Thinking about rich learning environments - almost revisited

I am working up our paper Rich Learning Environments revisited
and wanted to use this as a placemarker for a few diagrams and some thoughts.
My previous post on the cognitive digital apprenticeship is also relevant and tracking back through of my posts on PLEs can help understand how the ideas have been developing.
so this was one way in which I was trying to explain a rich learning environment


and this is another

The Digital Cognitive Apprenticeship - afforded by a rich learning environment

The idea of talking about a digital cognitive apprenticeship arose around the time Hugh Davis and I made a presentation to the HEA Enhancement Academy team leaders meeting* in May 2011. Although the concept has much deeper routes linking back to the concept of university education providing a 'cognitive apprenticeship' time when I  was working with Microcosm across the university to provide 'a campus wide structure for multimedia learning'.

Fast forward almost 20 years and the world is a lot more interconnected and a big focus for us is in terms of personal learning environments, where the title of our presentation was 'The personalisation of a learning environment: student-led connections online and offline'. The link will take you to the slides in ECS ePrints at Southampton.

The presentation in many ways was a chance to reflect upon and discuss our understanding of personal learning environments and the UK digital literacies agenda. We were particularly fortunate in having an audience drawn from colleagues who are actively involved in steering their institutions through change.

A lot of work has been going on to craft our own rich learning environment here at Southampton since I posted an account of what I mean by Rich Learning Environments late in 2009

Along the way, the University of Southampton has been among the front line of folk who have been surfing the open data wave - its a wave which is well on its way to becoming a veritable tsunami launched by Tim Berners-Lee's call for 'Raw Data Now' at his TED talk in 2009

We have been working with colleagues on creating a specification for our learning environment, and have reported on that project via a publication in the International Journal of Virtual and Personal Learning Environments (forthcoming) but a pre-print is available online from ePrints.

Our ultimate objective is to craft an environment which cultivates and supports situated and authentic learning with a community of scholars in a digital world.

We are seeking to harness the affordance of Web 2.0 and use linked and open data to integrate internal and external resources and services in a seamless manner.

We put a special value on enabling our academics to work with their students accessing authentic resources so that learning in their respective disciplines and fields of study can be situated.

We hold true to the idea that our university is nurturing a continually renewing community of scholars and again believe that we can craft the tools of social and (light) semantic web technologies to provide a platform which is agile to respond to changing and emerging techniques and technologies, a system which is fit for purpose in the 21st century.

We believe that our approach to situated and authentic learning addresses the agendas which are grouped under the headings of digital literacies, but we prefer to refer to the skills knowledge and understanding of a digital world. Hence our reference to the digital cognitive apprenticeship.

It is the role of universities to nurture the thought leaders and decision makers of tomorrow. Out students come to use with a mix of sophisticated and naiive understandings of the way in which they can use technology for their learning. If that was not the case, they would not be ready for a university education - we are no longer in an era when we believe knowledge is the prime objective (if that were ever true). Alvin Toffler was remarkably prescient when he observed that

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn",

our apprentices will, we hope, progress to master all of the essential skills, knowledge and understanding so they can step forward with confidence into whatever future they choose to pursue.

references

Casquero, Oskar, Portillo, Javier; Ovelar, Ramón; Benito, Manuel and Romo, Jesús. iPLE Network: an integrated eLearning 2.0 architecture from a university's perspective. (2010) Interactive Learning Environments, Volume 18, Issue 3 September 2010, pages 293 – 308

Fournier, Helena & Kop, Rita. (2010) Researching the design and development of a Personal Learning Environment, Proceedings of the 2010 PLE Conference, CitiLab: Barcelona http://pleconference.citilab.eu

O'Reilly, T. (2005). What Is Web 2.0 – Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software  http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html

O'Reilly, T. (2007). What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software, Communications & Strategies, 1(1),17-37 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1008839

Santos, C. and L. Pedro (2009). Sapo Campus: A Social Media Platform for Higher Education. m-ICTE 2009: Research, Reflections and Innovations in Integrating ICT in Education, Lisbon, Portugal, FORMATEX: Badajoz, Spain.

White S. (2009) Rich Learning Environments, University of Southampton http://shirleyknot.blogspot.com/2009/12/rich-learning-environments.html

White, Su & Davis, Hugh C. (2011). Making it rich and personal: crafting an institutional personal learning environment, International Journal of Virtual and Personal Learning Environments, In Press. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/22030/

White, Su & Davis, Hugh C. (2011) Rich and personal revisited: translating ambitions for an institutional personal learning environment into a reality. In: The Second International PLE Conference: PLE_SOU, July 11-13th 2011, Southampton, UK. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/22140/

Southampton’s SLE Project http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/research/projects/749

*You can find a blog post which talks about the event at The Auricle

 

#PLE_BCN

What an excellent, and interesting event, the immaculate planning, brilliant setting, and dedication to designing an event which made real communication happen was a refreshing change from the usual conference fare of dutiful presentations by inexperienced postgrads and academic posturing from over-inflated egos. Official web pages for the conference are at http://pleconference.citilab.eu/ A massive thank you to all the organizing committee, but especially to

Plenty of discussion and time for though with a conference which worked to challenge the standard format integrating components of bar camps and unconferences. This makes for some work for the participants (which is good), and does not necessarily result in the super smooth corporate commodified conference, but something which participants take with them afterwards because they joined in at the time.


Opening (un)keynote was a joint effort from Alec Couras and Graham Atwell @courosa and @grahamattwell. It included a whole load of contributed slides, and was structured around eight questions. There were a few tech issues, the usual stuff about computers not talking to the av system and computer and projection screen resolution challenges, but it was well aligned with (my) observation that (real) learning is messy!

The second unkeynote from Jordi Adell and Ismael Peña-López @ictologist and @jordi was crafted to ensure maximal participation, literally getting attendees to vote with their feet and express their views

The hash tag for the event was #PLE_BCN, and the twitter back stream peaked 5000 well before the close of play. You can take a look at the twitter stream (as we did during the conference) by using the visualiser tool http://visibletweets.com/ . Official web pages for the conference are at http://pleconference.citilab.eu/ .

Session chairs were asked to be innovative in their approaches, you can see Graham Atwell's blog http://www.pontydysgu.org/2010/07/how-we-share-our-ideas-ple_bcn/ It provides details from session chairs about how they will run their session - mine was rather tame by comparison, asking presenters to provide tag cloud style summaries prior to their short formal presentation, and trying to link the perspectives on the two items during an extended joint discussion slot!

Thoughts

Emerging definition - well when Hugh and I discussed it we decided to take part of O'Reilly's definition of what is Web2.0, and extend it...the web as a platform (for learning)


things I found/the conference used

Visible Tweets

Cirip

http://www.cirip.ro/grup/plebcn/cloud?limit=200&nr=30&cols=4&us&lg=en

Scribble Pad
http://moourl.com/ple1


things that made me seasick

google wave

prezi

People who also presented in our session which was about PLEs and Institutions

TOWARDS AN ELEARNING 2.0 PROVISIONING STRATEGY FOR UNIVERSITIES Oskar Casquero, Javier Portillo, Ramón Ovelar, Jesus Romo, Manuel Benito

MAKING IT RICH AND PERSONAL: MEETING INSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGES FROM NEXT GENERATION LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS Su White, Hugh Davis, Pete Hancock, Debra Morris

FULL IMMERSION LANGUAGE LEARNING IN ON-CAMPUS UNIVERSITY COURSES Bradley Bowers (did not attend/present)

ANAGRAMMING PLE: EMPOWERING PROFESSIONAL LEARNING THROUGH MICROBLOGGING Gabriela Grosseck, Carmen Holotescu

People in the session I chaired


AN APPROACH TO INTER-WIDGET COMMUNICATION SPECIFICATION Tobias Nelkner, André Kemena

PERSONAL DASHBOARDS FOR AWARENESS IN SOCIAL SOFTWARE ENGINEERING Wolfgang Reinhardt, Sebastian Nuhn could not attend

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE INTEGRATOR FEDERATED WITH PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE ENVIRONMENTS
David White


participant blogs

http://ibuchem.wordpress.com/2010/07/08/ple_bcn-conference-day-1/

remote viewers blogs/comments

http://www.masmithers.com/2010/07/08/the-ple-as-a-tool-and-institutional-lock-in/

A few of the new Twitter folk I met/followed from the conference - there were a lot!

@pgsimoes Paulo Simões

@samscam Sam Easterby-Smith

@ocasquero - Oskar Casquero interesting paper which complemented our paper on Rich Learning Environments by laying the ground with working definitions of the environment labs doing work implementing sytems which are in our Rich Learning Environment

@ggrosseck Gabriela Grosseck

http://pleconference.crowdvine.com/


http://visibletweets.com/

there were a number of presentations which looked at mobile platforms and discussed widget frameworks - sort of stuff I want to follow up

Work Related to the Southampton Learning Environment - which we put in a framework of a Rich Learning Environment

Sappo Campus - Portugal

Work in the Basque Country from Oskar Casquero et al

there were also various presentations on widget use and frameworks which could be usefully followed up - more when I have refined this blog

Rich Learning Environments - Education 2.0 or 3.0?

I have been working on various applications of technologies for learning for many years now. Along the way, I've been developing an idea of what I mean by a rich learning environment.

Rich learning environments are dynamic spaces which bring together personalised information and perspectives across a core of resources which can support the learner in addressing their educational needs. Rich learning spaces exploit the technology affordances of their component parts, but provide added value by simplifying and customising the interface to a set of complex and diverse resources based on a learners context and education needs.

These needs might be categorised into four broad areas personal space; institutional space; support space; and 'good for learning' space

Personal Space:
A learner will already make use of their own preferred tools and applications which may be used either in addressing the demands of formal learning (for example using google docs to create a word processed document) or informal learning (using delicious to store and find information and resources on topics related to study). Each learner will have (most likely) their own machine(s) (laptop, desktop, mobile (?) and within that operating system will have selected and be familiar with a set of tools. Some parts of this (e.g. Skype, text messaging) may not be clearly linked or associated with learning tasks, but none the less may be of great importance to the student.

Institutional Space.
The institution which the learning is studying in, or at which the learner proposes to study, will have 'spaces' which have a role in informal or formal learning and learning support. It is possible that the set of spaces will change during the learners route through education with the institution.]sites/sources will be of verying importance at different times.
At southampton you may have a number of discrete spaces - e.g. UOS web, ECS web, ECS web behind the firewall, Sussed, blackboard challenges some of these are password protected, vpn protected etc

Support Space
dependi8ng on the context of the student, there will be external spaces which mught be of use/relevant to formal and informal learning - e.g. In Southampton the SUSU.org web site provides additional information and support, for international students it may be that their home country embassy site, or some home office sites may be of importance

'Good for learning'
Students may benefit from information and resources which are located outside their current personal space, and outside the institutional space. For example the National Union of Students offers support and advice related to study and examinations. There are other sources of information (appoaches to leawrning inventories, second language study).

Social Space
underpinning the environment there is an integrating layer provided by social space. This incorporates email, messaging, and social software. It acts as the glue for the environment.

If we consider student whose topic of study is technology based, it may be that we could identify a set of sources/resources which could enrich the users perspective, but which are not obvious;y initially related to learning. E.G. In computer science/web technologies, maybe Zdnet, Slashdot, british computer society, ACM digital library, IEEE digital library it may be that a set of resources could be identified which are relevant and helpful to the rich learning environment user, which could usefully be integrated into a customised environment.

Challenges

Creating a rich learning environment presents a number of challenges

Integrating a set of resources to become an apparent coherent whole.

Offering personalisation and customisation of an environment so that it enables the user to retain use of their preferred tools, but also that it perform and educational function of supporting the learning

Providiung innovative and user friendly methods of accessing and overseeing (and perhaps organising/re-organising) complex information sources.

There is a challenge of how to customise the environment (at first use, during the course of use)

IATEL: Interdisciplinary approaches to technology enhanced learning

They wanted to call it an educamp ( a barcamp for education), and the folk at TU Darmstadt who organised this conference collected together a broad selection of contributors to augment their core community of post grads working in TEL within a particularly inter-disciplinary framework. You can take a look at their programme on the Interdisciplinary approaches to technology enhanced learning website, which will give you a flavour of the objectives.

It seemed to me there was a lot of discussion centring on learner choice, which put me in mind of the phrase, a road less travelled. I was thinking that when we have created learning environments, we have made highways (like VLEs) and expected our learners to take them. In fact they are each going down their own personal road, so it seemed that an appropriate quote
would be:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the 'one less traveled' by,
And that has made all the difference.
would be

According to wikipedia (yes google helped me find it) Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" is sometimes mistakenly entitled "The Road Less Travelled" which comes from the final lines of the poem: - apparently the critics think its ironic, basically you can read it as regret (not a likely intent) or positive choice...

my point it that learning is about choice, often learners make choices without realising that they have made choices, and later may regret the consequences but never link it with the original choice.

I see part of the role of education to assist learners in becoming more aware of their choices...

Our theme was about learning (in the/from the) network, where learning and network are both purposefully ambiguous words such that the phrase can be interpreted in many different ways.

the conference took an open structure, topped and tailed with kenotes presentations, but placing a big emphasis on what was effectively an active learning process for the participants working in workshop discussion sessions for each of the themes. The workshop process (posters, explanations, analysis, intense discussions) were effectively given a whole working day, with the them co-ordinators doing some heavy-weight analysis during the overnight break - and missing a rather fine social event with some intersting bands and singers!

The way the organisers described the structure was as follows:

“As a direct consequence of such an interdisciplinary approach, the conference format will not be defined by a preponderance of presentations and papers. In separately moderated and creative discussion forums one is able to examine and work towards a common understanding of the issues at stake. such an approach should also enable an assessment of how and to what extent the idea of interdisciplinary research is sustainable: whether it simply brings forth an only loosely fitting framework, or whether it evolves into a truly encompassing project that leads to results, insights and solutions which go beyond the simple sum of the individual trajectories.”

The two keynotes in our theme, followed the workshop discussion, and provided an interesting afterthought the the fairly intensive discussions which had preceeded it. One keynote was from Hugh Davis (the demise of the VLE) and Graham Attwell (a take on Personal Learning Environments), and the session was being directed by Max Mühlhäuser from Darmstadt, and led and managed by some very able PhD students.

There was a pleasing complementarity and dovetailing of the two views which Hugh and Graham presented, I guess in some senses representing a distillation of observations based on the UK experience, as well as incorporating some of the various points which had emerged from the preceeding discussions and other keynotes.

Graham's presentation was wonderfully eclectic in its references, looking at personal learning. I have asked him if he could make some kind of map of the references so that we could have an overview for consideration. Amongst other things he suggested that constructionism is not a pedagogical theory....and that we would see the appropriating of google wave for learning

Hugh's presentation, I think, reflected his perspectives as a computer science academic leading in technology enhanced learning, and as a university director of education responsible for e-learning across the university. He was also arguing for the priviledging or priotitising the personal needs of the learner over the thus far default choice of working with technologies which are adopted because of organisational priorities.

Alongside the presentations and discussions there was a very useful twitter stream (#iatel, and occassionally #iatel09)

Each of the groups plans to take forward their discussions into a published journal paper, and I for one, enjoyed being part of the proceedings, and am looking forward to the additional work, which will turn our speculations into some clear ideas and statements.

pictures from the conference are available under a CC licence from Flickr

Refs
in no particular order, and for all sorts of different reasons
Graham Attwell http://www.pontysysgu.com - a bridge to learning
Conference web site http://www.gkel.tu-darmstadt.de/iatel/de
...
papers which I thought about during the presentations
Bloom's The 2 Sigma Problem
Becher and Trowler, Academic Tribes and Territories
Biglan's Disciplinary Differences
Cox et all Vicarious Learners
Mazur - Peer Instruction