Work @ TAFE

New blog address: http://liveandletlearn.net/learning/

During the last holidays I’ve been busy moving my blog from absoludity.net to liveandletlearn.net… why? Good question! Part of the Web Design course that I facilitate is a client project where participants are required to develop a site from start to finish - and it’d been a while since I’d been through that process myself - so what better a project for the holidays (next to my gardening project to get me away from the computer)!

You’ll notice that the site itself is still in prototype stage, but the blog is all up and running so I’m going to be using liveandletlearn from now on. Please update your bookmarks/feeds! And please give me any feedback you’ve got time for at liveandletlearn.net !

After reading David Hargreaves piece dealing with sharing knowledge in education (created together with the UK Department of Education and Skills) I’ve been thinking more and more about how innovation and collaboration networks within TAFE might enable better courses and further learning amongst it’s facilitators like me!

I’ve since tried to contact other Web Design facilitators within TAFE NSW and we managed to form an email group with around twenty members. But when one member (Tony Lorriman) suggested collaborating for resource development (using Moodle), there seemed to be only one other member who was keen on the idea (that one other member being me ).

I did try setting up a “TeachingWebDesign Wikispace” to see what might be involved, but given the amount of work involved in creating something like this, together with the effort of keeping it up-to-date (webdesign grows and evolves at quite a rapid pace), I started to realise that it’s not feasible for the two of us…

What if it was possible to create a ‘course’ with a much larger collaborative audience (ie. worldwide) while still linking this course to our own qualifications framework? All the hugely successful collaboration programs (such as Wikipedia or CSSZenGarden) allow everyone to be involved (still enabling editing and controlling vandelism). What if students and professionals could help educators to keep such a course up-to-date (like Leigh’s PayItForward Learning idea)?

According to David Hargreaves, networks of educators should be more like the internet - sharing innovative ideas without boundaries of institution, or even country:

the path to system transformation requires every school to be willing to give away its innovations for free, in the hope of some return, but with no guarantee of it.

Enter the Web Design Wikiversity course:

Given that everything you need to learn Web Design is already freely available online, the purpose of this course isn’t to provide you with yet more content. Instead, this resource aims to provide a flexible learning path linking to excellent online resources together with fun learning activities that can be updated and improved by you - the participant.

Each module of the course includes suggested activities and may also be linked to qualifications within your country, helping you to demonstrate your skills or build a portfolio that you may be able to use towards assessment.

Although it’s only in its beginnings, I’ve tried to structure this Wiki-course so that it might attract a world-wide collaboration effort by separating the ‘course’ from the ‘qualifications’ so that the course can map to different national or even state-specific qualifications. Given the nature of Web Design, the course isn’t intended to ‘contain’ much in terms of content but rather provide a structured framework for learning Web Design with links to the excellent freely available online resources.

Each module might contain something like:

1. Module Aim
2. Suggested (learning) activities
3. Your Learning Resources
4. Related Qualifications

(for an example, see the Basic HTML and CSS module.)

I don’t expect this to take off too quickly, but it has been encouraging to already have some significant input from someone overseas! Hopefully I’ll get time to keep building on it together with others. Perhaps some students might be interested in being involved this semester - it would be great to get their feedback and learn from the experience myself.

Check it out at: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Web_Design

On Thursday afternoon I had fun for 2 hours with another group of fellow TAFE staff, as we saw how easy it is to create our own website on the Internet. Judging from the feedback, most people were suprised at how easy it was!

We spent quite a bit of time at the beginning of our workshop chatting about the nature of the new read/write web - a web that has moved from being read-only (except for the technically-elite) to a read-write medium for all of us! As an example, we were looking at Wikipedia and chatting about whether this type of “Open” encyclopedia was a good thing or a dangerous thing for learners - in terms of reliability of information. It was great to hear a bit of debate from both sides… I’d encourage everyone to check out some Wikipedia articles in their professional area and evaluate for themselves the information they find!

In the end we had all updated our own websites with information, although nearly everyone identified on their feedback forms that it would have been good to have more time to practise this process. I reckon it would have also been good to spend some time investigating how other people are using blogs in education in our specific professional areas.

Yesterday I had the chance to spend 2 hours with a bunch of TAFEies from Baulkham hills and Nepean…We had a great time seeing (and trying) some of the free and easy tools out there on the web!

We started out by looking at Wikipedia, and seeing how the web is changing into something that everyone can contribute to. I’m hoping that this is a good way to introduce a great free resource (Wikipedia), while also highlighting how the Web is moving from “Read only” to “Read/Write”, but am waiting for feedback from participants to help me understand whether it was helpful or not!

I think most people were suprised at how easy it is to get their own website up, but ideally we needed more time to practise using our sites… A few people identified this on their feedback forms. It’s great to see that everyone found the workshop to be very useful (on the feedback form anyway!)

Here’s some snippets from the sites people created:

Sandra reflects on one of the highlights of last week’s teaching:

Relief on our students faces! As students start to complete their final external exams this week, one of the great feelings as ateacher is to watch the transformation of students. Last week they were nervous, demanding and tired.

While another person seems to be beginning a novel where CLAMS plays an antagonist! . JforJules points out that technology introduces a “fantastic new world of interest and rubbish. how to discern is the trick” - how to discern… a good question! (Relevance, relevance, relevance)

Jill notes that “Another aspect of technology and learning is the ability for students to use online tools” - an incredibly important point! We always need to consider carefully our target audience when choosing to use a technology in some learning activity!

Well, I certainly enjoyed the two hours! I’m still struggling to re-jig this workshop so that people can have a website that they want to continue to use after the workshop… even if it was only reflecting on teaching experience once a month or something. Ideas?

It’s getting towards the end of my planned project time working on the tutorial:Getting Started with Blogging in Education. It’s been a great learning process for me in lots of different ways… next week I’ll write up my own summary + reflections, but for now just the normal droll (for my own record) of what’s been happening:

Teachers blogging to learn

After a few conversations with different people, I’m starting to think that it’s not so worthwhile trying to get educators to see the point of trying to use blogs in their own classes in a two hour workshop. People really need to experience the learning benefits of blogging themselves rather than immediately trying to use blogs in class.

For this reason, I’ve updated the activities within the Creating your own blog section of the workshop to encourage educators to begin reflecting on their own experience in the classroom and with technology - real issues that we can interact with there and then. Hopefully this’ll help people experience the social-constructivist learning that takes place when blogging - and encourage people to use their blog for their own professional development after class and continue learning (even if it was only once per month).

Helping others who want to run the workshop

Last week I finished the initial Facilitator Tips for the tutorial. These tips are just some ideas for how the Workshop can be used in practice (pre-workshop preparation, classroom setup, the workshop itself, and post-workshop communication). Ideally it really needs some contributions from others running the workshop… but that leads on to…

Getting other people involved…

When you throw your weight behind an idea (read pride, thought, effort & sleep) - an idea that you personally think will be useful to lots of people - it’s so easy to believe that everyone with any experience of blogging in education will want to contribute and join in. I’m currently trying to evaluate the reasons why this doesn’t happen… so far I’ve got:

1. The idea doesn’t strike other people as being as exciting or worthwhile (and perhaps therefore isn’t!)
2. The issue of perceived ownership - people want to contribute their time and ideas to something they believe in, not to a project “owned” by someone else (although in this situation, the idea isn’t owned by anyone - perhaps this is a problem)
3. People just don’t have time.
4. The people who would be interested don’t know about it yet
5. The project doesn’t meet immediate needs. Ie. there aren’t many people (in the circles we’ve contacted) who are involved in running similar workshops.

We emailed out to the Teach and Learn Online group (58 members), and out of those 58 only one person interacted by posting a discussion on the one of the pages.

That being said, Leigh and I have enjoyed working with each others’ ideas and taking the project in different ways using each others ideas.

Sourcing content for online learning

Leigh had a great idea for a page of recommendations for content sources - worthwhile links to information that can be legally sourced into your own material (i.e. licensed with a Creative Commons or GNU Public license). I spent some time formatting and adding information to this page as it’s a great idea!

A new icon for the site

I also took a photo of our hand-held blender at home to give the site a bit of a theme. Leigh pointed out that the icon could be confused for something else and might replace it with a photo that Sunshine has taken of their own blender.

And that’s it!

With workshops, skype calls, content-restructure, new content creation and some marketing thrown in on the side, it’s been a busy two weeks!

Evaluating the Blogging in Education resource

I’ve had two opportunities over the past few weeks to run Getting Started with Blogging in Education as a face-to-face activity within TAFE, and it’s been great fun! Although this work isn’t actually part of the resource development, it’s provided an excellent opportunity to see how the resource works in practise. I’ve started recording ideas about running the workshop on a new page, Blogshop Facilitator Tips, to help anyone who wants to facilitate a similar workshop (although it’s far from finished).

Overall, it’s been great fun running the workshops - people are always amazed at how easy it is to publish on the Internet themselves - and we’ll hopefully be running follow-up workshops! The structure of the Getting Started workshop has been great too, getting people to investigate blogging in groups themselves, rather than just being told what blogging is about. Unfortunately we’ve been running out of time to investigate educational blogging thoroughly, but we’ve been able to discuss lots of ideas for classroom use (communication, contributions, etc.)

One aspect of the workshop that needs refining is the example blog that participants create - this needs to be something useful that they can continue to use after the workshop. I don’t think it’s feasible to create something in the workshop and feel confident to go ahead and use it in class. Instead, maybe we could create a professional development journal - participants could use it to learn in their own professional area, linking and constructing new information as they find it… we could even practise doing this as part of the workshop. I feel that people need to practise blogging first to appreciate the incredible learning implications before thinking about using blogs in class?

Restructuring the Collaborative Resource

I’ve been revising the structure of the main page a little, but after a Skype call with Leigh Blackall - another contributor - we’ve decided to broaden the original scope of the resource to better fit the title of Blended Learning. Leigh’s currently working on the restructure to include other aspects of Blended Learning.

Marketing - or raising awareness

In an attempt to interest others in contributing to this resource (currently there’s only three of us who have contributed anything), I’ve started commenting on relevant educational blogs with a link to the resource. It would be unreal if other people who also saw a need for such collaborative resources were keen to contribute and add their bit! Or even just saw the benefit of using the Getting Started Blogshop! The more interest we can generate, the more successful the resource will be.

We have rated as a link on the Wikispaces hompage (without putting it there ourselves! Viewed 1st June 05), but need would like to invite more participation by creating a structure for something that people want to contribute to (ie. people need to see the benefit).

Related to this, we need to create an About BlendedLearning page, describing the purpose of the site and the main contributers (people and organisations - anyone else who contributes can add themselves too). This is often something that helps people decide whether they want to contribute or not.

Other related news

After having considered using Drupal as the technology behind this colaborative development (see Weekly report 4), I came across a Drupal-based resource called Weblogs for Educators that is very similar in purpose to our Getting Started with Blogging in Education workshop - a collaboratively-developed resource to help educators get started using Weblogs. It seems that our thoughts about Drupal being inaccessible to most potential contributors might be right - I could only find one contributor to the resource. I’ve added a comment asking for some feedback on their experience but haven’t had a reply yet.

Aims for the coming week:

• Finish Blogshop Facilitator Tips
• Create and work on an About BlendedLearning page.
• Continue re-organising to invite more participation
• Continue trying to raise awareness of the resource

After evaluating and using Drupal over the past month or so as a possible package that could be used to facilitate a collaborative resource development, we’ve ended up going for something simpler and cheaper: A free solution hosted by Wikispaces - check out the beginnings of our resource at http://blendedlearning.wikispaces.org/ - you can even edit/update it yourself - it’s almost as easy as editing a word document!.

Away from Drupal

Drupal is a fantastic open source collaborative development environment, that certainly lives up to it’s name: “Community plumbing”, but there are some inherent drawbacks for our idea of building a simple resource to help educators start using the free and easy tools of the web.

1. It needs to be hosted (costing money). Although James at IncSub has generously given us our own drupal hosting for free… it may not be a great long-term solution if the traffic increases etc.
2. Drupal takes quite a bit of setting up and configuration, which leads to the next point:
3. The medium is the message: We don’t want to use a system to deliver the resource that other teachers/educators can’t easily use for themselves.
4. Drupal doesn’t currently provide a great revision-tracking system of pages, which effectively means that we need to get potential contributors to create an account and login to make any changes to the resource. One of the ingredients to the success of Wikipedia is the fact that anyone can edit a page, without the hassle of logging in.

…And on to Wikispaces

These four points led us back to the excellent free resource: Wikispaces. Wikispaces allows anyone to create their own domain (ours is http://blendedlearning.wikispaces.org/). We can create and edit any number of pages, include pictures etc., all for free. Anyone can come along and improve/build-on the resource with ease - encouraging participation - yet there is a also great revision-tracking system that allows us to monitor the changes being made and revert them if necessary.

So I spent a large part of the past week or so transferring our work to the BlendedLearning Wikispace area. Thanks to Jude Cooke and Ian Bailey for there work on the Blog bar image .

I’m hoping to use a TAFE WSI logo for the site, instead of the default pot-plant, but need to find out a bit more about this. So, for now we now have the beginnings of a resource that can be continually improved and updated by its users. I’ll be using the resource as part of a training activity this Thursday (and, most probably, updating it afterwards with improvements!).

Previous ‘weekly’ reports:

• Weekly report 3 - 5th May 2005
• Weekly report 2 - 21st April 2005
• Weekly report 1 - 31st March 2005
• Initial outline of project idea - 22nd March 2005

We’ve made some good progress with the initial resource: Getting Started with Blogging in Education after some great feedback from a couple of TALO contributors.
All that’s remaining for this initial resource is to update the final page: Where to from here, and create a pdf resource “My Blogger Cheatsheet” for use with the Create your own Blog! activity. It’s been a great experience building on someone elses work (under a creative commons license), rather than starting from scratch!

I’m hoping to have a go at using the resource during a professional development activity on the 19th of May.

After using the resource and incorporating any feedback, it would be great to advertise it a bit to see if there are others who might want to use and/or contribute to the resource. Although we might want to consider whether it’s worthwhile setting up our own site at that point and planning the scope/focus of the site.

I’d like to look at using standard Wiki pages for other resources on the site too (such as a “First steps with RSS”), as it’ll allow resources to be updated much more freely than the current book format. We’ve used the ‘book’ format for this initial resource, as it is very structured and hopefully helpful for newbies, but other resources could be simply a wiki page outlining the best links to, for eg, take your first steps with RSS. I still haven’t had a chance to see if Drupal can support Sean’s idea of a categorised rating system for elearning links… it’s definitely possible, but I’m not sure whether there’s already a Drupal module for it or not… hopefully we’ll get a chance to research this soon!

OK, so it’s turning out to be more like a monthly report, but I’m “on holidays” at the moment

Slowing down a little…

We’ve settled (slowed?) down quite a bit over the last few weeks - with three main contributors (Leigh Blackall, Sean Fitzgerald and myself) posting to the blended learning email group. After a few Skype sessions with Sean, we’ve identified a few different ideas and I’m currently looking at whether Drupal might be able to accomodate our varied ideas.

Sean’s keen to include a database of links related to blended learning with a rating system of sorts, which will be a great resource if we can get it up and running (and populated). I’m keen to get up some basic workshop/web-quest resources to help educators transition to the new tools of the web, preferably splashed throughout with rich-content. Leigh’s creating some screen-casting tutorials which will be unreal demonstrations of the tools being used in action. Hopefully we can combine all of this into a useful and focused resource.

Two great discoveries

We recently discovered a great webquest by Trevor Ettenborough, and after contacting Trevor, he was more than happy to let us use his web-quest under a Share-Alike Creative Commons License.

James from Incorporated Subversion (another Aussie venture based in Melbourne) generously set us up with our own Blended Learning Drupal site so we could test its suitability to a collaborative resource development. I’ve started transfering Trevor’s Webquest so that we can try out Drupal and actually work on a simple resource… but that’s where I’m currently up to.

The short-term future

Another priority at the moment is to find out if Drupal can support Sean’s database of rated resources ‘out-of-the-box’ or whether we’ll need to do some development ourselves (which could be fun too! but time consuming).

I can’t hide the fact that I’m blown away by the flexibility and ease-of-use of Drupal. It has an incredible number of modules that allow you to configure the system with all the collaborative features that you want (wikis, forums, blogs, rss-aggregation)… it really is amazing. I’m feeling like I want to register a simple domain and just start going ahead with a Drupal site… we can only evaluate so long… but even then there are issues to discuss.

I really would like to get something ready to use in some professional development workshops, such as the Getting Started with Blogging in Education web-quest, but it’s hard to find enough time to get it ready (and there are always other issues popping up needing time to resolve). Why is there never enough time allocated to complete tasks satisfactorily?

Well it was only just over a week ago that I posted an idea for the collaborative development of a Guide to Blended Learning in the knowledge era. But it would be ridiculous to think of this idea as ‘my’ idea… it’s not. It’s really an idea that has been perculating (?) through the activity of all of us contributing to the Teach and Learn Online (TALO) email group - a group of people from a number of educational organistaions in Sydney (and overseas!).

Progress so far

It’s been an incredibly busy week! The original post generated some interest from the TALO group, and a few of us quickly set up our own blended learning email group to continue discussing the idea… and we’ve had 53 postings during our discussions so far, so it’s been quite busy!

Through these discussions we came up with the idea to use a Wiki to plan the project itself, and after checking out a number of options, set up the BlendedLearning Wiki on JotSpot. It’s taken a bit of getting used to, and we’re pretty certain that we won’t use JotSpot for the actual resource, but it’s been good to get started with the planning. We probably spent too much time trying out special features of JotSpot, but have started using the system to structure our thoughts for the project.

We’re currently focussing on evaluting which platforms might be most suitable for developing this resource, as well as finding out what resources are already out there (so that we don’t re-invent the wheel). I was also hoping to spend some effort looking at the licensing options, but haven’t had the chance yet.

So that’s it! It’s been a busy first week, but we seem to have some momentum going… hopefully we won’t lose it!

Blended learning, a principle that has been around longer than e-learning or the Internet, has a simple definition of employing multiple approaches when teaching or learning. Yet with the advent of the Learning Management Systems (LMS), in practice many institutions have adopted the term to imply a combination of face-to-face activities and structured activities within an LMS environment.

As George Siemens argues:

Learning Management Systems (LMS) are often viewed as being the starting point (or critical component) of any elearning or blended learning program. This perspective is valid from a management and control standpoint, but antithetical to the way in which most people learn today.

With this understanding many educators on the frontier of online learning are experimenting with the use of more learner-centred tools such as blogs, wikis and news aggregators together with activities focusing on the active construction of the learner’s knowledge – empowering the learner. Yet these new tools can seem inaccessible to many facilitators and learners due simply to the different nature of the tools and a lack of established ideas for using them within learning activities. Even worse, facilitators can venture to try blogging in class but be turned off because of a negative experience (low student involvement). Even those of us who are familiar with the tools often struggle to use them in ways that engage our learners in the active construction of learning (well, I do anyway!).

Wouldn’t it be great to provide a dynamic resource for facilitators who are used to centralised information sources to ease their transition towards the distribution of free tools available now and in the future?

The idea:

To set up an infrastructure for a collaboratively-built online resource called “A guide to Blended Learning in the Knowledge Era.” (ideas for better names!?) This resource will be aimed at providing an easy transition for facilitators who might be wary of using the new tools (such as blogs, wikis and news aggregators), enabling them to have fun learning the new tools themselves while also suggesting lots of fun ideas for using the tools with their students. As facilitators become more confident using the distributed tools currently available they will hopefully become less dependent on this centralised resource (having established their own distributed feeds for learning). Yet at the same time these facilitators will be in a position to contribute back to the resource for those yet to make the transition - updating it with the new tools and strategies that they have gone on to discover!

With the fast-changing landscape of available tools this resource will only be worthwhile if it is able to keep pace with the changes - and this itself will only be possible if it is developed collaboratively from a wealth of experience larger than any one organisation can provide. Furthermore, for educators throughout the industry to see it as worthwhile to contribute some time and effort to such a free resource, I think the material contributed would have to be published under a Free For Education or Creative Commons license so that contributors can be certain that they will always have access to the resource that they helped to build.

The underlying technology…

The technologies that this resource could be based on include open-source Content Management Systems such as Drupal, Mambo or CivicSpace that all allow a wealth of online contributors to create the resource collaboratively. There are other Wiki tools that I’d like to check out, such as Wikipedia’s MediaWiki, but we need to evaluate which CMS is best suited to the task (for example, I think it needs to be easy to update without using special Wiki tags). I noticed that Drupal has a module for collaborative book or documentation writing and looks impressive all-round, so I might install it soon and check it out first.

Aims/Outcomes (incomplete)

My main outcome would be to:

• Implement an infrastructure to support the collaborative generation of “A guide to blended learning in the knowledge era”

Other related outcomes that I’d be happy to be part of, as long as I’m not stepping on anyone else’s turf:

• Collaboratively generate a resource of fun activities based on sound learning strategies for introducing new free tools to learners (both students and facilitators).
• (edited according to Roisin’s comments) building teachers’ capacity to transform their teaching approaches to enable the development of engaging, community driven and technology-rich blended learning environments.
• ensuring that copyright is strictly adhered to.
• Involve users of the resource in the creation of new content as they discover new tools or applications or activities in their area of expertise.
• ??

I’m planning this resource to compliment/support the possible Learnscope team project “Continuous Learning with Evolving Free and Open Source Software” headed by Maria Trevaskis, which is hoping to trial free and open source software in at least 4 industry areas as part of delivery of courses for students in 2005, but I’m hoping it might compliment other projects that people are working on (esp. people in the TALO community, given how formative the discussions there have been!). Hopefully this resource won’t be conflicting with any Learnscope projects - I was told that Learnscope is focused around Professional Development rather than resource development. I’m just keen to set up the infrastructure and get the ball rolling and am happy to support the needs of other projects.

So, what’s your reaction? Why would/wouldn’t you contribute to this resource? Do you know of something like the collaborative resource described that is already setup? Do you think this resource will be valuable in helping facilitators to make the transition to the new tools (and hence help their students to use them too)? Basically, is it worth setting up this infrastructure? Let me know below!