There’s no LMS in my PLE

Just yesterday I was reading a great post by Steve Wheeler about motivation, with the general premise being that intrinsic motivation is a key element in operational personal learning environments (PLEs) and I was thinking “yes, that is so very true”. As a matter of coincidence, a few hours later, I realised that I had not included my university’s Learner Management System (LMS) as a component of my chart that shows the components of my PLE… more than that, I also realised that I had no desire to.

I have some fantastic classmates in one of my distance classes, but I have only seen them for two half days in the semester. If I were to have more interaction with them, I’d prefer they tweet or blog as I know they have some perspectives I’d value, but they don’t use the LMS either… well not for the experience and opinion type perspectives I’d like to hear from them.  What happens on our institutional LMS feels forced because it’s participation for marks. We’re supposed to participate around outcomes, not participate to test perspectives, show our ideas forming or alignment with identity, and that makes a big difference to the way students behave.  I believe this is because in being tracked and mandatory, interactions lose authenticity… and most importantly, contributions are made because of extrinsic motivation.

I don’t intrinsically want to go use an LMS to learn, and it seems my classmates don’t either, so while my classmates make the cut into my PLE (not as much as I’d like them to), the system that we use, by design, does not.

So yeah… I guess this is a bit of LMS bashing, but that’s what I think and why… ultimately that’s what this blog is about, to express those things, those things I think of all on my own, things I am thinking about at a point in time. Those things that help my learning have meaning and longevity. Intrinsically. Because I want to… those things that don’t fit in my institution’s LMS.

The Architecture of my Personal Learning Environment

For one of my uni assignments, I was required to design a Personal Learning Environment (PLE).  I responded to the challenge by creating the PLE Growth Model, which proposes some principles around how a PLE may develop… but now I have to put that into action. So while my following work will be about why and how PLEs fit in an organisational context, I am first to start with my own.

I am fortunate enough not to be bound by organisational restrictions when it comes to my professional development, but I know I’m lucky in this respect, and it hasn’t always been the case. So anyway, the model below is what my PLE looks like, some arrows are reciprocal as many elements feed each other, some elements provide a more one way perspective, each has its own function and reason for being part of my PLE.

To explain just a few key resources in this messy diagram as it applies to me: I use Twitter is a hub of new information, I feed links and ideas in, links, ideas and conversations come out (and all sorts of other strange things). My blog is a place where I reflect and think, like Twitter it is also out in the open for people to see.  A private, but just as essential part of my PLE is my netvibes account, which I use to aggregate blogs and other resources which offer repeated stimulation through new and potentially interesting additions.  The other aspects in of my PLE are important too, but these three are key to how I do what I do.  It’s a mix of what everyone sees, what some see, and what only I see… and it’s messy, because so far as I’m concerned, learning is messy.

Considering my comments about the importance of owning and creating your own PLE (it’s very nature is personal and should be created by its owner), I do feel a bit like I’ve just opened up my fridge and suggested a stranger look inside. What works for me may not work for anyone else, and there’s every chance it’ll look different again in a few months time. So in that respect, consider it a sculpture made of sand rather than stone.

A Thank you to my Personal Learning Network

As my semester studying Personal Learning Networks draws near its end, I’ve been reflecting.  When you study alone there’s noone to test assumptions with, noone else’s ideas to hear, and most of the time I’ve been left to do pretty much whatever I wanted.  I would consider myself an experienced learner who is about as comfortable online as anyone, and someone who is very self directed when there is reason to be… but that doesn’t mean this experience has been easy.

I wanted to say thank you to my Personal Learning Network for helping me through by just doing whatever it is you do… sharing links, commenting on my work, sharing insights, possibly understanding some of the jargon I use when people in my face to face world think I’m speaking another language… generally making me feel less alone in my experiences.

I don’t make videos using animoto often, and I know the timing is a bit out (sorry), but I thought it would be nice to thank all those who have given me so much help over this semester… so here it is.

Thank you.

Mandatory Participation and Authentic Learning

A short post. Moslty because I did not want to lose this thought amongst the other stuff on my Twitter stream:

“you can only design for and promote interaction and learning, you can’t mandate it.”

I said this as I was mulling over a fellow student’s disappointment at the lack of discussion in our dedicated online space for one of our subjects, despite some mandates that students must participate in a certain percentage of online discussions to pass the subject.  This isn’t about an angry molly post as it easily could be, with me shouting piously on here about interaction design principles… it’s much simpler.  It’s about human nature, and why we do what we do.

I think we do things  because we want to, not because we have to. I think that intrinsic motivation wins out over extrinsic in the end. Mandating interaction might make posts appear on the forum, but it cannot guarentee authentic learning and meaningful interaction, infact, in the forced behaviour it promotes, I believe it can work against the very ends it is trying to achieve. Making a someone want to do something, rather than forcing them to is a better option.

By the way… I still haven’t participated in the mandatory discussion. I haven’t even looked in. Because I don’t have high expectations for what it contains considering that people are writing there because they have to, and not necessarily because they want to. I’ll drop by and give a “me tooism” at some point, just as others have, I’m sure.

It’s so true of many things in life; that when we try to force an act of human nature, it slips away fom us.

Defiance: Learning in Muddy Waters

I read something somewhere today about how our interactions using social media are keeping us academically truthful.  I wish I could remember where I came across the quote, but it struck a chord with me.  As I was developing my PLE model, my lecturer asked me some really hard questions.  I remember lamenting to my partner saying “I can’t just change tack because I don’t just write for my lecturer, my blog follows me”, it really did cause a great deal of stress.  It also helped a great deal with my learning because I stuck with my perspective, but had to really examine it, quesiton it, and justify it.  If noone else was reading my work I don’t know that’s I’d have taken the harder road, I’d possibly have just taken the easier option.

So this time around, I’ve been given some feedback that is making me reconsider what I’m doing, and have been asked to make some hard choices should I want to continue study in this field in the future. The feedback was basically that I am concentrating on online learning alot, with less emphasis on face to face situations, and that perhaps I should exclude the latter as they don’t fit within the discipline of computer mediated learning.  I’ve thought about it, and I can’t agree that it’s what I want to do.  In part, this is because I have been known to be stubborn at times, but it is also because I have a desire to be as truthful to myself as I can be on this blog, because it follows me around online.  I’m a terrible liar, and I am sure that my false perspectives would catch up with me somewhere.

I don’t think that the study of personal learning networks can be restricted to the online medium because that’s not how humans work.  My work around PLEs is focussed on learning, and learning doesn’t assert that it lives either online or offline, it doesn’t have technological boundaries.  Were I to restrict my study of PLE’s to the online environment, I believe I’d be studying the Personal Web, a concept I am gradually coming to believe is flawed in its outlook (although I haven’t studied it in great deal so that may be a big call at the moment).  If we restrict our study of PLEs to the online environment, aren’t we focussing on technology, not learning?

Considering my own oft repeated mantra “it’s not about the technology, it’s about what it enables”, I don’t think it would be right to restrict my studies to what happens online.  In doing so, I feel that I’d be focussing on the techonlogy, rather than the learning, and that’s not something that’s true for me, either professionally, personally or academically.  So I’m going to do what I think is right for me, and what I think will help me learn what I want to learn. It might not get me the highest marks, and it might make my academic supervisor unhappy… it might not be correct, but I’ve been mulling over it for over a week now, and I need to do what I think works for me… and for me… not separating online and offline interactions feels like the right thing to do.

Multitasking learners? Opportunity, not threat

I was cruising through my netvibes tonight for the first time in too long and noticed that this month’s big question on the Learning Circuits blog is around a topic quite close to my heart.  I am one of those “presenters” (I am a facilitator/moderator/community manager, not a sage on the stage presenter) and learners who is impacted quite deeply by what Clive Sheperd considers as a problem: multitasking.

I have a different take on it, I don’t consider it a problem, I just consider it the way the world is, and our responsibility in either of the below roles to deal with it in the way that’s most productive for us.

First: as a learner

I can remember a distant time when my attention was only ever on the presenter at hand.  Before my iPhone and laptop my thoughts were, to be honest, usually centred on food: was I hungry, what could I eat now, what could I cook for dinner, did I have enough time to go find sushi. Now, even though I have more things to multitask with, I tend to make my multitasking more efficient, and less about food. If I am multitasking during a presentation, there is a greater liklihood that those other tasks actually pertain to what’s going on in the room than anything else. Those tools can consume me and make me appear to be doing little, but I may very well be back channelling, bookmarking, googling, or even writing notes in my blog a a draft.  Chances are, I am not looking up recipes online, because I was only dreaming of food out of boredom.

To be honest, as a learner I think I’ve become accustomed to this environment, and it works for me.  I like learning through dialogue. I enjoy the conversation around what that sage on the stage is talking about.  My “multitasking” devices are a way to have that without being disruptive, so I’m not convinced they are a bad thing, just a reflective tool.

But I’m not an angel, noone is, no matter how well intentioned.  If a presentation is not engaging me, I will multitask in a less presenter pleasing manner, and by that I mean I may do some admin, catch up on what’s been going on on Flickr or whatever. Really though, this has been going on since the dawn of time, devices just make it more obvious and potentially productive.  If a presenter isn’t meeting my needs, and I’m there to learn something, well… there’s a bigger problem than me using my laptop. Rude? Yes. But so is dreaming of food. Both represent a bigger problem.

As a presenter

It can be hard to present and monitor a back channel.  I have presented online without a moderator before, and after a reasonable amountof experience, still find it hard to listen and read a backchannel, or talk and read a backchannel. However, this doesn’t mean the back channel shouldn’t exist, it just means I need someone to moderate it and give me a poke in the ribs when something comes up. I see the backchannel as a really positive opportunity for people to either converse with each other about what’s happening is a place where others can join them, or a place where they can ask me questions, or give some feedback about what I’m saying or doing.

As a trainer, it can be scary to come face to face with some real time genuine feedback, and I find that people tend to be more honest when it’s an informal medium like this as compared to a “happy sheet” completed post course. That feedback can be invaluable, and if I remove my ego from the equation, it can make me better at my job.

I think that even the “bad” type of multitasking, the kind which sees people catching up on emails and playing on eBay can have some positives in it, despite that horrible sinking feeling you get as a presenter when you realise that noone is listening or cares. I’ve heard many trainers complain online that it’s disrespectful to them when people multitask. I counter that it’s disrespectful to learners to present something that does not meet their needs, not wonder why they are not paying attention, then get offended when they don’t listen.  If people aren’t paying attention, or multitasking in a bad way, it shows you that something isn’t working, and if handled well, can perhaps highlight some areas for improvement, whether they be with you, the content, the venue etc.  It may also highlight that sometimes life just takes over and it’s got nothing to do with you as a presenter.

In summation

I don’t find a backchannel rude. I don’t even find other multitasking rude, I find it symptomatic of needing what we learn to be relevant and engaging in an already too busy and distracting world.

What is a corporate educator’s role in non-formal learning?

As I did my thing last week online, I was looking at our #eci831 homework, and while I didn’t answer the question during the week as I was supposed to, it did get me thinking, I just didn’t get to blogging in time.

I think that our role as educators in a non-formal learning environment is to act as frustrators of learning, by this I mean to critically question, to guide towards, to aid in connection.  I don’t see the educator’s role in non-formal learning being one of the all knowing individual who has control, in the non-formal environment I think this control belongs to the learner more than ever.

When I look at this in the context of my uni assignments exploring that nature of PLEs and as a corporate practitioner, I think it is important that the learner really owns what their learning and what they intend to learn, and for that, I believe the educator to take a step back from the traditional position as the all knowing sage.  I see non-formal learning as something which is increasingly important in terms of organisational learning as there’s just so much to know, and let’s face it, the training department isn’t always around to impart information when its needed. Perhaps, if I were to look at it from that angle, an organisational learning type person’s role in this context would be to help the learner establish their network by not only introducing employees to knowledge, but also to other employees who can act as future sources of knowledge.

But this is where the problems start. In my utopian world that’s a wonderful suggestion, but in the less attractive reality, such acts come up against significant barriers, with organisations desiring control, denying non-formal learning is occurring, wanting to “harness” and measure it and so on.  Another barrier is us as educators, it can be hard to admit that we aren’t the all knowing powerful beings that we purport to be when up infront of the class in the training room.

So where to go with this? There has to be a happy medium between formal and non-formal learning in organisations, I’d even dare to suggest it is negligent of learning and development practitioners to blindly deny that non-formal learning occurs as it obviously does, and I believe it can complement formal learning really well if supported within an organisation.

In summation, I think that our role as educators  in the corporate learning and development world is to support and recognise options for learning that extends beyond our immediate control and department and to respect the learner, and help them develop their own network so that the quality of their non-formal learning is high.

Connectivism: round four

I’m going to revisit George Siemens’ Connectivism for the fourth time as part of my reading for ECI831.  I haven’t really *stopped* thinking about Connectivism this semester as it underpins so much of what I believe about how we learn, but at the same time, I don’t entirely agree with it as a learning theory.  I know that, considering my passive interest in CCK09 and my extreme excitement that George Siemens is going to be a guest presenter for ECI831 next week this sounds, this sounds… not right. There’s also that voice in my head that says “You’re a student, what on earth makes you think you know better”, and “what is George Siemens read *your* work with its holes and gave an honest opinion?”, so it’s hard for me to give an honest response, but I’m going to try, as I seem to be inching closer toward finding out what I really think every time I try to do a bit of free writing about it.

The reason I can’t see Connectivism as a learning theory is because I still believe that learning is a personal thing, which is influenced by the continuous interaction between the person and their environment. Learning can be socially constructed for and by the individual, but I don’t think it can exist outside for the individual, so what is learned and known to you, is information to me if I haven’t encountered it myself. Wenger’s (1999) participation and reification come to mind here in terms of how we negotiate meaning, and how that meaning changes our identity.  I think that the individual’s network serves to filter information, and the better that network and our own connective literacy, the more relevant that information is, and the faster it can be learned… If the individual doesn’t learn from what they encounter in others, and only encounters others learning, how does their identity evolve? is scaffolding just replaced with pattern recognition?

So now that I’ve gotten that off my chest and asked more confusing questions, I agree with pretty much everything else Siemens says.  I could just quote most of the paper and write “yes!” next to it over and over.  I especially believe that the capacity to know is more important than knowing everything… I’d go so far as to suggest we store information (I think Siemens would call this knowledge, see above paragraph) outside ourselves, I know I do. My del.icio.us and blog posts are my saviour when it comes to assignment writing time, and the social commentary around their content informs my learning each time I visit.

I also agree with information being chaotic, with everything linked to everything. All I have to do is look at my own personal learning environment to see this, there’s stuff and connections between people and topics everywhere, some I can explain, most of it is random and organic. I think our participation in environments takes us on a journey, although I don’t see that journey as chaotic, I think that the way we organise the information, gives us direction, we see what we want to see… and perhaps (this is where I probably depart from Siemens because I think the individual learning crucial here) we see what we’re ready to see, based on what we’ve personally learned.

I think I’d reserve the biggest loudest “yes” for Siemens assertion that systems need to be informationally open.  Our environment online, through the properties of networked publics (boyd 2008), show who we’ve been, who we are, and to some extent, where we want to go (just think about those old blog posts you’ve written, your current learning communities and those who you’ve just started following for development reasons on Twitter or the like)… and without the benefit of being able to connect at will, without being informationally open, the quality of our learning would deteriorate because our connections would be limited.

I think that’s enough now.  This has been a bit of a free writing exercise for me to loosen up some thoughts (so nice to just think on paper after all my academic assignments!)… I’ve really tried to be honest, and I hope that’s not offensive to anyone.  I keep coming back to this paper over and over because I see it as incredibly valuable to my studies and my professional field, even if I don’t agree with quite all of it.

References:

boyd, d. 2008 Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics, PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley

Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, Cambridge University Press, USA.

Connective Literacy

The concept of the Personal Learning Network is not new, with variations or underpinnig theories increasing in popularity throughout the 1970’s.  There are multiple factors that have created educational environments conducive to the PLE style of development, including the rapid rate of change, educational fashion and the advent of social media to name a few, but in my studies so far, I have been unable to find a description of the individual skills that underly the PLE, with George Siemens’ Connectivism (2004) being the closest in describing the critical need to recognise patterns in ever shifting chaos. Perhaps this lack of investigation is because of the assumption that because PLEs  grow organically and are highly personalised in nature, perhaps it’s because I have been researching in the wrong places. Connective literacy is my attempt to identify the collective competencies that a PLE owner hones over time in developing their PLE.

In addition to the underpinning adult learning principles, there are a variety of skills that are required to develop and maintain a PLE.  The PLE Growth Model identifies this particular collection of skills as “connective literacy” and illustrates their development through time and experience in developing the PLE.

The term connective literacy is used to describe the aptitude for locating, connecting with, and assessing the value of nodes online or offline within the current and future context of the personal learning environment.  The term spans further than the original core skills described in Siemens’ Connectivism (2004), in suggesting that there are a set of underlying social, informational and digital aptitudes that drive the key competencies of recognising important information and patterns and making and maintaining connections with others, and that these patterns vary according to environment and change in a directed manner reflecting the learner’s developing needs.

Existing social intelligence and information literacy theories can be applied to the PLE because nodes, whose role includes creating and filtering relevant information are often human and therefore social in nature, or may be a product of social construction.  The learner also needs to have a level of information literacy to recognise and evaluate the credibility and usefulness of the information nodes can contribute (Bruce 1997) and tie with them on a social level in a manner culturally acceptable, requiring both social awareness and facility (Goleman 2006).  Additionally, the learner needs to overlay their mix of social intelligence and information literacy ith pattern recognition skills (Siemens 2004) to organise their environment in a manner that streamlines the filtered information into workable sources that can be applied to self defined learning needs.

In addition to the externally facing skills above, the learner needs to have a sense of self concept, future direction and awareness to grow their PLE in a fashion consistent with their shifting learning needs and identity.  The skills include the ability to assess their current environment and align it to their evolving needs by applying their current context to their desired future direction, identifying potentially useful nodes and “seeding” them in the PLE, rendering nodes that are currently not useful but still hold potential dormant or “quiet”, and “weeding” noisy or ill fitting nodes to remove them from the PLE.

Because PLEs frequently span online and offline realms, it is held that digital literacy is increasingly important in determining our access to learning opportunities (Blackall 2005).  As those aspects of a PLE that exist online become more dominant and move with increasing speed toward a “personal web” (Johnson et al 2009), digital literacy will be a required component of connective literacy as it has a direct correlation with an individual’s ability to use tools that allow them to self organise their environment in a way that minimises noise.

References

Blackall, L. (2005) Digital literacy: How it affects teaching practices and networked learning futures – a proposal for action research, International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, December. Viewed online 23 September 2009 at http://networkedlearning.wikispaces.com/digital+literacy+and+how+it+affects+teaching+and+learning+practices

Bruce, C. S. (1997) Seven Faces of Information Literacy, AULSIB Press, Adelaide

Goleman, D. (2006) Social Intelligence, Hutchison London

Johnson, L., Levine, A., & Smith, R. (2009) The 2009 Horizon Report. Austin, Texas: The New Media
Consortium.

Siemens, G. (2004) Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. Viewed online on 18 May, 2009 at http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm

PLE Wanted: Vendors and Institutions Need Not Apply

I’ve been pondering the nature of PLEs a little more of late, and as I gear up to investigate how one could go about supporting PLEs in an organisational setting which needs some form of assessment, I seem to run into a few problems before I can even get to the (hairy) assessment one.  It seems that many organisations and institutions aren’t quite satisfied with the benefits they can gain from a learner’s PLE, they want to own it too.

I’m going to put my learning anarchy hat on here and say quite definitively in terms of organisational ownership  “by definition, you cannot own someone’s PLE”.  When considering a PLE as :

“a tool that allows for a learner (or anyone) to engage in a distributed environment consisting of a network of people, services and resources” (Downes 2006, p23)

it doesn’t seem quite right.  I think that some vendors and organisations take the “tool” thing a bit too literally and think they can build some fantastic portal, aggregator thing, supported through the institution’s infrastructure and call it a PLE, but they can’t. They can build a fantastic portal, aggregator thing… and that’s really it because such a tool is:

• not owned by the learner, but the institution
• only takes into account the online component of a PLE, this is described as the Personal Web by Stephen Wheeler
• assumes that all components of the online PLE will fit into this portal thing (something as simple as a password protected Ning foils this)
• is organised according to the needs of the organisation first and foremost (I don’t care what skin you can apply or what modules can be shown or selected, it is still defined by the system’s infrastructure, which is defined by the organisation)

If the PLE is considered as a tool a little more metaphorically, in that the PLE is the tool, and that tool is the distributed environment Downes describes, it gains its own unique shape through the interactions of the learner, growing and shrinking according to their will, extending nodes where they want them to be. If looking at it that way, the architecture of the PLE is owned and formed by the learner, and the PLE becomes

a tool that complements the ideal of lifelong learning, acting as an enabler of both formal and informal learning, for institutional or personal objectives, transforming over time to meet ever changing objectives.

This “thing” an institution owns is probably more like a Virtual Learning Environment, a Community of Practice, or more skeptically an LMS with some bells and whistles.  While it may be a tool that holds much pedagogical value (and I really do earnestly believe in the value of such tools infact, I am Mollybob the online community manager/facilitator when not being a student on this blog), it is but a part of a bigger picture and, by definition, can never be a Personal Learning Environment.