Here’s my slide deck for my keynote at #aitd2012

Photo by Sergiu Bacioiu, cc licensed on Flickr

(This post is cross-posted from a guest blog post I wrote for Hazel Owen at Ethos Consultancy NZ community site)

I have a hard truth to share with you. Our learning management systems are letting us down. They are not getting the job done.

The slow rise of social learning

Over the last decade, the internet has gone from a primarily static content distribution system, to a social publishing, communication and sharing environment. As we’ve seen this “social web” develop, several social learning theoretical frameworks have been developed and tested, including connectivism, social constructivism and the conversational framework. These pedagogical models of learning remain at the periphery and have yet to achieve mainstream adoption.

That uptake will be slower in coming than some of us might wish, due to many stumbling blocks. I’ll mention just a few here:

• our policies (both governmental and institutional) are slow to adapt because policy changes are not made at the speed of social media,
• a “content is king” culture exists in learning and training that is hard to crack,
• some long-standing organisational habits are not conducive to transformation (timetabling, lectures, a weighted teaching-research balance),
• there are debates about what constitutes proof of learning; is it tests and exams or projects, group work and portfolios,
• the struggle for investments needed for large IT projects in an age of funding and budget cuts,
• digital literacy skill challenges of the parties involved,
• and a persistent belief that nothing trumps face-to-face interactions.

I’m sure that there are gradations to which these stumbling blocks are present in your organisation and that there are others. And there’s no need to point fingers. These are large complex changes that affect every single part, process and person in our organisations. It will take time, new practices and some very hard thinking to adopt this new social learning. But it’ll be totally worth it. We will change how people have learned for… well, forever. The flexibility, support and opportunities we now have through education technology and social media, will allow people to have a job while studying, to have a family, to lead a portfolio life, to live where they want, to change careers. And that goes for teachers and learners as well. Social technologies shold herald the survival or perhaps rebirth of the university, in a new connected form. It’s tremendously exciting to be a part of this learning transformation, even if getting there makes us want to tear our hair out…

The insidious infiltrator

So I’ve been doing my share of the hard thinking, and in starting my new role at Deakin University, I came to a realisation. One of the stumbling blocks to the uptake of social learning is so well camouflaged, so institutionalized, such a part of the furniture, that I’ve been using it on a daily basis and never noticed just how much it got in the way of social learning. In fact, it is an insidious infiltrator, it presents itself as an aide to our social learning cause, our hope, while actually delaying it. Yep, it’s the Learning Management System.*

The hope…

About 3 years ago I had a small glimmering of hope that a change was gonna come, when I was running a Beginner’s Guide to EIT Online workshop at my previous institution, EIT Hawke’s Bay. The beginner’s guide was aimed at staff members (teachers, librarians, professional staff and others) new to EIT Online, our Moodle LMS. Besides Moodle use, the workshop also covered some basic computing skills, like file management, browser use, and shortcuts like Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. With this target audience, I often explained the uploading of a file to a course as “no more difficult than attaching a file to an email”. I figured email was likely the most commonly used information system in their every day tasks. But on that day, one of the participants proved me wrong. After succesfully uploading a file to her course site, she piped up triumphantly: “Oh, it’s like posting on my wall!” She was of course referring to her Facebook wall. And I thought to myself two things. One: I really need to update my workshop. Two: this is it! If people are gaining these kinds of digital literacies from social networking activities they perform on a daily basis, just think what a change that’s going to make in how far I can take them in our course design and learning management system…

The realisation…

But that’s not what happened. More and more, I would work with lecturers who became my Facebook friends, my Twitter buddies, my Instagram connections. (Even now in my new country, they still send me the loveliest messages and pictures and some of the most obnoxious content they dig up on the “interwebz”. Bless.) Their digital literacies were obviously on the rise. However, they continued to struggle and wrangle with our LMS and with adopting social learning approaches. No matter how encouraging I was in us focusing on activity-based learning, and collaborative learning activities, in most instances the creation of a social learning experience was an uphill battle, from course design, to course development, to facilitation. Why?

Well, I’m starting to think that most LMSs are simply not very good social learning environments. They’re not even middling. They’re great at administrative tasks. Most are ok to good on content management. But despite course pages, discussion forums, wikis and glossaries, they are just not great social environments, requiring too many hoops to jump through to create a convenient, natural, social learning experience that fits in with our information consuming, active, diverse and increasingly mobile lives.

Picture by Spencer E Holtaway cc licensed on Flickr

Why is it more difficult to be social in an LMS than on Facebook?

Well to answer this, let’s look at 5 things we do on an average day on the largest social network, Facebook, that are difficult to do in an LMS.

15% of Facebook users update their own status.

In an LMS, only a teacher, tutor or trainer can perform a status update seen by the community or by a selected part of that community, in the form of a course announcement. Learners do not have a status update. Most LMS systems allow you to fill in some brief biographical information on your Profile page, but this is often a static text field with no history or stream. Some LMSs have implemented ‘shoutbox’ modules, which means users can post short messages in a course stream, but those messages are often not collated on the user’s profile page. You can say, well but that is not what the LMS is for. My answer is, perhaps, but that is how people establish an identity in a social environment. And identity is a prerequisite for building a learning community. Not allowing a user a space to establish an identity, makes it very difficult for them to feel ownership and participate actively.

We all try to get around this. For example by having an introduction forum, activity forums, or the Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, forums. But these are often public, or at least course wide, spaces. They are also instigated by the lead user in the environment (the teacher) and so slightly contrived. This is part of that insidious nature of the LMS I mentioned. We think we’re being social, we try to jump through the hoop the LMS has presented us with, but it’s a workaround.

22% of Facebook users comment on another’s post or status.

Making a connection with another user is the first step towards building trust. Commenting on someone’s posted content (a link or a shared thought) is a gentle trust building or trust affirming activity. And trust is prerequisite for communicating, discussing, collaborating and creating, all the things that should happen in a social learning community. Now on Facebook such a comment is often short, supportive or appreciative, and timely. It is also often only viewed by the few people in your network who happened to be online at that time in the Facebooks News stream or those you have closer ties with. And so even though it doesn’t disappear, it does lose its prominence in the crowd. And it is mainly contained to the user’s timeline.

In an LMS, a post will likely sit in a forum and remain prominent for the entire term. And so it becomes more intimidating to post to a forum or to comment on someone else’s post. And again, because the forum activity is an orchestrated subenvironment set up by the lead user, comments are often required to adhere to criteria (length, referencing, inclusion of links). And now, it’s not a matter of two learners connecting gently in each other’s personal learning spaces, but being mashed together in a public or group setting.

20% of Facebook users comment on another user’s photos.

The latest version of Moodle has a repository where learners can upload files, including photos. Many LMSs have a similar function or a portfolio tool where a learner can post individual content and choose to share it, often including the ability to make content available through a public link. So this sharing of photos (and other artefacts) is possible to some degree. But having a repository is not the same as having a personal space with a personal browsable life stream that can feed your community stream. Or I suppose in the case of the LMS and education, we should talk about a “personal learning stream that can feed and populate the communal learning stream.”

Reflecting on that very popular Facebook activity of posting and commenting on photos and updates, you can see that another obstacle in the LMS is the single sidedness a user (teacher or learner) is often required to present in a course site. Photos and status updates which users post to Facebook often are artefacts representative of a range of their interests. Speaking for myself I post about ukulele playing, shoes and food as well as social media journal articles and education technology presentations. I’d like to think that all of that gives me a rounded identity, again making it easier to be an interesting connection, current collaborator, fellow learner and future colleague.

Now I wouldn’t chat about ukuleles, shoes or food in an online work meeting. However, the fact that I have my own space (in my case on Facebook, Twitter, my blog and a little on LinkedIn) in which I display not only my personality, but also my expertise and thinking, means that a colleague or fellow learner can build up a sense of ambient awareness about me. A mutual ambient awareness can act as a lubricant to collaboration or co-learning. The one-sidedness and single focus imposed on us by the LMS is another hoop to jump through on the road to social learning.

26% of Facebook users “Like” another user’s content.

Liking is another gentle connection establishing and affirmative activity between users, fulfilling a similar role to the leaving of Comments mentioned above. However, at a network or community level, more ‘Likes’ on a piece of content, indicate importance (or at least popularity) of that artefact. It denotes value of that content.

However the Like button has an even more powerful function: the ability of the user to curate something into their own stream and the network stream with a single click. In the 8 Realities of the New Normal presentation, Lee Rainie of Pew states that one of the new ways people are adapting to the information age is that we show “grazing behaviour”. We consume little tidbits throughout the day. And when we see something that piques our interest we want to either collect it or share it (or both). The astronomic rise of Pinterest shows how fond we are of curating our interests, whether hobby, work or in our learning behaviour. Pinterest buttons are popping up left, right and centre, but the Facebook Like button is almost omnipresent already. So for a user to share an interest takes one action: Hit the Like button.

In an LMS, sharing a website for a teacher will typically take 11 actions from the moment they decided to share what piqued their interest.

1. Copy the url.
2. Open a new tab.
3. Go to the LMS website
4. Log in.
5. Click on that particular course site.
6. Go into Edit mode.
7. Scroll to the appropriate module or topic
8. Click Add Link.
9. Give the link a name.
10. Paste the link.
11. Click Save.
12. (Optional but probably necessary) Send a course announcement to let learners know about the new piece of content.

The learner in an LMS course site is dependent on the teacher setting up a social sharing space in the form of a wiki, glossary or forum. If it’s not in the course site, they can’t share at all. However, if this prerequisite does exist, their number of actions would be similar.

That’s 11 hoops to jump through to achieve one element of social learning in the LMS. And for the learner with little lasting result, because after 3 or 6 months, they will likely lose access to the content they and their fellow learners shared in that course site.

10% of Facebook users send another user a private message

In Facebook the Message function acts both as a very dressed down email and as a chat tool. It’s great for leaving someone a short, private message. Thanks to the presence indication that is built in, you can see when your friends are online and have a live, longer conversation with them. When you open up Facebook, you can see by the icon that you have a new message. A message also sets off an activity notification on your smartphone, so you can see it even on the move.

Most LMSs have a private messaging or private email function. Many institutions disable this function for learners. The worry is that learners may abuse the function, by spamming all 600 students in a course, or targeting individuals for abuse. Some institutions limit it so learners cannot message their teachers. Regardless of the policies and procedures, the LMS messaging system is often flawed for two reasons.

First, you only get messages or are able to chat, when you are logged in. Most people have Facebook open the whole day. In my work as Moodle admin, I found that the average site visit lasted 10 minutes. That is a short time, and so doesn’t create much overlap between fellow learners in a course. Anyway, in most LMSs it’s difficult to see whether any other learners are online with you. Most don’t have presence indication or it is only there if the teacher turns it on.

Second, the notification system is often an email. Or worse, an email to an institutional student email that is never checked. On receipt of the email the student can then, click a link, go to their browser, log in, click on the Messages link, find the message and then reply. It certainly lacks the convenience and that easy to use on-the-move aspect of the Facebook notification system. I know that people are working on mobile apps for LMSs, and I can’t wait until they’re pervasive.

The LMS as a mixing panel, the teacher as a DJ

Picture by Libertinus cc licensed on Flickr

So how can we address this stumbling block to social learning, now that we’ve uncovered it? Should we demand from our LMS vendors that their systems should be more like Facebook? No. Even the corporate LMSs don’t have the Zuckerberg millions to try and remake themselves in the Facebook image. And anyway, the Facebook statistics I’ve used above are just to highlight some social activities we do on a daily basis in ONE platform. Every day statistics like those above are available for Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Evernote, Google apps,…. The list goes on.

LMSs should not try to emulate all of those social media, but instead become better at integrating with them. The LMS needs to become a mixing panel for all the other platforms, where the teacher as a DJ for learning, can direct learning activities and community interactions. And we can see that the LMSs are developing in that direction. Moodle and D2L now make it easier for a teacher to find and embed content from those platforms, treating them as external content repositories. It’ll be interesting to see how they go about the next step, which should be linking to or importing people’s social identities and interactions.

Should we avoid using the LMS in our teaching & learning? Again, no. I think there is a role for the LMS. As I said above it is great for some of the administrative tasks and sensitive communication or assessment activities. But in our learning design, we need to show an awareness of the LMS limitations and work with other tools when they are better suited to the desired learning activity, using the LMS as a base camp.

A ‘mixing panel’ example

Say I want to design a crowd curation learning activity, in which learners contribute and share interesting links they find about the course topic throughout the course. In an LMS centric design, I might set up a forum in which students can post links but this solution has issues. It’s a cumbersome task for the learners requiring many actions. It’s taking place in an isolated system from the rest of the web community missing out on added value available in the network. The learners are not building towards a personal collection. And the learners will lose access to the course based collection, when they are unenrolled.

However a mixing panel learning design might be to use the LMS and Delicious. All the learners set up an account, they install the bookmarklet which makes curating a link a one-click action, and for any links about the course topic, they label it with a course tag I’ve set up. In the LMS I set up a web page with links, the course tag and instructions for the activity and a feed in a sidebar on the course homepage that shows the latest 5 curated links with that course tag. Every few weeks I post a course announcement in the LMS sharing, reviewing and commenting on some of the most popular links curated with our course tag. How is this ‘mixing panel’ design better suited for social learning?

• a better workflow for the students that is similar to a social activity they already do, so they are more likely to participate at a higher level,
• a dynamic stream both in Delicious and in the course, showing the other learners’ contributions which can act as a motivator,
• added value from the wider network around that topic. On Delicious, experienced practitioners in that field will already be active so the learning activity can contribute to the induction into a community of practice,
• the possibility to connect with the other course participants on Delicious in a connection that will outlast the course duration,
• the establishing of a personal and community collection of links that also outlasts the course duration,
• the collection can transcend the current course community of learning, as next semester’s students continue to grow the collection.

I think this ‘mixing panel’ use of the LMS is the answer. As Professor Grainne Conole said in her presentation here in Melbourne recently, “social media is a Pandora’s box”. It’s been opened and there is no putting it back in the box again. She’s right and we need to recognise that in the learning experiences we design. Use the LMS where indicated, but don’t make users jump through hoops. People have their personal learning networks and environments already.  Let’s use them and use the LMS as a mixing panel were us DJ teachers can bring it all together and whip up the learning community!

I’d like to thank Hazel Owen for the opportunity to appear as February’s guest blogger on her Ethos Consultancy NZ community site. Yes, it’s technically March now, but believe me most of this very long post was written in February. When she asked me, we discussed several topics and finally agreed on a comparison of user experiences in the LMS versus social media. I had no idea so much on this had been rumbling about in my mind. I’m very pleased Hazel chivvied me along in the nicest possible way to articulate these thoughts and put them all together coherently.

*If you are not in an organization with an LMS, you can probably substitute Intranet or Content Management System, where I say LMS.

Like most people in the last few weeks, I’ve been greatly entertained on Facebook and Twitter by the What People Think I Do, What I Really Do meme.

Here’s one for all you education technologists, or flexible learning advisors, or e-learning designers, or learning technologists, or whatever they call you…

This weekend I got the nicest email from Jasmin Klindžić, informing me that the latest translation of the Moodle Tool Guide was complete. He and his colleague Tona Perišić Pintek from the University of Zagreb had finished the Croatian translation. And with that, there are now a cool dozen translations.

The power of community around an LMS

I just wanted to take a moment and say thank you to all those Moodlers spending their evenings & nights contributing to their local Moodle community. A real example of Clay Shirky’s cognitive surplus in action:

More value can be gotten out of voluntary participation than anyone previously imagined, thanks to improvements in our ability to connect with one another and improvements in our imagination of what is possible from such participation.

I think the collaboration and open sharing in the Moodle community, is special.

And an active LMS community is an often neglected or underestimated point when organisations are selecting a new LMS. Choosing Moodle, you provide a platform where your users can immediately tap into a group of enthousiastic and open experienced practitioners publishing their experiences on a number of platforms (blogs, wikis, Twitter, Moodle.org, at MoodleMoots). These users share:

• classroom activities & strategies
• course design ideas
• LMS improvement suggestions
• staff development and training plans
• institutional implementation strategies

to name just a few. Moreover, Moodle users know that their experiences, wishes and frustrations are appreciated and listened to by the Moodle developers, because the developers are in the community with them. This symbiosis lies at the heart of Moodle’s success I think. Although other LMS vendors certainly recognise the importance of community, and set up community sites, in my experience these can often feel closed and contrived, with many of the shared artifacts produced by the vendor. I’d love to hear other edtech’s experiences of this, people who have worked in the implementation of several LMSs.

The Cool Dozen

So bravo translators and thanks again for contributing your time and effort to your community! Without further ado, here are the 12 translations of the Moodle Tool Guide for Teachers.

Basque: Moodle Tresnen Gida Irakasleentzat – Maite Goñi (Mondragon Unibertsitatea)

Brazilian Portuguese: Moodle Tool Guide for Teachers – Brazilian Portuguese – Ewout ter Haar (Universidade de São Paulo)

Catalan: Moodle Tool Guide for Teachers – Catalan – Enric Blasco (Universitat Barcelona)

Croatian: Vodič kroz Moodle za nastavnike – Tona Perišić Pintek and Jasmin Klindžić (University of Zagreb)

Dutch: Moodle Gereedschapslijst voor Leraren – Koen Roggemans (Roggemans.net)

French: Guide des Outils Moodle pour Enseignant(e)s – Nicolas Martignoni (Centre Fri-tic)

German: Moodle: Leitfaden für Lehrkräfte – Martin Voegeli (Switzerland)

Hebrew: פוסטר כלי מוודל – Heftsia Ben Artzi

Norwegian: Moodle Verktøyguide for Lærere – Harald Torbjørnsen (Feide)

Portuguese: Guia de Ferramentas Moodle – Lurdes Martins (Portugal)

Slovene: Moodle: Vodnik po orodjih za učitelj – Sarolta Godnic Vicic (Slovenia)

Spanish: Guía de herramientas de Moodle – Victoria Castrillejo (Eledelengua.com)

Remember I’m collecting ALL adaptations (for colour blindness, different pedagogies, institutional versions, etc) on the Moodle Tool Guide page. Please email me (joyce [AT] cats-pyjamas.net) if I haven’t added yours yet.

Flickr Group

We also started a Flickr group to view the Moodle Tool Guide for Teachers in use by the global Moodle community. You are invited to share your pictures too.

This weekend one of my friends asked me: “So what do we think about Path?”. What DO we think about Path?

I installed it about 8 weeks ago. In fact Path tells me two months and 285 moments ago. I can’t remember who originally suggested it to me. It was at the beginning of a month’s travel around Europe and I had intermittent internet access. This meant I was mainly in capture & broadcast mode (journaling my travels) rather than access & curate mode (monitoring and sharing from information streams). And Path is great for capture & broadcast.

I fell in love with  it, even though I did have to move it to the front page of my iPhone first, so I wouldn’t forget to use it, and go to one of my other services instead. Here’s 5 reasons I do so like Path.

It’s personal

I think the key reason I like Path is that it is intensely personal. Path only lets you post your personal updates. It has various artifacts you can create: a check-in, an update, a picture, a music-update, but all of those are originally created by you, based on an experience you are having. You can’t “re-Path” someone else artifacts either, so only your artifacts live in your Path.

Friends can take several different actions in response to your artifacts, they can Smile, Laugh, Gasp, Be Unhappy, or Love it, and also leave a comment, giving Path a little more finesse than just the Facebook Like or Twitter Favourite or Retweet.

You can include your friends in any update by using the “I’m With” function. This works for anyone on Path, but if your friends are not on Path, you can still include Facebook, Twitter or friends in your Contacts. Only their first name will be used.

The lack of external content, no links, no lolcats, no game updates, no witty videos, makes Path a very different and very human experience.

It’s pretty

Path got its interface right and is much more attractive to look at and to use than some of the big social media giants’ apps, like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. I think this may be because Path is not trying to mimic a website. Particularly not a website that had design flaws in the first place (yes, that’s you Facebook) or a website that is contorted in adding superfluous functionalities beyond its initial function which it did exquisitely (and that’s you Twitter). Path had the freedom to design its app for a single purpose (personal broadcasting) and with mobile and gesture in mind, and that shows.

It has a cover/profile pic combination that most will recognise from the new Facebook Timeline layout, but I had Path before I switched my Wall to Timeline, and I can’t help thinking that Path is what Facebook was trying to achieve (and certainly in its mobile app, fails).

The Chooser where you go to perform an action, is just lovely, and much nicer than a row of links, blocks or buttons.

It’s packaged

Path packages several types of social media actions I regularly perform, into one platform, all started from the pretty Chooser. It also adds one update I didn’t perform but would find great if it was cross-platform.

Location update: I usually use Foursquare for this. With Path I can post a location check-in to Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare and believe me, its location finder is much more robust than Foursquare. You know the “Foursquare Servers are busy” message? Hasn’t happened on Path… However the link with Foursquare is good, and so your check-ins do count.

Photography update: Path photos are very nice indeed and it comes with a good selection of remarkably effective filters (although you have to pay for others). I was using Instagram for this, and find it a pity that Path doesn’t link to Instagram, as I miss out on my Instagram community interactions. However it does allow posting to Twitter and Facebook, and when posting to Facebook, they all go into a Path album on Facebook, making the photos taggable. This is something Instragram has only recently managed and was a big bugbear for me.

Unfortunately when you send a pic to Twitter with Path it doesn’t end up in your Twitter stream of pics (via TwitPic) but just becomes a link to Path, as you can see below. A bit of a fail, that one…

Very Monty Python [pic] — path.com/p/1XdSwX

— Joyce Seitzinger (@catspyjamasnz) January 28, 2012

Creating Path pictures is easy and beautiful. Sharing and re-using them is not so easy. It doesn’t have an embed function on the web page. I’d love for Path pictures to go to Flickr and Instagram.

Music update: I like to share what I’m listening to and follow my friends’ music tips too. It’s how I’m introduced to new bands or genres these days, rather than radio or tv. I used to use Blip.fm but then my use was browser-based. I gave it up when it became buggy and my browser kept crashing. I then switched to Soundtracking on my iPad and iPhone, but my use was intermittent, I never built up a huge community and with my last update, it also became buggy, crashing out frequently. With the Path app I can share songs in Path, which is just with a small group, but I can widen that by choosing to share with Facebook and/or Twitter as well.

Status update: You can write a status and per status, choose to share only in Path, or to also post to one of the four linked services, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare or Tumblr.

The Sleep or Awake update: This one is new for me. Basically you can set a notification in Path that your are asleep. Path posts this in your timeline, usually accompanied by the time, and sometimes an automated status update or comment, eg “Must have been a busy day” if you go to sleep early. While you are asleep you don’t get notifications from Path. How nice would it be to have a universal Sleep function that was cross-platform? You say “I’m asleep” in one platform, and all the others Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Path, WordPress and other notifications are off. I know people will say: “Why don’t you just turn off your smartphone?” but the fact is sometimes I want peace and quiet, but I do want to be reachable by txt, phone call and for my alarm clock.

The “I’m Awake” function held a bit of a surprise, as it makes for a nice communal morning experience, as you and your friends in the same city or region all wake up, particularly on work days.

It propagates

Path can propagate my updates/artifacts to one of four main services. To expand on what I wrote above. You can write a status and per status, choose to share only in Path, or to also post to one of the four linked services, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare or Tumblr. This works not just for Status updates, but also for pictures, music and location updates.

I’m not a Tumblr user.  I do use the other three avidly and for overlapping but different purposes, and with overlapping but different networks. So being able to select per status which network is appropriate is great. I know there are other services that allow this, but Path makes it very easy with four tickboxes at the bottom of any  update or artifact creation page, whether that’s a regular status update, a picture, location or music update.

You can think of Path as a “feeder app” for the three sisters: Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare.

It’s private

When I say private, I don’t mean it’s closed. It is that too. Path itself states: “Path should be private by default. Forever. You should always be in control of your information and experience.” I’m not sure how they relate this to pictures being public on the Path website as my picture is here. But this may be a setting I haven’t found yet.

But by private, I mean intimate. That is mainly due to the relatively small uptake and who is using it in my circles. The 20 or so people I’ve connected with are all avid experienced social media users, like @haikugirloz, @playnice_nz and @daveymelb. They realise intuitively that Path is a medium and interface that can easily get flooded by too many posts. They also seem to understand that its interface calls for aesthetic, personal updates. So the photos my friends post are artful and intimate, the music they share is one song, just to indicate their current mood, the statuses they post are entertaining and personal.

And I think this last may also be Path’s downfall. It works best when used in a small network by personal friends who are all social media savvy. With no grouping (circles, lists, etc) option, you can’t structure your network into manageable streams. So if I had 450 Path friends (as I do on Facebook), the Path would be flooded and unnavigable.

It’s sad, as I love the app, but I wonder whether it will survive, or at least survive in its current pretty, personal form.

I’m really looking forward to the PLE Conference 11-13 July 2012. The conference continues to innovate in many ways. Organisationally we’ve expanded the conference to two locations, Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia and Universidade de Aveiro in Portugal, spreading the opportunity for sharing scholarship around the PLN and PLE topics and effectively making this a blended conference. How neat! (Of course, one of the venue organisers for Melbourne is yours truly  so I’m a little bias…;-))

The two locations have a joint Call for Papers out with the closing date for abstracts on 16 March 2012, and the deadline for final papers on 13 May 2012. I’m hoping to encourage you all to write an abstract, submit it and join us!

So why should you go to the PLE Conference?

I was very lucky to attend the first PLE Conference in Barcelona and some firsts are simply things which cannot be guaranteed for subsequent events. This first iteration was a veritable who’s who of networked learning with Alec Couros, Steve Wheeler, Graham Atwell, Ilona Buchem and many others in the field attending. Besides the excitement of this, it being the first conference, it also meant that much of the PLE work presented, was completely new to the other attendees. So it was like finding a treasure trove of PLE/PLN research. Also Ricardo Torres Kompen was just the best venue organiser/host, his attention to detail and calmness without peer.

So what are elements of the PLE Conference that continue to make it THE event for any networked scholar/educator to attend? Well some of us “PLE goers” have shared our experiences and reasons on this Corkboard for you to read. But I thought I would expand on my reasons below, using some of the artefacts I collected in 2010.

1. Connecting with those you are already connected with

I’m a Twitter evangelist, and an enthousiastic Facebook user. I love communicating with social media because they allow me to connect with like-minded people, people who intersect my interest niche. And I love it whenever I meet these people in real life (so much so that I’ve got a So you’re real after all! set on Flickr). Not because of the coincidence, nor the look-who-I-met factor, but because thanks to social media filtering, it is always an intense and very enjoyable occasion to meet one of these connections. We have so much to say and share with each other, and can build so much on each other’s ideas in a very short time, fueling our interests and thinking until we meet again. All of the people at the PLE Conference are of this variety. Alec Couros touches on this too in the interview I did with him.

It’s been really neat that people who have been connected over years, you yourself included, someone I haven’t had a chance to meet … Actually, you build a sense of friendship over a long time… and when you actually get to meet each other,… you can get right to the sort-of deep conversations. Because these deep conversations have been going on for a long time. That’s really the difference with the dry academic sterile type conference…When you come to a place, you can actually just get to the matter, get to the content that you’re looking for. I think that’s really quite powerful. – Alec Couros

2. This is a growing field!

Personal learning environments, personal learning networks, networked learning. It’s all very new but maturing rapidly. In his video interview Graham talks about 5 or 6 years old and PLE scholarship needing some space to come of age.

Sometimes, the discourse and the dialogue … around PLEs tends to gets lost in the big conferences, and especially tends to get lost behind educational technology, and I don’t see PLEs as being primarily about educational technology. – Graham Atwell

3. Now in the Southern Hemisphere!

@catspyjamasnz and @colwar at #ple_bcn

In 2010 Colin Warren and I (pictured here) were 2 out of maybe 6 Asia-Pacific participants. Most of the research presented was conducted in Europe, in the European context, with European funding models, in European higher education institutions. Of course, Asian, Pacific, Australian and New Zealand organisations work in different contexts, with different funding models, different education systems, policies, cultural differences, geographical differences, etc. So our uses, considerations and views of PLEs, PLNs and personalized learning will be different too. Having the PLE Conference in Melbourne, allows more people outside Europe to contribute to the body of work.

4. Anything goes

If you’re tired of traditional paper presentations, would like to try a different approach, a PLE Conference is the ideal place to mix it up . In her video interview, co-organiser of the 2010 conference Cristina Costa says:

We wanted to challenge how conferences have been done for decades.

And they did:

• In 2010 Crowdvine was used for pre-conference communication and connection building and people were posting to it even 6 months before the conference dates.
• The 2010 Twitter hashtag #PLE_BCN was coined and correctly promoted by the organisers, creating a vibrant Twitter stream which became a community of itself. That hashtag is still alive today, co-habiting with this year’s hashtag #PLEConf.
• The unKeynote of 2010 was a collaboration between Alec Couros and Graham Atwell, crowdsourcing ideas on topics and formats via Google Docs and encouraging in-room and external participation during the unKeynote
• Why should a conference be closed? Most of the 2010 sessions were streamed live from Citilab, sharing research findings and thinking straightaway, and encouraging participation, questions and comments via Twitter from inside and outside the conference. It widened the conversation and was greatly appreciated by many, although when @evilsue got involved things turned a little messy .
• The introduction of Pecha Kucha sessions allowed many participants the opportunity to present
• In 2010 (and continuing in 2011) Ilona Buchem set up The PLE Media contest, a way for participants to present their PLE work or thoughts in a 3 minute video/animation, leading to such little gems as this one describing the PLE tools in place at the TU Graz.

The conference organisers are using the successes above to inspire this year’s event, but we also have a call out for you to put your thinking caps on and devise other presentation options. Your imagination will be the limit…

5. Creativity is rewarded (and very much appreciated)

As you can see from some of the examples I gave above, creativity is rewarded and appreciated at a PLE Conference. In fact, it starts right as you walk in the door and create your own badge (or put on the one you made earlier). After all, what is more personal than how you introduce yourself to others?

And this theme of personalization and creativity runs through the whole conference. Whereas traditional conferences leave behind only a few torn paper posters, crumpled standard badges and a thick book of proceedings (most of the time only available to attendees and those who pay for access), the PLE Conference leaves in its wake a trail of open artefacts, like a rich twitter archive, YouTube and Vimeo videos, blog posts by the participants, Flickr photos documenting the event, creative slidedecks on Slideshare, and collectively taken notes in Google Docs. We look forward to seeing where you take it this year…

6. You can be on your iPhone and not be rude

@anetq at #ple_bcn

And last but not least, at a PLE Conference, everyone is like you. We are all committed to monitoring our streams, to finding those juicy tidbits, to sharing what we hear, to publicly posing our questions or comments. And so it is perfectly all right for you to whip out your iPhone, smartphone, iPad or whatever device of your choice, in the middle of a conversation. In fact, we encourage it. After all, you’re amplifying and sharing what we’re all learning about PLEs, aren’t you?

See you all in July!

In December I had the pleasure of visiting the The Hague headquarters of Shell, courtesy of @hansdezwart, their Innovation Manager for Global Learning Technologies. After a long Twitter “courtship”, we finally met IRL at Online Educa in Berlin (#oeb11) and found we indeed had lots of shared interests. One of the things I wanted to know more about was his use of Yammer to improve team connections and collaborations. I was lucky enough to have a personal demonstration and discussion, but you can read all about his Narrating Your Work project on Hans’ blog.

Sharing
As we were talking, we hit upon an activity we both do, that is not strictly part of our job but seems to have evolved naturally. We both work in roles that connect us to many different colleagues, within our teams, across our organisation, and in similar positions in other organisations. We also both have a widespread personal learning network (PLN), that is,  we are connected to many education technology experts and information sources, outside our organisation through various social media tools. The Conversation Prism diagram below created by Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas demonstrates how some of those social media tools are used to ‘listen and share’.

In our discussion, Hans described how he used to send people links he had found through his PLN via email. He had now started sharing those links via Yammer, tagging all of them with a #share tag. And that triggered something for me. I’d been doing the same at EIT in my 5 years there as e-learning advisor. Monitoring my Personal Learning Network which has a heavy education technology focus, and then sharing useful, pertinent and timely resources I found through various channels. Many, many an email to a teacher was sent at 11.30pm as I hit upon a gem shared through Twitter by a colleague from Europe who was just getting to the office, along the lines of “Hey so-and-so, I think this link on yadayada might be of interest to you as we work on your blahblah course”.

All sorts of ed tech info
And it didn’t just stop with course specific information. I’d also share links on pedagogical strategies with teachers and on how higher education organisations use social media with our Marketing department. If I found an edtech link on higher management decision making for education technology, I would send it to one of our deans, or our Director of Academic & Student Services. If I found a resource on iPads in the library, I’d send it to our inestimable library manager, Diane Friis. And so on. The sharing I was doing was topic specific (education technology) but not limited to my role, or level in the organisation.

Other sharing channels
In some cases, larger projects, I was working on I would try other sharing channels and also getting the other project team members (teachers, administrative support and their managers) to contribute. For example, I’d create a Delicious tag and /or a workspace for all of us to use and share resources in. Typically this workspace would be a Moodle course for all teachers collaborating on the programme design, including a forum for sharing, or with ability for every one to add links to the course page. I wish I could say that these other sharing channels had been tremendously successful, but they weren’t. I can hypothesise several reasons:

1. these Moodle workspaces and Delicious tags just aren’t part of most teachers and academic managers’ work/life streams, and that is because
2. ‘Surfing the web’ for resources, tips and ideas is still seen as time wasting rather than time saving in most educational organisations.
3. As a consequence, most teachers and academic managers don’t have many or substantial incoming information streams, so they just don’t find that many treasures to share in turn. As a result traffic in a Moodle forum/workspace is low and so it becomes an easy stream or avenue to forget.

So I continued being a lone sharer and sharing in the stream most people do check: their email.

This is digital curation
The activity I’ve just described, that Hans and I were engaged in for our organisations, is digital curation. Us education technologists have probably been acting as digital curators for our organisations around the e-learning and education technology topics for longer than we realise. If you’re an edtech who recognises this, I would love to hear your experiences and thoughts.

• What tools have you used?
• How long have you been doing this? How long have you consciously been doing this?
• What processes have you used?
• How efficient would you say this was?
• Are your digital curation activities and results warmly received or less appreciated?
• And should this curation activity be seen as part of our role? And of other roles in the organisation?
• What would happen to your organisation if that was the case?

Many of you will be familiar with the Moodle Tool Guide for Teachers which has been doing the rounds in the Moodle community since 2010. It’s been tremendously exciting for me to see the guide I released under a Creative Commons license, being used, re-used and re-developed by so many people for so many different purposes.

Why should you share an Open Educational Resource?

Besides being a staff development tool for me, the Moodle Tool Guide  has  taught me so much about what it means to be an open resource contributor. Until the MTG went viral(ish), as an ed tech I would often encourage teachers to share their resources openly. It was always a logical, practical argument around the benefit for the community. I don’t think I articulated the personal rationale for providing an open educational resource with passion.  Now I can speak from experience, when I say that sharing your teaching resources openly can:

• bring satisfaction of ‘a job well done’ when other practitioners in your field take your idea/resource and run with it,
• help someone else in your field, a colleague you may or may not know,
• bring you peer recognition within your country, internationally and sometimes even inside your institution (often a tougher nut to crack),
• provide you with external support for your ideas, processes or approaches (which may be controversial inside your institution),
• provide you with peer support, as you connect with other practitioners in your field. This is beneficial particularly if you work in isolation or are a niche expert in your institution,
• help you improve your resource, through peer review and comments,
• establish new connections with other practitioners and experts in your field,
• create new opportunities. I’ve had the privilege of being invited to a number of MoodleMoots and other conferences. that I couldn’t have attended otherwise,
• help you discover new resources and collections. You’ll be surprised at the many places your resource gets re-posted, re-tweeted and re-published,
• provide career opportunities. I’m sure I wouldn’t have been offered my current position at a large Australian university if it hadn’t been for the MTG.

Two new lessons learned

And then this week, the Moodle Tool Guide for Teachers taught me two more new things. Here they are:

1. You may not have a leg to stand on…

In the first week of January my Tweetdeck column for “Moodle Tool Guide” started filling up with people mentioning it. I have this set up so I can see how the guide is being used and tweaked by the Moodle Community. I’ll usually get in touch with whoever’s been working on it. However upon following up, I noticed that in this case, it wasn’t our Moodle Tool Guide that was at the center of attention, instead it was a resource by a web conferencing company called WizIQ.

Moodle tool guide for teachers: How to interact with students online using Moodle fb.me/1r3qHFksv

— WizIQ Official (@WizIQ) January 4, 2012

Now I should be clear, WizIQ’s guide was very different. Other than the name, it was not similar to the original nor did it reuse parts of the original.

Whereas the Moodle Tool Guide is a poster-sized matrix tool assessing Moodle tool effectiveness for pedagogical aims, WizIQ’s resource was a How-to instruction manual for several Moodle tools with screenshots. But I was a little disappointed, thinking that having two documents out there with the same name, would detract from the now community-owned original Moodle Tool Guide.

The original MTG was released under a Creative Commons license, non-commercial with attribution and share-alike criteria. This protects it from someone using it for profit, or pretending authorship or ownership, but it doesn’t protect its name. Also, despite a Belgian judge ruling for Creative Commons to be legally binding in Belgium in November 2010, I’m not sure how much other legal precedent there is. So other than being a little sad at the guide losing its identity, there wasn’t a lot I could do. Or so I thought.

2. …But the crowd has your back.

And then I received this tweet from Nathan Cobb.

@catspyjamasnz I dropped a quick email to wiziq about their “Moodle tool guide” – Response included at link – bit.ly/wMu01H

— Nathan Cobb (@nathancobb) January 5, 2012

And he had. Someone in the Moodle crowd has stood up and said “Oi!”. Nathan had felt strongly enough to email WizIQ and ask if they were aware of the existence of the original. You can read Nathan’s blog post on his actions and reasons and WizIQ’s response on his blog. This is even more special if you know that I don’t know Nathan other than from Twitter. I’m not sure we’ve even ever tweeted each other directly. So I had to say thanks…

Dear @nathancobb, you’re a total trooper for taking up the Moodle Tool Guide claim w @wiziq! bit.ly/wMu01H Thank you!! #moodle

— Joyce Seitzinger (@catspyjamasnz) January 5, 2012

I have to say WizIQ handled the incident well and swiftly. They stated that they were unaware of the original but quickly renamed and republished their guide – you can download it as 12 Moodle tools to interact with your students online. They even changed their publishing practices to include a search for a title: “the “quick google” is now part of our publishing SOP.”

This was my first personal experience with crowd intervention, although I did follow the much more serious story of the intentional breach of Creative Commons in 2010 of Tom Barrett’s Interesting Ways series. An Australian company used his CC-licensed Interesting Ways to Use iPads in the Classroom as a handout at a sales event. Read more in Violating a Creative Commons License. The Interesting Ways series has a community that consists not only of users, but of contributors. Each presentation is crowd-sourced by teachers, education technologists and other professionals sharing their tips openly and freely. This community is so widespread, that someone who knew about the Interesting Ways was bound to run into the evidence of the breach of Creative Commons.

I wonder if what we are seeing is evidence of companies with pre-21st century business practices. They don’t involve themselves in their field enough, to have an awareness of the existing community and its artifacts, yet blatantly try to interact with that community. Social media should make that easier, but unfortunately many companies and organisations still seem to be in broadcast mode.

What if you don’t have a crowd?

It did leave me wondering, what happens to your open resource when you don’t have a crowd supporting it? At Online Educa 2011, John Bohannon in his keynote Without Wikipedia and Google, I’m Stupid, mentioned that only Wikipedia articles with great interest benefit from constant improvement through crowd editing. When there is no community around a page, fallacies or disproportionate importance to one aspect of an article, can exist for a long time. I suppose the same thing applies to OER’s. If a crowd doesn’t care for them, and they don’t have widespread recognition, they could easily be subverted for profit, or put to non-crowd use. And no one would ever know. Or act.

It’s been an interesting episode, providing me with more insights for when I talk to teachers about sharing their resources openly.

If you would like to learn more about Creative Commons, I’d recommend this resource: Creative Commons, What Every Educator Needs To Know

A few weeks ago I was kindly invited by the #ConVerge11 organisers to do a digital curation workshop. First of all let me say that I’m so impressed by how well organised this conference is and how responsive to feedback. Last year they introduced Twitterwalls and this year made some minor tweaks, to further improve the very active conference backchannel. Well done eWorks and particularly the ever smiling Sarah Phillips!

This was a little nervewracking for me, as it was my first time speaking about my new topic of interest, and PhD topic: digital curation for teachers. Over the last few years I’ve presented, workshopped, taught, written and spoken a lot about the Moodle Tool Guide for Teachers, Course Design and PLNs. All of these are familiar territory for me. Speaking on a new topic was both scary and exhilarating. Scary as I don’t have that much “go to” material yet, and went into the workshop more with questions and observations, than answers. Exhilarating because I met others who either are curators or are interested in curation and this led to some very stimulating conversations (thank you @jurgen @tanmac73 and @stickylearning).

I believe that digital curation will be a new activity that academics in higher education will need to adopt. What do you think? Some questions in my mind:

• What skills will academics need to be effective digital curators?
• How ready are they to adopt this activity?
• How ready are the systems in our institutions (learning management systems, hardware, software availability, etc but also institutional career progression and research systems) to support the academics in this?
• How does this fit into the concept of digital scholarship?

So I’m sharing my presentation here, in the hope to get more discussion partners on this digital curation topic.

cc licensed Flickr photo Jabba by cplbasilisk

Jetlag is wreaking havoc on my sleep patterns. So on the phone to people downunder at 5.30am, I got a tweet from my mate Steve to check out #pencilchat.

And promptly lost the next hour of my life to a highly entertaining conversation that can only happen when you mix experienced education technologists, the risk-averse environment they work in and Twitter. At one point I had tears running down my cheeks. Here are a few gems, but please, do go check the stream for yourself. It’s cathartic. And dare I say, a little pointed…

And one of my own contributions.