation of pdf from wiki pages. There is also a facility to generate content cartridges of wiki pages for importation into LMS. And last but not least – Learning4content – is the largest wiki training initiative in the world.

WikiEd team
graphic designer
learning designer
critical reader
editor
subject matter expert

A return to tradition 
There are several levels of certification available following training:
wikiapprentice
wikibuddy
wikiartisan
wikitrainer
wikimaster

It is possible to get certification loaded on your user page after having done the training; maybe I will work harder on getting this. One thing I do need to do is create a decent profile page. Leigh has been nagging me for ages to do this.

In the future, WikiEd is looking at developing the extra capability of exporting an IMS package. It enables direct import of content to LMS without creation of a cartridge. Not sure why this is necessary but I guess it will satisfy people who are unwilling to share and feel cheated if others use their content.

A school initiative is racking up the action: http://wikieducator.org/Handouts4Teachers. Another school example – http://wikieducator.org/Biology_in_elementary_schools. There is a big opportunity for us to work with schools in helping them develop content on wikiEd. I wonder if the push is still there to do this? Not being on Academic Board any more I don\’t hear about these things and the info is not filtering to us.

Utah state is going to create an open school – an OER handbook is being developed to help educators create OERs. Perhaps they could use some of the stuff we have developed on digital information literacy on the WikiEd platform and which we are using in the Digital Information Literacy project also located on WikiEd. ….so much to do and so little time.

It was a good presentation and although discussion was slow and had that halted factor due to the \”push to talk\” feature of Elluminate, I was glad I made the time to attend. It has motivated, mortified and made me petrified….will I ever get my thesis written?

1. Dr Pita Sharples spoke at the Powhiri and shared his perspectives on Maori learners and participation – it is okay to take a long time to get your education – he did. His talk was enjoyable and set the scene for the conference about disadvantaged learners such as Maori, however, only the keynotes addressed this area with regard to engagement, and I only attended one presentation which dealt with this – Selena Chan (given by Nick) and the use of mobile technologies so that bakery students had access to resources. A lot of speakers spoke about engagement and communities of practice, but not about access and equity and diversity. Dr Sharples spoke about the importance of “language nests” for Maori children and also schools where they could carry on the learning. Taking children from Te Kohanga Reo and putting them in mainstream schools did not work. Te Wananga were another advance for improving the participation of Maori students.
   
2. Dr Barbara Holland – spoke about communities of engagement. She mentioned how contemporary students crave active and experiential learning eg mobile learning and social networking – I was curious and want to investigate the research on this. She suggested a conference – International Service-Learning conference – Hong Kong 2009. There are different perspectives on what engagement with the community means. For example, an exchange of ideas and information is heading towards engagement, whereas Incubators, continuing education, internships and clinical work which are work-integrated and which promote networking are examples of community engagement. In other words engagement is connected learning and discovery. Dr Holland framed this as community-based learning which enables participants to explore their interests leading to greater self-esteem, motivation, engagement, empowerment. I liked the ideas Dr Holland put forward, as the theoretical basis of a practical framework which Judith Ramaley explained later on. However in vocational education community-based learning is not new. Certainly in nursing and other health professions there is a strong connection with professional communities which is linked to learning objectives and reflection. The development of academic/clinical positions in the School of Nursing at Otago Polytechnic has been dually beneficial. I wonder if they still exist?

3. Judith Ramaley – was charming and funny as she spoke about how a framework of engagement in an organisation can lead to transformative change where “adaptive expertise” is foremost. That is proponents have the capacity to “learn on the job” and solve problems creatively as they arise. Anyone and everyone can lead change as people work together collaboratively using inquiry and emotional learning to form communities of practice. I particularly liked her analogy to social networking where “institutions become equivalent to a social network or open source model in which anyone may offer suggestions, contribute to advancing the institution and feel an integral part of the enterprise as a whole” – a “transformational change dynamic”. It is not a top down model and I believe OP has the beginnings of this capacity although our managers are immersed in a model of strategic change. The work we are doing with the Commonwealth of Learning through WikiEducator is an example of community-based learning and this is being led from the “coal-face”. It is disruptive, complex and collaborative and transformative for anyone who becomes involved and capacity is building around the nexus of open educational resources (Holland & Ramaley, 2008, p45). References: Holland B. & Ramaley, J. (2008). Creating a Supportive Environment for Community- University Engagement: Conceptual Frameworks. HERDSA Annual Conference 2008 Proceedings, p33-47.

4. Dr Stuart Middleton – was also funny and it was obvious he was not very impressed by politicians and the impact of government policies on access to education. We now have a situation where education has become more academic and has lost flexibility – the one size fits all approach means there is no longer a differentiated curriculum. The result is that disengagement is now occurring, and even though there is growth in education a large number of people turning are turning their backs on education and there are serious skills shortages. He likened the educational system to a nut which was resistant to change (the nut cracker), with disengagement showing up as one of the cracks as the arms of the nut cracker (changing demographics and economies) squeezed the nut. As Dr Middleton said, “Given the filters of failure that currently operate within education up to the point of entry into further and higher education, the group that presents itself for postsecondary education has become such a distorted reflection of the community that even the most carefully attentive and sensitive selection procedures would simply not achieve equity nor provide access for a majority of students.” We have a “leaky education system” with large numbers dropping out of secondary school, truant and leaving with no qualifications. Maori participation has increased thanks to the Te Wanangas, however, participation and completion rates in mainstream universities continue to be low. The diagram below depicts equity and access, and shows where some of the cracks lie in the transition from secondary to higher education. I will link to the paper once the proceedings are online. In the not too distant future, white Europeans will be in the minority so those groups of learners who have traditionally been under-represented are increasing, meaning HE needs to work differently. For example, the Pacific Island population is predicted to increase to make up 51% of the population in Auckland in the next five years. He also referred to examples in the literature around student retention and success stating, “Supporting students is critical to their success”.

people might be interested in Phelp\’s 2003 report of action research done on \”the development of one tertiary course in computer education for pre-service teachers\”. It is a great practical example of the importance of working with complexity rather than trying to put our students into boxes – and striving to meet pre-determined objectives.

It helps to illustrate an answer to George Siemen\’s (2008) questions – \”Consider learning outcomes created at the start of a course. Can we really ensure they are achieved? Can the complexity of learning be reduced to six or eight broad statements? Many educators feel that outcomes can be achieved. What is overlooked, however, is that much more than planned outcomes are experienced by learners.\”

Complexity of learning in my view cannot be reduced to \”six or eight broad statements\” and if students are given freedom, they will indeed learn more than they or the teacher ever imagined…..if they engage of course.

In Phelp\’s research, \”students were prompted to set themselves appropriate goals and were then challenged to engage with content most relevant to them\”. they engaged in self-directed and scaffolded learning which was authentic and relevant to each student. plus they took their learning to a metacognitive level. well worth a read. however it did happen over three years BUT like a good cheese, learning takes time…so pre-packaged, quick-fix, unit-standard-type courses probably don\’t cut it for real learning….well not in the long run. they serve a purpose perhaps to get black and white standards across eg. food safety, how to fly a plane etc. but if you do not really understand why it is important not to clean the cheese (yes the cheese theme is rife today) in dirty dish water, the complexity of life starts to confuse the unit-standard educated worker. We have to help teach people to think don\’t we?

However according to this Buddhist saying by Hsin Hsin Ming – thinking might not be so hot! I was interested in looking at something from the Buddhist tradition due to my husband\’s talk of Zen and the belief that we are both everything and nothing. also the post by Tech Ticker about Buddhism and complexity theory \” Everything, they say, is related and dependant. Nothing is independent.\” It is hard to be everything and nothing is it not?

To deny the reality of things is to miss their reality;
to assert the emptiness of things is to miss their reality.
The more you talk and think about it, the further astray you wander from the truth.
Stop talking and thinking and there is nothing you will not be able to know.
Hsin Hsin Ming

What do others think?

• Can an online community thrive through commensurate (equal) facilitation and and symbiotic (feed off each other) relationships, or do you need one person or several people to take on leadership roles to make it work well?
• How important is the platform chosen for the online community?

So how did I get to these questions? To start with on the email forum, I found that I agreed with Bronwyn Stuckey\’s example about learning.

\”For me a worrying area is when people call a class of learners a CoP and say that learning is the practice. That is really too large and amorphous to be one practice. A class of students learning accounting by engaging in scenarios as practitioners, possibly with real practitioners in the class as mentors is beginning to take on a CoP approach. According to what you state this course is not a community of practice of online facilitators. We\’re going there. \”

Already the email forum discussion has helped us to see the differences between online communities and CoPs and some belive there is not actually a difference.

I believe there is a difference. However surely an online community is \”what you make it\”. Certainly it can turn into a CoP if it is not already one. Sylvia Currie mentions, \”often communities evolve from interest — to learning — to practice. is it developmental\”. Perhaps it is but is it as simple as it seems?

The model of Virtual Community brought to us by Greg Barcelon via Violeta mentions that a Virtual Community exhibits – Responsibility, sharing, celebration – in other words members take the initiative, and they have enjoyment while sharing their ideas and knowledge. As Russ says, \”we need to understand the way the community functions\”. Plus a virtual community can be comprised of groups and is usually interwoven by networks (Bee). This is quite nice but is it too simplistic?

Isn\’t an online community not just about the participants in it, but also about the ways in which participants interact, and the platforms they use to interact?

For example, as many of you already know, and others will find out as you progress through the course there is a multitude of online community platforms – Second Life, FaceBook, MySpace, Google Groups, wikis, blogs, online games etc, etc, etc. Additionally, some platforms can kill a community as mentioned in Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach\’s blog post – The Art of Building Virtual Communities – if they are not right for the community.

Therefore if a platform is chosen which does not work for the community, then does this mean that the participants and/or facilitators do not have an adequate understanding of the community or that the platform is at fault? Sheryl also appears to make no distinction between online communities and CoPs.

There is some interesting stuff on Sheryl\’s post about Member Roles, What makes a healthy community and Derek Wenmouth\’s The 4 Cs of Participation in Online Communities for blogs. It is an extension and new take on Gilly Salmon\’s Five-step Model for e-moderation.

According to Greg Barcelon\’s take on virtual communities everyone is in it together and leadership is not important but is it? Is he just referring to active participation and not leadership? According to the writing by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, both her and Etienne Wenger believe that leadership is essential.

Bronwyn Stuckey in her post refers to opportunities for leadership as important:
\”the opportunity to step up and step into roles – that this event provided. And ..the shared sense of the value of being together – that evolved through the activity\” 
So maybe we need to do what the fellow in the pic is doing, and take charge of the situation and go for it if we are to create an online community around the subject of this course – online facilitation. I am looking forward to reading more people\’s opinions about online communities.

In my next post, I will write about my beliefs and experiences, but firstly, people might like to take 20 minutes out to view the presentation to listen to some information about the different viewpoints and examples. There are lots of things to consider before going down the \’rocky road\’. It is important to make the right choice for your teaching context and to provide the best option for your students. Otherwise instead of ending up in a rolling green valley where you can lie around feeling happy, you may end up trying to scrabble out of a deep, dark cavern. Scared…no its not that bad, but in the best interests of your time and the implications on your workload and that of your students, it is best to get it pretty much right first time.