Personal Learning Environments

A picture created by the children in the Hole in the Wall project Feb 15th 1999

A mish mash of thoughts this week sparked by a number of separate but converging discussions

@ffolliet, @weavermiles, @sfpeaky have all been asking the same question this week (in slightly different forms and for different reasons)- how do we get our learners and colleagues engaged in communicating and collaborating on line?

Students complain they don't see why they have to use wikis, colleagues complain they don't have time to learn about all this new-fangled web 2.0 stuff.

Age doesn't seem to be a common factor as the one group are in their 20's whilst others are 40+. Usage isn't mandatory in all these cases so that's its not just that they are being awkward or rebellious, and there are fabulous role models out there with everyone from Obama to Jonathan Ross (!) on Twitter - so its obviously trendy: does the reluctance then stem from apathy? fear? lack of technological skill?

I suspect that the key has to be in the title of this blog post: learning environments are highly personal - each individual will have their own story of previous technological failure, a fear of looking stupid, experience of being criticised for getting it wrong in a new social setting (I agonised for ages about how to "retweet", for example, or whether/when to request friendships in my Ning community....)

So it may be different in every case but most conversations I have had with those reluctant to dive in seem to start with: "I just don't see the point".

And that is the point, really: people will learn to use something if there is a point to it, if they have a reason for doing so. My technophobe partner, for example, who normally avoids the internet as though it were the work of the devil, downloaded and taught himself how to use iTunes, because he is passionate about collecting music.

So one way that has been put forward is a mixture of carrot and stick perhaps: award students points for on line engagement - to make collaboration on a wiki a central part of their programme (that'll get them interested!) or make certain key information available on-line only .

But this also has to be supported with thorough training, access to the technology and exemplary modelling from the top - don't expect people to get on board if you are just waving at them from the platform..... you need to be blogging, tweeting, wiki-ing right alongside them.

Isn't use of web 2.0 just a "leadership of change" problem like any other? People will always be reluctant to embrace change unless they see it is meaningful, feel themselves supported and have a leader who is modelling the required behaviour. At least that is the conventional wisdom.

What then do we make of the Hole in the Wall experiments carried out in India by Dr Sugata Mitra? PCs with Internet access were dropped into small Indian villages without training or context and groups of children taught themselves to use them...(the adults, interestingly, made no effort to engage with them).

Finally - my personal learning story of this week. I responded to a Twitter message from a "friend" (someone I met on line through the Ning Digifolios site) who wanted a buddy to learn Spanish with. I suggested another Ning friend who had expressed a similar wish. Over the space of a couple of days the three of us set up a date and time to "meet" in a free on line classroom , accessed an on line learning programme from BBC languages and had our first somewhat chaotic lesson.

One could question the wisdom of this as a learning experience: we are none of us Spanish speakers nor particularly expert at the language.
I am English and living in Nottingham: Maria is Portuguese, from Lisbon and Natasha is Russian and was speaking from St Petersburg.

With no teacher to guide us, how can we expect to improve our Spanish language skills?

I don't know yet how this is going to turn out but I know that I did manage to practice speaking and writing, that we each took it in turn to help and correct one another from our different knowledge/skills levels and that we are as a result eager to go on learning, speaking, supporting and preparing lessons: I personally can't wait for next Thursday.

And there was something else for me about the whole experience which I reflected on later: when I was a child growing up in the 60's, I could never have imagined that an event such as this could have happened. Not just that the internet would exist and give me the ability to speak simultaneously to people in different countries, but also that one of those people would be Russian! It is perhaps because the world is constantly changing, because the change to come is unimaginable now, and because I want to be the change I want to see that I am involved in education, in the education of leaders and in on line education.

So that is the point for me.

Leaders and followers......

.....there has been a lot of speculation about whether Obama will live up to the hype - to people's expectations - and generally commentators guess he won't.

Well, of course, how could he?

In a sense we get the leaders we deserve - because we get the leaders we create. A leader is in many ways just the sum total of all of our hopes, fears, expectations and - yes - projections.

So its encouraging that at this moment the US - and the rest of the world - has got in Obama a leader who promises hope: who (in the words of Nina Simone's song) is "young, gifted and black". (Coincidentally the title of an album by Aretha Franklin, who sang at his inauguration today).

This must say something encouraging and hopeful about the state of the world, of democracy, and of human development?

But leaders are ever at the mercy of these communal projections - whether US presidents, parents or teachers.

I know that as a "teacher" (or facilitator), I am never quite as all-powerful, as all-knowing, as wonderful (or as awful) as my students imagine.

The learning journey is usually one in which the student moves from dependency to self responsibility. It's one reason why I am so excited about the development of the Personal Learning Environment, of initiatives in collaborative learning and the use of self and peer assessment.

In the same way, mature teams are those which assume responsibility for delivering outcomes and don't fall apart if the boss proves to be a fragile human being - just like the rest of us....

Indeed, teams can be self managing: there needn't be a leader at all - and each individual accepts that they have a key part to play in the success or failure of a project.

I am currently involved in a "leaderless project" as part of the Digifolios Ning Community on personal learning spaces and accepting individual responsibility for supporting the completion of the task, collaborating in learning and sharing resources is the unspoken principle behind all we are doing there.

So the real question is, are WE going to live up to the promise that Obama's election brings? Will we disappoint ourselves as a global community? Will we accept responsibility for the successes and failures ahead - and are WE prepared to do something to make a difference?

Digital Identity: the edited me

Being part of the Digifolios experience has given me pause for thought on the nature of digital identity - not least because I didn't know what one was until last week.



I guess my first foray into this world was when my good friend and unofficial mentor, @stujohnson (his twitter id), invited me to be part of Facebook. He's a good deal younger than me and I thought FB was for, well, people a good deal younger than me. For 6 months I had two friends on FB: him and a mutual work colleague.



Then about 18 months ago, my official mentor and now friend, @hallymk1 (his twitter id) invited a bunch of newly embarked PGCE students (of which I was one) to contribute to a blog: and so my blogging self was born.



Only last February I discovered delicious, netvibes and RSS (again, my friend @stujohnson) and in June, my boss introduced me to Twitter. Since last summer I have been blogging here and Tweeting as Virtual Leader.



I still find the notion of a digital id rather scary. ID theft is a worry of course, as is spamming, but its more about how I will be perceived in this virtual world. Eventually all things connect up and I risk having aspects of my life and work inadvertently revealed in places I'd rather they weren't.



Its not that I have dark and shameful secrets to hide (well none I am going to tell you about here!) just that I am essentially, and paradoxically, rather partial to maintaining my privacy: I keep a private blog about my learning on my PGCE programme, for example, and I maintain a wholly separate online identity as an aficionada of salsa - different FB profile, website, blog.....



I have read elsewhere that on line relationships permit a freedom and intimacy that f2f doesn't always allow: it is possible to hide behind a created identity to be bolder and more open than we would be in "real" life, without the risks of rejection, perhaps?



In the same way that my profile pic is carefully chosen, cropped and "fixed" to present an acceptable face to the world, asynchronous blogging, discussion boards and emails - even video blogs that I can review before publishing - present the edited me.

First of the New Year.. a personal learning story

I am not going to write my new year's resolutions here, because I don't have any......


Instead I want to write about a new learning experience I am involved in: http://digifolios.ning.com/


It's concerned with developing Personal Learning Portfolios/Environments - something I am keen to introduce to my students, particularly on the Virtual Teams Module. In fact I'd go so far as to say its essential in e-learning that students craft and develop such an environment for themselves in order to keep track of their learning resources.


I have blogged before about Netvibes and how it has made such a difference to my overall efficiency in keeping track of my surfing adventures....so it isn't the use of an aggregator that is new for me.....

No, what I am loving is the being part of a community and collaborating in learning tasks. There are some scheduled synchronous events (talks on WizIQ and Elluminate), there are blogs, shared presentations, discussion boards.... and yesterday we had an "ice breaker" in the form of a challenge to discover the Birth Order of each community member.

The fascinating thing about this was the ingenuity of individual members in their use of technology to discover the answers: polls on Survey Monkey and Doodle, use of Google Docs, Twitter and Gabmail etc - without any specific instructions from the coordinating team, people just got on with it. What is more, the results were fascinating - why are so many in this community eldest children - and is that significant? And the emerging stories even more so.

This is in sharp contrast with an e-learning conference I attended a few days ago where I felt I was talked at all day and only got to network in the coffee breaks - like that was somehow incidental?!

Whenever I ask students to tell me the best things about distance learning programmes I run, they say - the networking, hearing how other people manage these issues. When I think back to courses I have attended, I remember the people I met, the stories I heard, what I learned about myself in sharing stories of my own and having feedback and support from others.

And finally, this whole experience convinces me that it is possible to kick off a virtual learning experience from a cold start, to form relationships on line without benefit of face to face introductions and to collaborate effectively with others across distance using technology.

O brave new world, that hath such people in it!

virtual leadership - lessons from the module

Reflecting on the assignments from this first run of the Module (ok I promise this will be the last mention of assignments), I have been caused in turn to reflecton my own leadership of this virtual team of learners.

One observation is that this of course isn't a team at all but a group as although each student aims to complete and pass their individual assignment, they do not have a common aim or common task to complete as a team.

As the "leader" I supplied the task ( the assignment) and resources to complete it in the form of learning materials, but some individual interpretation of that task was permitted.

Participation in any group activities was therefore entirely voluntary: there were neither rewards offered nor sanctions imposed for not participating.

The only performance management activity undertaken by me was to monitor who was participating in the Discussion Boards and wiki, but the criteria for assessing participation - or team efectiveness - were not transparent.

Individuals were not directly superivised unless they requested a coaching or tutorial session, though I did write to those who appeared not to be participating to check they were able to access everything OK.

I guess that on the one hand my leadership style could be described as laissez faire - I allowed them to work in whatever way they appeared to choose (but without enquiring as to what actually did suit them best...). On the other hand, I tell myself, I am simply treating them as adults who are responsible for their own learning.....

The results then are interesting:

Over half of the group achieved a very good or excellent mark for their assignment. The majority of these were also actively participatory in Discussion Board, Wiki, chat room and tutorials. One could conclude that participation, self-awareness, organisational skills and high achievement orientation went together.

Curiously though, about 1/3 of this "very good - excellent group" had had no contact with me or with one another. They displayed all the same levels of self awareness, application, and achievement orientation without ever having functioned as part of a learning "team". Clearly these were highly self motivated and required little direction to keep them on track - perhaps these are the ideal Virtual Team members?

Of the half of the group in the satisfactory or good range of results, most made little attempt to participate in group work beyond introducing themselves initially: variously they were afflicted by technical difficulties and onerous work demands. Some however missed out important sections of the brief - but by not asking for at least a personal tutorial, they did nothing to help themselves, which was a missed opportunity.

And then there were a couple who appeared not to have particpated at all in the module; did not refer to any of the learning materials or recommended reading resources and did not offer any reflection, but nonetheless submitted a half decent offering albeit working entirely to their own brief.

I can now reflect on this and think of ways in which I could improve the learning experience (and my leadership role) - say by offering marks for Discussion Board participation and wiki contribution to enhance motivation and clarifying the criteria by which performance will be assessed.

However, the really fascinating thing for me is that these results have a lot of parallels in work "teams" - especially where a "hands off " leadership style is being employed and the purpose or overall aim is neither fully articulated or regularly measured.

For a start there is the social crew (they are never alone!) who organise birthday lunches, send one another funny emails and turn up to every team meeting, but nonethless work really hard to further the group's overall aim, which is something they believe in fervently.

Those lone stars who rarely interact but whose work output is high and whose contribution is original, creative, and occasionally pays great dividends for the wider organisation.

The worker bees who attend for the contracted hours and ususally come up with the goods but give team meetings a wide berth, suspecting them to be "soft and fluffy claptrap". Most likely to be flustered by technology or overwhelmed by the amount of paper on their desks (or under it, behind it, etc)

The most worrying of course is the maverick who ignores any direction from the centre, shares nothing with colleagues (information is power afterall!) works only to further their (largely personal) ends, and keeps just enough this side of the "law" to avoid sanctions.... a very difficult one for any leader to manage.

If you recognise anyone here, please believe me, this blog is not based on any actual person, either living or dead.....