Nice presentation at the Networked Learning conference by Riina Vuorikari and Yves Punie and others. Here are my notes from the session. Digital natives is a problematic term. Learning networks for professional development Learning analytics in a teachers’ social network Teacher collaboration in the context of networked learning - current eTwinning perspectives and future perspectives Supporting teachers’ networked learning skills for more online engagement Contexts European Schoolnet - created in 1997 based in Brussels network of 30 EU ministries of education eTwinning - community for schools in Europe, started 2005 Portal for teachers in Europe 133088 active members, inspiring teachers and professional development and tools for collaboration and rewards Bruer et al 2009 School collaboration Projects can be of any kind and length Spreading a positive virus called pedagogical innovation Those not connected don’t get the virus and are not collaborating with others ETwinning reach = number of eTwinners/number of teachers ca. 160, 000 schools On average 2.64% of EU teachers are eTwinners Countries have very big differences big community in Estonia whereas very low in Germany Can map to Rogers diffusion of innovation curve still mainly innovators and early adopters Tellnet project - to better understand how social learning networks can support teachers’ competence building Methods: longitudinal studies using authentic eTwinning data, SNA, visualization techniques, scenario forecasting exercises TALIS< OECD, 2009 Teachers’ co-operation teachers working together: a statistical factor analysis. Two types of activity: exchange and coordination and deeper collaboration Can drill down and find out the nature of these two types of activities. Social capital Burt 1992 Human capital ability to perform tasks, Social capital social environment surrounding individual Social capital as a property of individuals - position in SN that are ore efficient in performing tasks (ie local structures) and groups - structure of members betwork that makes the group functions more efficient Used SNA metrics and a development model The performance of teachers and projects recognized by quality labels Network structure of projects and position of teachers - identified via networks created by several communication mechanisms (message, project collaboration, blog) Two forms of social capital - structural holes vs. closure Structural holes nodes are positioned at the interface between groups, informational advantages access to information from different parts of the network, from novel ideas by combining information from different groups, control the communication between groups Closure - nodes are embedded in tightly knit groups, more trust and security within coherent communities Coleman 1990 - Social capital - individual and groups deriving benefits from social relationships, network structural property - either structural hole or closure At what stage is the members’ network of a given group? How does it relate to the performance of the group? Can trace stages of development: born, bonding, emergence to interdisciplinary, Hierarchical and focused.  Pham et al. 2011 Density: fraction of actual edges in the network Global clustering coefficient Maximum betweenness: highest betweenness of nodes Largest connected component: fraction of nodes in largest connected component IPTS research: Significant change in what, how where and when we learn

Terry Anderson and Jon Dron gave an excellent and highly entertaining keynote at the Networked Learning conference this week. They focused on their concept of the four generations of Distance Education pedagogies. They describe this work in more detail in a special issue of IRRODL on connectivism. Here are my notes from the session. Agenda The nature of technologies and pedagogies Reviewing generations of DE and pedagogy Aligning them with groups, sets and nets (Dron and Anderson, 2007) Case study using Athabasca’s landing ELGG installation Here are the slides for Jon and Terry’s session It’s hardly easy to be softly hard: freedom and control in learning spaces View more presentations from jondron Overview Generations of distance learning pedagogies (open/closes, hard/soft) Instructivist - self-paced, individual study, etc. Social constructivist - groups, classes, etc. Connectivist -  networks, MOOCs, etc Holist - sets and collectives   P1. The next generation learning evolves form and with past generations P2. Different structures/pedagogies/technologies wth different affordance and degrees of hardness affect our use. McClunan Learning as a Dance (Anderson 2008) Technologies set the beat and the timing, pedagogy defines the moves. Technologies The orchestration of phenomena to some use (Arthur, 2009). Assemblies of hard and soft components. Technologies exist in relation to get other. Technologies are assemblies. Pedagogies are among the soft components of all learning technologies. A pen can be used for an infinite number of pedagogies. Writing and reading are technologies, as is language. Technologies Soft Hard The adjacent possible Flexibility and freedom Creativity Orchestration of phenomena by humans Path dependencies Freedom from error Uniformity Orchestration of phenomena embedded The different is the degree of human involvement. Soft is hard (its difficult), Hard is easy.  Soft technologies enable us to be creative. Behavioural/Cognitive Pedagogies - Instructivist Tell ‘em what your going to tell ‘em. Tell ‘em and tell ‘em what you told them - Direct Instruction movement (ISD). Enhanced by the cognitive revolution - chunking, cognitive load, working memory, multiple representations, split-attention effect, variability effect, Sorden 2005 - multi-media effect. Greeno, Collins and Resnick, 1996 Behaviorist /Cognitive thinking - knowledge as a thing, context free, can be transmitted, logically coherent, readily defined through closed systems with discernable relationships between input and output Technologies - videos, lectures, text books, video and audio broadcast, course packages. Knewton - continous adpativity Social focus of ist generation - individual learner Instructivist freedoms - subject, delegability (choosing to choose), technology, approach (how - pedagogy process), sociability, pace, time and location. M. Paulsen Future of 1st generation OERU, limitless, very low cost content, challenges of accreditation, The (forever?) just around the corner, ‘learner adaptation’ technologies. The great courses content, interactive MIT courses, value of courses is dropping. Give aways - Issues in Distance Education series - http://aupress.ca Seven books available. Second generation DE - social constructivist pedagogy Continuum conversation with the external world and tis artefacts with oneself and with other learners and teachers Groups as the social unit of SC pedagogy Why groups? Students who learner in small groups demonstrate greater academic achievement Springer Stanne and Donovan 1999 p. 42 Problems with groups: Restriction in time, space , pace and relationship, not open, Confined by the leaders expectation, usually isolated from the authentic world of practice, low tolerance of differences, Bron 2005 Group think, Cousin and Deepwell 2005, Poor preparation for LLL beyond the course, unscalable. Group model - membership and exclusion, closed, Hierarchies of control, focus on collaboration and shared purpose, teachers - guides. Freedoms for control of learning are different Trusts both opens and constrains. Typically a structure process. But: opportunities for negotiation of control, shifting boundaries, diversity valorized, big issue - getting it just right for everyone (assessment?) Third generation - connectivist pedagogy Learning is building capacity. Emergent, distributed and diverse, chaotic, fragmented, non-sequential and contexualised. Connected knowledge. Barth 2004. Knowledge is defined by its creation through activities - accessing information, evaluation, filtering, conveying ides. Burt 2005 Brockerage and closure. Networks celebrate and stimulate cognitive diversity. Arises when have diff types of info and knowledge perspectives, diff ways of viewing the world, diff ways of categorizing a problem, heuristics yielding diff ways of solving problems Fisher 2009 Technologies - networks, bottom-up, open, inclusive, focus on individual and connections, teachers - role models and co-travelers, change.mooc.ca People who live in the intersection of social worlds are at greater risk of having good ideas’ (Burt) The network is not an analogy of how we think, it is how we think Siemens Much more connectivist freedoms MOOCs aren’t courses, they are opportunities for learning, learner has a lot of individual freedom and control Limitless assembly, limitless choice, limitless dialogue, but too soft. Connectivism is the pedagogy of infinity But do learning networks really work? Network ghost towns, build it and they may come or not Weinberger’s new book ‘Too big to know’ Fear of open spaces, Internet is what you get when everyone is a curator and everything is linked. Very disruptive. Lost is social space! Choice! = control Its not just about networks Set model Cooperation, anonymity, focus on filtering and selection, hashtag is about sets, tags and categorization, teachers: analysers, curators and publishers, analytics, collectives. Pinterest. Nets (MOOCs, blogs, LinkedIn, social networks), groups (classes, LMS, tutorial groups) and sets (Wikipedia, twitter, pinterest, google search) are different 4th generation of learning pedagogy Reducing choices to only those choices that learners want or need to make. People need to make meaningful choices. 1st - 4th generation from closed to open, from hard to soft! Holist freedoms have a high degree of control over the different aspects of learning. How holist? Plenty, openness (resources, people), soft and malleable systems, feedback loops, stigmery, social navigations, sociability, adaptive hypermedia, collaborative filtering, learning and process analytics, hard when wanted, soft when not, Structure and infrastructure. The collective - emergent structure, individual behaviour. Etc. The Matthew effect the richer get richer, following the wrong trails, cold start problems, context separation, mob stupidity. Testing these theories out at Athabasca. The landing platform - ELGG. It’s a walled garden. A private space for AU but has windows. User controlled creative space, Boutique social system. Networking, blogging, photos, microblogging, polls calendars, groups, etc., differentiating and merging world from school, form fun. ! It’s a soft space. It malleable space. Multiple rationales. Have nets, sets and groups within this landing platform. Popular activities - blogs, files, wire posts, bookmarks, discussion topics, wiki, photo page. It’s not a product it’s a process. Tara Fenwick - opening up small spaces within what exists. Current user bas 3250 users (out of 42000 people). References Dron, J. and T. Anderson (2007). Collectives, networks and groups in social software for e-Learning. Proceedings of World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education Quebec. Retrieved Feb. 16: 2008.      

I am doing a seminar at Plymouth University on the 18th April. I thought it might be fun to adopt a crowdsourcing approach to gathering material for the event. I would of course acknowledge all contributions. Don’t know how this will work but thought it might be fun as an experiment. The topic is digital liteacies and creativity. So…. Contributions here please!

I was supposed to be doing a keynote at the ALDinHE conference in Leeds last week, but stupidly managed to double book myself. Luckily they got Helen Beetham as a replacement. By way of apology I have created a slidecast of the talk that I would have given. There is also an article to accompany the talk in the ALDinHE journal.  Conole al din_he View another webinar from Grainne Conole

The blog post is a work up of a talk I gave in the School of Education at Plymouth University on the 18th April 2012.  Conole plymouth View more PowerPoint from Grainne Conole Jenkins (2009) lists eleven digital literacies which he argues are needed to be part of what he terms today’s participatory culture. They are: play, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, negotiation, distributed intelligence, multitasking, appropriation, simulation and performance. I would add a twelfth, creativity. This list demonstrates the complex way in which we interact in digital networks and represents the set of skills we need to be able to harness and appropriate the affordances (Gibson 1979; Conole and Dyke 2004) of social and participatory media. Together these digital literacies enable us to find and manage information and to communicate and collaborate with others. These media offer rich multimedia representations and there are a plethora of ways in which we can interact and connect with others. The statistics associated with social media are truly profound as this short YouTube video demonstrates.[1] The figures are truly staggering; for example if facebook was a country it would be the third largest in the world. Clearly social and participatory media have significant potential to foster new approaches to learning, teaching and research, however to be used effectively we, as learners, teachers and researchers, need to develop a complex new set of digital literacy skills. Technologies have transformed everything we do; from the way we find information to the ways in which we connect with others. Arguably anything we want to know or learn is available somewhere on the net. As John Naughton argues, disruption is a feature of the net, not a bug (Naughton 2012).  New technologies have a unique set of characteristics: networked, distributed, peer reviewed and open, they are complex, dynamic and evolving - we co-evolve with the technologies, appropriating them into our everyday practice. Your network and who you connect with defines you.  A number of useful reports give summaries of these new technologies and their implications for education, for example the NSF-commissioned report on Cyberlearning (Borgeman, Abelson et al. 2008), a review of Web 2.0 tools in HE (Conole and Alevizou 2010) and more recently the IPTS report on digital competences (Ala-Mutka 2012). Digital competence is defined as: The confident, critical and creative use of ICT to achieve goals related to work, employability, learning, leisure, inclusion and/or participation in society (Ala-Mutka, 2012:1). The IPTS report describes how new technologies are being used for work, leisure and communication, arguing that the network is the key.  It also recognizes that new technologies are more participatory, promoting more open practices. However it also states that the digital divide (Norris 2001; Warschauer 2004) is still present - arguably narrower, but deeper. What are the implications of not being part of the net, when increasingly more and more information is only available online? The report outlines a digital competency framework, consisting of three aspects: information skills and knowledge, advanced skills and knowledge and attitudes. These can be broken down into the following components: Operational skills and knowledge - referring to the technical aspects of digital tools, such as using a mouse or manipulating particular tools. Medium-related skills and knowledge - referring to understanding how to purposefully and safely use specific media.  Communication and collaboration - referring to the ability to effectively express and communicate, as well as understanding the potential and limitations of different media. Information management - referring to navigating the wealth of information available online and making informed judgments about which resources are appropriate in different contexts. Learning and problem solving - referring to acquisition of the skills needed to harness digital tools for learning, working and problem solving. Meaningful participation - referring to the ability to find and participate in digital activities, either individually or in collaboration with others. Intercultural and collaborative attitude - referring to the ability to be culturally sensitive and able to participate with others from different cultures in an appropriate manner. Critical attitude - referring to the ability to critically reflect on the quality and provenance of things they find on the net. Creative attitude - referring to the ability to adopt creative practices in harnessing technologies for learning, work and leisure activities, encouraging open and participatory approaches. Responsible attitude - referring to the need to be aware of the visibility and potential consequences of one’s own digital activities. Autonomous attitude - referring to the fact that the internet is not structured and has no rules or monitoring. Each individual needs to be clear of their own objectives and find and choose appropriate tools and resources to meet these objectives. The report also lists the benefits in terms of: social, health, economic, civic, cultural and societal. Although it also points out that there are a number of implications/risks, in terms of: personal safety and privacy, the need to act responsibly, ethically and legally, understanding the nature of digital media and issues associated with inequalities. It is interesting to reflect on how each of us are using these technologies and which are core to our daily practice. Beyond email and general use of the web, there as a number of core tools I now use on a regular basis. I have been blogging now since 2007.[2] Blogging has become an important part of my professional practice. I blog about ideas in development, reports on conferences and project meetings, pointers to interesting research and articles and draft publications. Blogging now sits as a step towards completed publications such as articles or books, and is a good way of working up ideas and getting comments from the wider research community. I use Endnote to manage references and have now built up a comprehensive library of references. Diigo  and ScoopIt are useful as a means of keeping track of interesting links on the web. In terms of social networking I am an active user of Twitter with more than 4,000 followers. I also use facebook extensively, the later for more social interactions and the former for more professional activities. Clearly such tools have enormous potential, but not everyone is comfortable with blogging or participating in social networks. Indeed many have very strong views against these technologies, arguing that they are trivial and raise a host of ethical and privacy issues. A body of research has emerged in recent years around the competences and skills needed to effectively use and interact with new technologies. Terms such as digital literacies, information literacies, 21st Century literacies have been used; each with subtle nuances and different foci (Jenkins, 2009; Goodfellow and Lea, 2007l Lankshear and Knobel, 2006). Literacies can be seen as a continuum from instrumental skills to productive competence and efficiency. Lankshear and Knobel (2006) adopt a ocio-cultural view of digital literacy and argue that they are the set of social practices and meaning making associated with interacting with digital tools. Fundamentally the central issue is about the literacies needed to communicate with others and make sense of information (and more specifically how to do this in a digital context). Returning now to Jenkins list of digital literacies, I will now expand on some of the terms and demonstrate how they are realised through use of digital technologies. The web is complex and vast, transmedia navigation is a key skill needed to be able to navigate this terrain. Arguably any information we want is available on the web, but finding appropriate resources and tools and evaluating their relevance is non-trivial. A good example of this is how learners are interacting in a new form of open and free courses, termed MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Developed by Siemens and Downes  MOOCs have now been running for four years or so. Anyone can participate in these courses, which are organized into chunks of materials and resources around particular topics over a number of months. Thousands sign up to participate in these courses, although the number that complete them and get any form of accreditation is much larger. Evaluation of users’ perceptions of these MOOCs indicates that many get lost easily and find participation far from satisfying. The sheer size and complexity of MOOCs is overwhelming; with each learner having to define their own personal learning environment and learning pathway through the course. Distributed cognition was defined by Saloman in the nineties (Salomon 1993). In essence this refers to the fact that our cognition is distributed between ours brains and our digital environment. We increasingly use a range of information management tools to collate and aggregate relevant resources, we harness our social networks in terms of getting answers to queries and participating in ongoing discourses and shared co-construction of knowledge. We are no longer isolated individuals, but part of a global distributed network of others and tools. Anyone who has seen children interacting with technologies, will agree that play is an essential digital literacies. Children don’t reach for a manual when starting to use a new tool, they simply start to interact and explore, learning through playing. This active, learner-centred approach is a key facet of new technologies and increasingly the interfaces of new tools are intuitive and self-explanatory. Play can be mapped to particular pedagogical approaches such as role-play and problem solving. A nice example comes from the SWIFT project,[3] which has developed a virtual Genetics laboratory in SecondLife. To orientate new users to the environment there is a maze that the users walk through, there are various activities they complete along the way and by the end of the maze they are equipped with the basic skills needed to interact in the environment. They can then enter and interact with the Genetics laboratory, playing with instruments, taking measurements and learning basic laboratory techniques. Networking is also a key characteristic of new technologies; the nature of your network and how you use it defines who you are in digital space. A network is only meaningful if you are connected to those with shared interests. Furthermore, it is important to give as well as take, active participation is expected. Within each social network we interact with others in a variety of ways. With both facebook and Twitter, I have a number of ‘onion layers’ of those I interact with; there is an inner core of friends and followers who I interact with on a regular basis and then a set of layers of users I interact with less and less, and finally those that follow me, but that I don’t follow. Collective intelligence refers to the ability to be able to work with others to solve a problem or aggregate a set of resources. A good example of harnessing the distributed collective intelligence of the network is the work being done as part of the iSpot project,[4] on promoting scientific awareness. It is an online site where users can share and discuss sightings of fauna and flora around the UK.   The site is an excellent example of collective intelligence (Lévy 1997) and harnessing the power of the masses, as it enables the capture of sightings of flora and fauna from around the country on changes in patterns of nature that can then feed into ongoing research activities. Once registered, a user can add an observation to the Website, suggest an identification, or see if anyone else can identify the species. Users can also contribute to existing observations and there is a forum to stimulate debate. Despite the overall look and feel of the site being focussed on ‘fun’, it feeds directly into real research activities and also enables users to transfer their informal learning/interests into more formal educational offerings if they wish. Evaluation of the use of the site indicates that it is increasing general interest in science and is also resulting in users then signing up for more formal courses (Clow and Makriyannis 2011). The data collected on the site is being used by scientists and is providing them with a rich understanding of the changing ecology across the UK. Galaxy Zoo[5] is a similar initiative. The general public are invited to help astronomy researchers to categorise and chart the galaxy, using thousands of images derived from the Hubble Space Telescope Archive.   Performance is about how you present yourself on the web and the ways in which you interact with others. We each need to find our own digital identity and voice. Some choose to adopt a very professional stance, others are more light hearted. We each need to decide the degree to which we want to adopt open practices; what we share with others and the extent to which we share our experiences and activities. I have a very open approach to the way in which I interact with others online, I share my ideas and thoughts as I go, pass on interesting ideas and references received from other, ask queries of the network, as well as providing useful feedback to others. For researchers social and participatory media offer a rich set of ways in which we can communicate and discuss our research outputs. They extend the reach of the audience; a paper in a closed journal might at best be read by a handful of readers, in contrast a blog post can be virally communicated to thousands in a nano second. There are now a number of new tools emerging that can provide some indication of an individual’s research impact. For example Google Citation Indicator gives the H factor for an individual, along with a ranked listing of their most cited papers. It is evident to me that these kinds of tools will be used increasingly within institutions in terms of promotion and at a national level in terms of things like research assessment exercises. Whether you like it or not, your digital footprint is there and is being monitored.   In addition to Jenkin’s list of digital literacies I would add creativity as an important skill in harnesses the potential of new technologies. Creativity derives from the Latin word, ‘crea’, which means to create or make something. It is about creating something new (either a physical artefact or a concept) that is both novel and valuable. It is about the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, partners, and relationships, and create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods and interpretations. I would argue that it is an essential skill to deal with today’s complex, fast and changing society. Technologies offer a wealth of ways to foster creativity; they provide a range of ways for us to communicate and collaborate with others. There are four aspects to creativity: ·        Process: mechanisms needed for creative thinking ·        Product: measuring creativity in people ·        Person: general intellectual habits (openness, ideas of ideation, autonomy, expertise, exploratory and behavioural) ·        Place: best circumstances to enable creativity to flourish.   There are five stages of creativity: ·        Preparation: identifying the problem ·        Incubation: internalisation of the problem ·        Intimation: getting a feeling for a solution ·        Illumination: creativity burst forth ·        Verification: idea is consciously verified, elaborated and applied   Wall (2009) argues that creativity is the new technology: I think that the 21st century will be a century of creativity in the same way that the 20th was of technology. Much of the creativity, interestingly enough, will be based on the tools provided by technology, especially tools that allow us to create, collaborate and communicate.   Along with the eleven digital literacies identified by Jenkins, creativity enables learners to connect and co-constructive meaning in rich authentic environments. iCreaNet (http://www.imv.au.dk/icreanet/) is a global research network of educational researchers focusing on support for development of creative skills in higher educational contexts. Fundamental to the work of the group is seeing ICT resources and environments as crucial means of providing the flexibility and diversity necessary to facilitate creative development and to bring education up to speed with the way that citizens of the earth learn and enhance themselves in the contexts of their daily lives in the 21st century. Conclusion This post has explored the types of digital literacies that are needed by learners, teachers and researchers to exploit the potential of new technologies and to enable them to connect and communicate in a plethora of ways. The digital literacies needed are far more participatory and interactive, the distributed network of others that we connect with is as important as the way in which we access and use information on the Internet. We each need to identify our own digital voice and identity, how we want to be perceived and how we want to interact with others. Used effectively social and participatory media offer a powerful means of us communicating and developing our ideas. References Ala-Mutka, K. (2012). Mapping digital competence: towards a conceptual understanding. IPTS report. Saville. Borgeman, C., H. Abelson, et al. (2008). Fostering learning in the networked world: the cyberlearning opportunity and challenge, Report of the NSF task force on cyberlearning. Clow, D. and E. Makriyannis (2011). iSpot analysed: participatoiry learning and reputation. 1st learning analytics and knowledge conference, Banff, Canada. Conole, G. and P. Alevizou (2010) "Review of the use(s) of Web 2.0 in Higher Education." Conole, G. and M. Dyke (2004). "What are the affordances of information and communication technologies?" ALT-J 12(2): 113-124 %U http://oro.open.ac.uk/6981/. Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Hillsdale, New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum Associated. Jenkins, H. (2009). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century, Mit Pr. Lankshear, C. and M. Knobel (2006). "Digital literacies: Policy, pedagogy and research considerations for education." Nordic Journal of digital literacy 1(1): 226. Lévy, P. (1997). Collective intelligence: Mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace, Perseus Books Cambridge, MA, USA. Naughton, J. (2012). From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg, what you really need to know  about the internet. Norris, P. (2001). Digital divide: Civic engagement, information poverty, and the Internet worldwide, Cambridge Univ Pr. Salomon, G., Ed. (1993). Distributed cognitions - pyschological and educational considerations. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Wall, R. (2009). "Creativity is the new technology." Zen and the art of being rob http://robwall.ca/2009/03/10/creativity-is-the-new-technology/. Warschauer, M. (2004). Technology and social inclusion: Rethinking the digital divide, the MIT Press.     [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eUeL3n7fDs   [2] http://e4innovation.com   [3] http://www2.le.ac.uk/projects/swift/   [4] http://ispot.org.uk   [5] http://www.galaxyzoo.org/

This is an update of my previous post on our 7Cs of learning design framework. We have now trialled aspects of this with three different groups: teachers in South Africa via a two-week online workshop - through a range of synchronous and asynchronous activities, in a face-to-face workshop with colleagues in Leicester on our new Masters programme and yesterday with teachers in Aalborg University. Conole learning design_final View another webinar from Grainne Conole

I’ve just returned from a few days in Dublin, where I was doing some work at Dublin City University (DCU). On Monday, I met with the President of DCU Brian MacCraith. We had an excellent conversation covering a wide range of aspects of the use of technology to support learning. Brian outlined their plans to set up a new Centre for Digital Learning, which sounds really exciting. So it will be interesting to see how things move forward at DCU as a result. I ran a two-hour Masterclass in the afternoon on learning design. I was expecting about 30 people, whereas in reality there were more than 90! We managed to have a good session nonetheless, with a number of interactive activities, such as: brainstorming the characteristics and implications of new technologies, exploring people’s personal digital learning environments, their views on Facebook and other social media,  and the how to ruin a course activity. They also had a chance to explore some of our learning design conceptual tools - such as the pedagogy/activity profile. On Tuesday I gave a keynote entitled ‘Social and participatory media and new digital literacies’ as a prelude to DCU’s annual teaching and learning awards. I was impressed with the range of innovations created by those who were shortlisted and it was great to hear the testimonials from their students. Overall it was a good trip and it was great to get some insight into what DCU is doing and their vision for the future. An institution to watch I think.

I’ve just returned from a great trip to South Africa with five of my colleagues from Leicester (Ale Armellini, Ming Nie, Palitha Edirisingha, Terese Bird and Gabi Witthaus). Gabi is collating all twelve of our presentations on the BDRA blog, which will also have some audio and video recordings of the sessions. We were presenting to colleagues at UNISA (South Africa’s distance education institution, which has an impressive 350, 000 students!). We presented in parallel at two campuses - Pretoria and Florida. The sessions covered the following topics: Optimising the research possibilities in online teaching and learning (Ming Nie and Gabi Witthaus) 2.     Questions for future e-learning research: can we plug the gaps? (Ale Armellini) 3.     New Technologies and 21st century learners and their impact on teaching and learning at Unisa (Palitha Edirisingha) 4.     Ethical considerations in learning and teaching (Palitha Edirisingha) 5.     OER-based design for learning and its impact on research (Ming Nie and Gabi Witthaus) 6.     What works and what doesn’t work in research dissemination (Terese Bird) 7.     An overview of the TEL landscape (Gráinne Conole) 8.     Research methodology in TEL (Gráinne Conole) 9.     Harnessing social media (Gráinne Conole) 10. The implications of open practices for learning, teaching and research (Gráinne Conole) 11. Translating research into practice (Gráinne Conole)  Together the presentations gave a rich overview of the currant state of the art in TEL research. The audience were very participatory and asked lots of great questions. Our host Paul Prinsloo couldn’t have looked after us better, and although we didn’t have much leisure time, we managed to get a bit of experience of life in South Africa.  Paul’s blog is well worth a look at.  We are hoping to go back and follow up with some more in-depth interactive workshops, particularly focusing around learning design and Open Educational Resources (OER). An excellent, productive and enjoyable trip!

I am delighted to have been elected to the EDEN executive!  The website states: The European Distance and E-Learning Network exists to share knowledge and improve understanding amongst professionals in distance and e-learning and to promote policy and practice across the whole of Europe and beyond. I must admit I was a tad nervous standing up and saying why I wanted to be elected. There were four of us standing for three places. EDEN is a great professional body and well worth getting involved with for anyone with an interest in distance and online learning. The annual conference and research workshops are always an excellent opportunity to catch up with other researchers in the field and are usually in lovely locations around Europe! EDEN also has an online professional network and is linked to the EURODL research journal. I am looking forward to working with others on the committee over the next few years!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/24289877@N02/3638995571/ In this blog post I want to describe seven principles of learning design. I would welcome comments. Are there any others I have missed for example? The first is that teachers are bewildered by the plethora of tools available and lack the skills necessary to make informed learning design decisions. Therefore a key facet of all the tools is that they attempt to provide practitioners with some form of guidance and support around their design practice. The aim is to help them shift from an implicit, belief-based approach to design to one that is more explicit and design-based (Conole 2009). Evidence of the evaluation of the use of these tools shows that they do help shift practitioners from a focus on content to activities and the learner experience. The second is that many of the tools use the power of visualisation as a means of representing the designs. These can then be shared and discussed with other. The third is that there is a tension between design representations that are rigorous, precise and perhaps machine runnable and those that are more creative, ‘fluffy’ and nearer to real practice. Derntl et al.  (Derntl, Parish et al. 2010) argue that designing for learning needs both ‘beauty’ and ‘precision’; and they show how different design languages can be used to present these. They state that: We are in no way suggesting that beauty and precision are in opposition to one another, nor even that they are mutually exclusive concerns. We make the distinction merely to further stress the competing demands on instructional designers for maintaining a grand view of the learning experience while also addressing the myriad details of an effective end product. The fourth is that there is an issue about what level of in-context support and guidance is provided to the designer and how such support can be created on the fly from up-to-date and authoritative sources. The CompendiumLD tool includes a walled garden Google search, which searches across a number of predefined well-known and validated sources against a set of keywords(Brasher, Conole et al. 2008). However, in the future much more sophisticated personalised help needs to be developed. The fifth is the fact that learning designs are both a produce and a process. In the first instance the designer engages with various learning design Mediating Artefacts to guide their design process, through a creative, iterative and messy process. Then their final design is a product, which represents a particular moment in time in the design process. The sixth is that, as Liz Masterman articulates, there are two dimensions of learning design: i) the creation of structured sequences of learning activities, and ii) a way to represent and share practice. Finally, it is clear that the inherent affordances of different learning design tools will have an impact on how the practitioner goes about the design process. For example, because the LAMS tool focuses on tools as conceptual elements, the design process is likely to be tools focused. In contrast, the social networking site Cloudworks focuses on sharing and discussion and so emphasises the practitioner, dialogic aspects of design. I believe we are at an interesting watershed in terms of learning design research. We have made significant steps forward in the field over the last ten years or so and now have a much richer understanding of design practices and mechanisms for promoting them. The tools developed along the way have enabled us to explore these in real-world contexts; some focus on visualisation, others on dialogue and sharing, and others on guidance/support. All three of these different types of scaffolds are important and support the practitioner in different ways.  What is needed next is to try and combine these elements, not necessarily into one monolithic tool, but through the creation of some form of dynamic learning design ecosystem. As a first step towards this, the key researchers in the field have being meeting as part of an EU-funded group, the LDGrid.[1] A key output of the group is to produce a concise, comprehensive and accessible set of resources for practitioners and learners to help them adopt more learning design based thinking and practices. The group has held a number of workshops and has an evolving set of learning design resources. References Brasher, A., G. Conole, et al. (2008). CompendiumLD - a tool for effective, efficient and creative learning design.             Conole, G. (2009). Capturing and representing practice. In A. Tait, M. Vidal, U. Bernath and A. Szucs (Eds.) Distance and E-learning in Transition: Learning Innovation, Technology and Social Challenges. London, John Wiley and Sons.             Derntl, M., P. Parish, et al. (2010). "Beauty and precision in instructional design." Journal on e-learning 9(2): 185-202.                   [1] http://www.ld-grid.org/