I’m presenting my new wiki site to the EULETA conference this weekend. The idea of it avoids making any distinction between teachers and students.

Users can join and all have the same rights to edit. They can choose (from among the other users) people who will be their “friends” and “adversaries”. In a bid to increase participation: there is a list of “top users” who can get points firstly for uploading their picture and secondly for making edits to the wiki. One obvious fear is that people might feel motivated to edit foolishly just to increase their points score….it seems worth experimenting with. In any case the points don’t have a great deal of significance…there are two “levels” trainee (for those with less than 1,100 points) and learned (for those with more).

Also, there are gifts “a vote of thanks” and an award for making 25 edits. Each edit is worth 50 points, but the quick way to become learned is to upload an avatar to your profile…worth 1,000 points.

Users can communicate with each other by Email or by “board” on the site.

I made a mind-map made in Cohere showing how articles in the wiki should be categorised. There is a category of information for teachers, but no secret answers.

I’ve started writing the ECA by going back to a post written before H800 started. This mentions the importance of getting beyond the pros and cons binary structure of arguments…and using Compendium to support that. This +/- way of thinking prevents most of my students ever producing clear writing – as if the existence of a debate in itself prevents one from choosing one side or the other.

In that post, I linked to this illustration where Buckingham Shum shows the step of switching from lists of pros and cons to the evaluation of competing solutions (which each have supporting or detracting arguments).

The act of going back to an earlier post reminded me of the structure of H809 – which is meant to go over the same territory more than once with increasing levels of understanding and analysis. I thought this was successful, and I wonder how far the same sort of repetition can be applied in my own personal quests and investigations.  I think there’s a danger with blogs and essays that one follows a particular branch suggested by one possible solution and mistakes that for the whole debate. The circle is only completed when one comes right back to the original question which the various solutions are responding to….

On 23rd Dec. I wrote “I’d like students to record all input from a lesson”. Now returning to that I can see that INPUT isn’t quite in keeping with the approaches I want to adopt. Maybe there are two things for students to record here instead…a collective aspect: what actually happened in the lesson and individual…the personal responses and ideas which attracted their attention.

Creative commons...Thanks to http://www.flickr.com/photos/heatingoil/

This post is a continuation of the worry I began to document in June relating to the Lanier critique of web 2.0 collaboration. One of the theses of “You are not a Gadget” and the related presentations was that collective “wisdom” was best applied to questions with a simple numerical answer…something like Guess the Weight of the Bull, or the fete game I remember...how many smarties in the jar?
It seems to me that this is a very particular kind of simple question, and in other cases we get spectacularly bad results. For example: In less than ten years the market price for a barrel (159 litres) of oil rose from around twenty (in 1999) to around 120 dollars in 2008. I propose that simple / complex is not the only issue here and we might get a better description by including a further factor: caring. Players in a market care about the overall results because they are financially interested, and this distorts all their guesses about the price.
In the counter-example, a complex design question can be badly answered by a group if they don’t care about the final result but only seek to further their own agenda…that’s “design by committee”. But in places where the individual egos are in second place to the collective result and the participants care MORE about the latter…then good results can surely be had from the wisdom of crowds. Cue the 2 X 2 matrix…this is meant to show the results you can expect from a collaborative exercise requiring input from a large-ish number of people….

My holidays are officially starting and nobody better pinch me

This post closely follows the structure of an article by Y Engestrom entitled FROM COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE TO MYCORRHIZAE. A webcast on the subject is also available.

Determining the proper object of information sharing is a key question for activity theory. In this metaphorical story, nurses’ tweets and online photographs relating to an informal, extra-curricular activity may eventually be accepted by the education authorities as a valid alternative to the institutional e-portfolio limited only to formal course materials and work experience.

The question of whether this learning object is best compared with a tree, a mushroom, a tuber or a mycelium is a matter of theoretical debate.

We can criticise the idea of the “community of practice” here as ahistorical and unnecessarily abstract. For example, nurses are organised not around a “master” but a “matron”. The matron was traditionally a strong mother-figure authority, phased out in the 1960s as part of an NHS reform process and brought back again recently as part of another. Thus it makes little sense to compare their training with apprenticeship as it might have existed in some traditional manual trades.

We can contrast the two 19^th century concepts of the romantic “Gemeinschaft” – a unified hospital full of nice nurses who are loyal to their collective, see the matron as their figurehead, and care mainly about the patients . And the hierarchical “Gesellschaft” of nasty scheming nurses who only care about advancing their own careers. A good NHS manager will try for a balance of these by providing different sorts of motivational and team-building strategies to manage “the process”.

The problem, according to Engeström, is that the trainee nurse making an e-portfolio is not really engaged in a linear “process”. Some nurses form out-of-work collectives which engage in activities such as roller-blading or participating in street protests. We could thus posit the future possibility of a “runaway object” in the form of a volunteer emergency nursing service on roller blades that would frame its actions partly as a protest against commercialisation of the health service.

Thus we can come to see the formal bureaucratic structure of the hospital as something like a tree. A tree depends for its existence on a complicated symbiotic relationship with the soil, this is an especially popular metaphor in north eastern Europe where people are keen on striding through damp forests to look for mushrooms. We can contrast this with the French philosophical taste for the rhizome which is good for making salads, or in the case of the potato – pommes frites.

Mycorrizae depend for their nourishment on the photosynthesis happening in the nearby trees (NHS funding) but the trees in turn get their water and minerals from the mycorrizae.

The metaphor can also be used backwards: “The mycelium is the Earth’s natural internet.”

Parallels appear in other natural systems such as social insects, which also seem to exhibit a kind of distributed intelligence, and in human activities:

• jazz improvisation, where a simple melody does not tell you what note to play but is still there in the background
• the way Whorf thought the Hopi (without a linear sense of time) could still imagine getting ready for something that was there in the future.

Mushrooms can seem to spring up overnight. So when the nurses get together and start roller-skating to road accidents everybody will say “that’s really cool”. They will probably document their exploits using twitter and uploaded photographs and thus the phenomenon spreads rapidly.

A similar venture is already under way in the area of medical research.

In this metaphor we pay attention to nodes and the network effects governing flows between them.

The nurse’s course represents a clustering of nurse and trainer nodes (although some may prefer to see the nurse as a link-maker rather than a node). As the nurses interact with the institution of the hospital they develop closer connections with a professional community which they will be absorbed into.

Nurses’ e-portfoilos are a product of several networks.

Depending on your philosophical preference you may define “nurse” as an individual body which has credentials to pass the gate-keeping procedures of the college admissions office, or as a collective actor which is renewed by the annual intake of a new cohort of node-constituents/ link-makers. While successfully completing their studies, the nurses are connected to the flow of pounds sterling by the flat rate maintenance grant, and of words by their receipt of interconnected distance learning materials. The value of the pounds sterling is fixed by international speculative flows of virtual capital between financial centres.

Meanwhile, the cultural power networks of the hospital and the training college partly overlap during the nurse’s work experience period. You may wish to view these as supportive communities, or as sites where power and resistance are held in tension. In this metaphor, power appears in the network as a cluster, which is evidence of a historical accumulation of links.
For example, as well as completing their work duties in the hospital, nurses produce e-portfolios which will be linked to their TMAs and exam results. E-portfolios have a predetermined format established by the learning technologists’ network – but most importantly, they contain links between the isolated cluster of study materials and the cluster of work-related documents closer to the core of the hospital. A “good” portfolio is one that succeeds in making the connections between these two clusters which are deemed most useful to the network as a whole.

Naturally the nurses use a communications network to record their experiences in the hospital, they may also use their brains…which have a similar branching structure of neurons inside them. Interestingly, both the number of people in the world, and the number of internet users, is now approaching the number neurons inside a homo sapiens’ head.

Homo Sapiens may use the same network to support informal and family networks engaged in other types of practice, thus a single nurse is a fractal model of the world as a whole, in terms of biology, ICT and (if Deleuze is to be believed) the structure of her own thought. In their blogs, the nurses each construct meanings which will be comprehensible to each other due to their common participation in a linguistic and media environment which provides them with ideas and models of expression.

It is possible to trace the spread of conceptual categories from the cultural networks into the nurse cohort’s e-portfolios. Researchers may be able to predict the following:

• Which “work experiences” will be recorded and with what frequency according to the relative position of each node.
• The influence of changes in the format of the e-portfolio on its contents.
• The extent to which policy initiatives in the hospital network will facilitate or hinder the flows of bedpans and pillowcases as recorded by the nurse cohort.

Nurse Capping Ceremony and Candelighting Ceremony at Presbyterian Hospital School of Nursing 1951

The nurse should begin by collecting sand from the beach and discover a method for purifying it into silicon and growing crystals out of it. Slice the crystal and etch transistors into it. It will be helpful to already have an efficient scheme for designing logic gates for different kinds of Boolean operation. Be careful with the hazardous chemicals!

Design a magnetic or optical memory and input and output devices for your “computer” and hook them all up to a power supply. This can easily be made from a large windmill and sufficient quantities of copper wire.

Then begin an organised movement of the urban working class which will eventually hit upon the popular idea of a health service employing large numbers of doctors and nurses. Don’t forget to develop suitable training institutions for them to study in. Then go and study in one yourself, but don’t speak to any of the staff or students. Some time later you will have become a nurse.

While you are studying, you will want to quickly think up a way for your computer to run more than one program at a time (if you can get a copy of Unix from another planet that will be a big help).

Enjoy your secret individual work experience in the hospital. In the evenings you will be writing the software that enables you to produce a record of what you have done. Don’t worry if your portfolio looks a bit slapdash…nobody is going to read it. But you will have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all your own work…

What is Hanny's Voorwerp?

We have been discussing on the forums the question of what drives changes. When human beings look at really complex systems, we seem prone to attribute some sort of intentionality or “driving principle” that we assume to take primacy. Where we locate that driver depends on our own interests and whether we have any scope for action:

The Horizon report seems to capture its data by discussing publications and new projects in a wiki. I get the impression that they are really keen on novelty, even if the tools hardly work: I tried Sophie for reading and writing media rich documents and shock me for visualising a forum as a 3-D space. Simplifying brutally, I’d like to summarize their concept of change in this way:

The highlight of the National Science Foundation report is the story of Hanny – who discovered the green Voorwerp (Dutch for “object”, distant ionized gas shown in the picture) in the citizen science project – Galaxy Zoo. NSF distributes US$6.87 billion in grants annually…so it naturally wants to put research questions at the start of the story:

BECTA the British ex “quango” shows some signs of New Labour style joined up thinking in its report, (probably the sort of thing the new government doesn’t approve of) with a wide range of concerns including home access for the poor, workforce skills and health. The corresponding model of how change in schools might function looks more realistic. My mind map:

…would be quite compatible with a sort of activity theory picture where the school overlaps with other systems such as the technological one and the society in which participants are located.

The experience of reading this kind of thing is that rather like reading a newspaper – the more you know about the subject the less satisfactory the coverage seems. For example the 2010 Horizon includes Open Resources as a trend but does not mention Open Learn. They chose instead the Leicester site Otter.

It’s worth noting that the two American reports provide an “executive summary” which supposedly allows a decision maker to respond to the information with quick action. This again seems apt – the less you know about a complex system the more likely you are to think that your actions upon it are going to have a predictable effect… Thus information for decision-makers should always be kept to a minimum.

Today I attended a talk in Second Life entitled Myths and realities of English on the Internet. It was a re-transmission of a talk presumably given to another audience by David Crystal. I guess the “real” audience was the English Teachers Association of Israel.

This was the first time I have tried to do anything practical in Second Life. I wasn’t the only person who had a little trouble getting the sound loud enough for my liking, but the experience overall was positive. I enjoyed being able to see the audience from the speakers point of view. See below:

But most importantly the ideas seemed fresh and interesting. Crystal’s thesis was that although the internet represents a revolutionary change in communication, its effects on the English language so far have been minimal…people tend to exaggerate some aspects. For example these myths about abbreviations in sms texting:

People have started to abbreviate everything they write. NO – abbreviations are quite a small percentage.

The abbreviations are all newfangled. No – some are hundreds of years old, although lol is new.

Young people don’t know how to spell.  No - they leave out letters because it is cool and fashionable not because they don’t know. The best texters are also the best spellers. They practice more.

He noted that we tend to use both speech and writing as metaphors to talk about communications on the internet. In fact internet communications are radically new and depart from both in some ways:
from speech…. because of delays and the different sense of presence even in videoconferencing. And because in chat we can keep track of many conversations and butt in when we feel like it.
and
from writing…because whatever we write can get straight out into the public domain, without proof reading or editing. And because search puts writers in contact with people who otherwise would never hear about them.

The LXP final report states that “students see the personal computer as their central learning tool”.  This is enough to make a nonsense of the debate between VLE and PLE because both ultimately entail  “using my main way of browsing and typing with a computer”.  Another way to make a nonsense of this debate is to take the idea of environment literally and say that my learning environment is the place where I sit – see the main illustration to this post.

I still think there is a useful level at which the distinction can make sense for a particular type of teaching. … There are necessary features in formal education  which can’t be met in a world where everyone is centering their work on a self created toolbox…

I can imagine interacting with a series of different PLEs as a teacher of English as a foreign language on line. The approach would be “whole language”  with one-off achievement testing. So your teacher says go away and immerse yourself in English – read listen and produce anything you are interested in, keep in touch and feel free to ask questions, then come back next month and and I’ll tell you whether your proficiency has increased. Quite a feasible and attractive way of working with a one-to-one learner, or a small group with similar problems and objectives.

The VLE can have two sorts of function that a teacher won’t be able to do with a PLE, unless they are completely freed from the need to treat everyone in a cohort of students fairly. These functions suppose that the teacher is providing something more than the loose encouraging contact shown in the example above, and that there are  certain external standards that apply to all students accessing the material:

1 collecting a series of assessments as official scores that enable the student to pass a “course”. This supposes some official place which records an “audit trail” showing how the student has done enough to satisfy the requirements. This will only happen in formal education.

2 implementing conditionality. The teacher may want to be 100% certain that materials are viewed in a particular order. This is a use which will only happen where there is a course author / learning designer – a person who is a subject expert in the field being studied

(This is quite likely in language teaching, although still controversial. There is a respectable school of thought which says that students should be exposed to the “whole language” from the start. I tend to think that there are limits to this: for example I’d say English speakers would do well to start reading Russian by spending an hour or so just paying attention to the alphabet with access to some information on pronunciation, rather than plunging straight into War and Peace.)

The size of conditional segments may vary. It could be a lesson plan for 40 minutes work. It could be locked access to a week’s work, or as we have in H800, timed access given to TMAs when they are several months ahead.

It makes sense that people will import the segments into a PLE if they want. But if these kinds of granularity appear in their study material, then students will always need to refer to a “management system” that treats everybody in a standard way…at the points where they want to get through a conditional gate, or record their achievements for assessment.