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Blew my mind or blew a gasket??

My blog review of

Sabry, K. & Barker, J. (2009) Dynamic interactive learning systems. Innovations in Education and Teaching International46:185-197.   Link

Well I started reading this article with slight headache and finished it with a thumping headache.  So which is it?  Did this article blow my mind or am I ready to blow a gasket?  Lets find out …

Exploding head

Blown mind or blown gasket??

(Image courtesy of fuckedupmedicalconditions.tumblr.com)

Perhaps one of the most ongoing and complex questions in education is how educational organisations can deal simultaneously with multiple types of learner without ignoring their differences.

What a way to start!  Yes – how can it be done?  I wanna know and I wanna know now.

… a large gap exists between the information available and the use of that information (Barker, 2005; Barker, 2007; Barker & Finnie, 2004).

Again, yes!  How can we close this gap? Please tell me …

For a learning system to be interactive for different types of learner, it will be necessary to take account of the users (the learners) who are expected to use such systems for learning, and it is not merely enough to give students access to different tools and/or learning environments (Bates & Leary, 2001). It requires a move from a teacher–student dependence design to a teacher–student independence design that gives students flexibility and control over their learning in line with their changing needs.

Woah!  These guys are good.  This stuff is exactly what I want to know.

S&B continue by telling us about the components that make a good Interactive Learning System: Learner, Subject Content, Technology and Pedagogy.  So far so good – they are making lots of sense and it is well referenced, with lots of other theorists backing them up.

DILS will not only have interactive components, but dynamic components rather than static, components that are constantly updated and modified based on latest research and updated knowledge gained in the field concerned.

Fantastic!  But how?  This is where I start to get a bit mad with them.  All theory backup (references) seem to stop here and they appear to just be pulling ideas out of thin air and chucking them in.  OK maybe this is because they are all their own ideas but I can’t help feeling that they should have thrown a few examples in here.

Course Materials

This component should contain up-to-date links to up-to-date information and knowledge resources related to subject area in digital form (e.g. e-book, virtual lecture, e- libraries, web, simulations, labs, etc). … As an example, each student in a class will have his/her own dynamic text book, the content of which is based on the constantly updated (dynamic) evaluation of the student’s knowledge and understanding of the material.

If the course material is so dynamic – what happens to the teacher?  Will they stop learning themselves because there is no perceived need?  If this happens then at some stage, surely the learner will know more than the teacher?  Then where does the teaching profession stand?

And if students use dynamic books, what happens if the website/company stops trading/publishing?  Who will update the knowledge then and how will the teacher know that the knowledge is no longer being updated?

Learner

This component contains actual and dynamic information including up-to-date information about level of attainment, courses evaluation results (as it occurs), efforts, progress, and considerations about the student

Where does this information come from?  How can this be dynamic?  Surely it would come from the teacher?  If that’s the case then is the teacher of the future just going to be an evaluator/administrator?

Educational Technology and Pedagogy

OK great.  How can these examples be used?

Learning interaction design

This is the component that coordinates and balances the other four components, based on up-to-date and dynamic course material, technology, pedagogy, and learners’ profile.

And the diagram includes a teacher!  Sorry – where does the teacher fit in???  Poor old teacher doesn’t seem to fit with this model at all to my mind.

The whole idea of dynamicity (dynamicness, dynamicality …what word am I looking for here?) is brilliant, great, smashing, super but seems to be rather a model of utopia than a realisic model in my mind.

Sorry rant over!  It looks like I blew a gasket in the end – my temples are certainly throbbing now 😦  Or have I missed the whole point?  Please tell me I have …

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RSS – is it worth bothering???

I have done a fair bit of trogging around the internet tonight – troggin’ and bloggin’  🙂 looking for ways to use RSS feeds – specifically in education, but anywhere really.

So what has my trogging found?  Not alot that isn’t already pretty obvious.  The best way to use RSS feeds is the one that I set up the other night: set up Google Reader (other readers are available) with blogs, wikis, news sites etc that are of interest to you.  This is a good way of sharing resources, particularly if you are in a blogging community such as ours.  The way that we are using our blogs and RSS feeds is creating our very own online community of practice but that is very much a conscious effort on our part.  If we were studying a different course that didn’t include e-learning, would we still be as interested in our little community?  If we weren’t being assessed on our blogs would we be as active as we are?  I don’t believe that blogging would create a CoP on its own in many other settings TBH.

So what other uses of RSS feeds have I found?

My favourite one is from one of the RSS websites:

10. Study Guides
Many websites that are focussed on studying. Have created RSS feeds that contain daily questions. There are feeds for “word of the day” or “problem of the day”. Students can subscribe to the feed and integrate long term studying into their daily routines.(http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-and-education.htm)

That could be a really useful tool – set the students a small task each day/week.  But that could be done via all kinds of other tools; Twitter, VLE, email and so on.

Another idea is to convert an RSS feed into an audio feed.  I found this in a SlideShare Powerpoint:

RSS in Education

The slide of interest to me is number 23 “Auditory Learners Rejoice”.  I quite like the idea of being able to convert your RSS feed into a podcast, but having said that you could just do a podcast in the first place.  It could be handy for some students with disabilities though.
So, on the whole I like RSS feed and it can be useful but it isn’t going to rock my world.  I don’t feel sufficiently inspired to use it in any other way than following you guys on this course.  Personally I prefer Twitter for my newsfeeds; I like diversity, the conversational aspect, the interactivity that Twitter offers.  I like to see a list of tweets and to choose which ones I open up to delve into further.
The two tools are very different, but can be used for the same purposes.  Geekpreneur has listed similarities and differences between the two here whereas Daniel Scocco has listed how Twitter is better than RSS here so I will leave you to decide what you think of the two.  But please let me know … 🙂
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RSS Feeds

I think I might finally get RSS feeds!  I first encountered them a couple of years ago and had a bit of a play using iGoogle (not realising the difference between iGoogle and GoogleReader) and was pretty unimpressed.

So far I have been trogging through everyones blogs trying to work out if I have already read them or not – but now I can see straight away what I have read and what I haven’t using Google Reader.  Me likey.  Having said that I liked delicious when I first tried that but the novelty soon wore off.  We’ll see if it wears off with Google Reader as quickly.  I will try to come back to this in a week or so and will let you know (I bet you can’t wait!)

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Thoughts on Muirhead & Juwah

Muirhead, B., & Juwah, C. (2004). Interactivity in computer-mediated college and university education: A recent review of the literature. Educational Technology & Society, 7 (1), 12-20.

OK – here goes …

This article is the first that has invoked any real response in me so far this module.  I have also read a couple of Laurillard articles (‘Pedagogical challenges to collaborative technologies’ and ‘Conversational framework for individual learning …’) both of which were perfectly good articles but didn’t say anything that surprised, motivated or otherwise entice me to blog.

“Interaction is a dialogue or discourse or event between two or more participants and objects which occurs synchronously and/or asynchronously mediated by response or feedback and interfaced by technology.”

This is the definition of interactivity coined by M&J in response to articles written by Beard and Harper (2002) and Thurmond (2003).  I have two points to raise here:

1.  “… between two or more participants …” – what about internal reflection?  You don’t need a second participant for this.  Believe me; I’m very good at arguing with myself

2.  “… interfaced by technology”.  OK I’m probably being picky with this bit, because within our scope the technology aspect is very important.  However, this is a definition of interactivity not necessarily even within an educational setting and so strictly speaking should be taken out.  After all we don’t want to fall into the trap of making the education fit the technology; as Laurillard says “How do we ensure that pedagogy exploits the technology, and not vice versa?” (Laurillard, 2008).  We need to make sure that we use the most appropriate technology for the job to create educational solutions that are more stimulating and engaging than traditional teaching.

The next bit that caught my attention was a study by Taylor and Maor in 2000 that was discussed by M&J.  Taylor and Maor identified 6 categories to measure student and tutor perceptions of an online course;

“ professional relevance- the extent to which engagement in the on-line classroom environment is relevant to students’s professional worldviews and related practices;
 reflective thinking- the extent to which critical reflective thinking is occurring in association with online peer discussion;
 interactivity-the extent to which communicative interactivity is occurring on-line between students and between students and tutors;
 cognitive demand- the extent to which communicative interactivity is occurring on-line between students and tutors;
 affective support- the extent to which sensitive and encouraging support is provided by tutors;

 interpretation of meaning- the extent to which students and tutor co-construct meaning in a congruent and connected manner (Taylor and Maor, 2000, paragraph 4).”

Going back to my own studies with OU I found these categories to be extremely relevant.  Regarding professional relevance; whenever I came across something that was relevant to my own situation I would sit back, read it again and translate it into what it meant in my work/life. I had a lot of ‘Eureka’ moments through doing this!  The next 4 points were covered through using FirstClass which is the OU’s online community, rather like a forum it is made up of threads.  Students, moderators and tutors would use FirstClass to interact with each other, offering support, asking questions, clarifying answers and so on.  It was our lifeline whenever we were struggling and was one of the best examples of a community of practice that I have ever come across.  The last point was probably an example of the telephone conversations between myself any my tutors which I would turn to if the help from FirstClass wasn’t enough.  All of these were my support mechanism during my OU studies and without this interactivity my attention would have disappeared and I would very possibly have discontinued my study.

M&J go on to identify that “It is clearly evident from the literature that interactions are critical for enhancing motivation, communication, a diverse range of skills and intellectual development in the educational process.”  I couldn’t agree more!

M&J continued with “Student online remarks were one-dimensional commentaries that failed to address comments made by their colleagues.”  We need to make sure that we don’t do that on this course!  We need lots of different dimensions and comment-addressing  🙂  But not tonight – I’ve had enough tonight!

And my final quote for the night

“Additionally, students must be dedicated to becoming more sophisticated learners who are willing to learn from their colleagues while cultivating an intellectually engaging writing style that fosters academic discussion.”

Happy blogging!  😀

References

Laurillard, D. (2008). The pedagogical challenges to collaborative technologies. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 4(1), 5-20. doi:10.1007/s11412-008-9056-2

Muirhead, B., & Juwah, C. (2004). Interactivity in computer-mediated college and university education: A recent review of the literature. Educational Technology & Society, 7 (1), 12-20.

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So why the name?

Mainly because I couldn’t think of anything better!

During class Ann mentioned “tumbleweed” to describe some online communities.  This struck a chord with me because my action research project last year had been to create a Discussion Forum (http://ucbforum.co.uk) which is sat doing nothing at the moment because none of my students have any interest in it  😦  I want to get rid of the tumbleweed … hence tumbleweeder.

Unfortunately that was already taken so I put my twitter name (@jubaru) in front of it.

Hey presto!  jubarutumbleweeder

Bet you wish you’d never asked now …