Blogging for writers

The author's dilemma: to blog or not to blog

Although its target audience is professional writers, this article's overview of blogs - their purposes, pros & cons - is a useful primer for educators, too. The idea of "blog tours", with visiting guest bloggers, is one with definite potential for learning situations.

Langdon Winner

That's another name I hadn't come across before... his views on the "political nature of artefacts" cropped up in Rheingold's Virtual Community discussion of early MUDs. The inference seemed to be that certain types of software actively encourage the emergence of certain types of community, running contrary to much of the evidence Rheingold provides elsewhere about the way online communities emerge spontaneously & unpredictably. The idea of producing software with a particular kind of interaction designed in is clearly relevant to the issue of VLEs, so I thought I'd look further into this Winner bloke.

I emerged a while later, having been beaten about the head by Engels v Marx, automatic tomato-picking machines & Platonic ships, but largely unconvinced.

Do Artifacts Have Politics?

This is Winner's 1986 paper on the subject. I really don't see that he's saying any more than 'technology reflects the values of the society that produces it, therefore its effects tend to reinforce the status quo, therefore it should be assumed to be a Bad Thing & regarded with deep suspicion'. No new insights there & a far from unassailable conclusion!

Interview with EDU-SHAM CEO

A 1998 satirical piece that shows Winner's deep hostility to the spread of e-learning. Amusing in parts (as much satire is, whether or not you're sympathetic to its aims) it seems to be based on a misapprehension of the subject, overlooking the transforming potential of online learning communities by allowing them no part in the EDU-SHAM dystopia. If e-learning was as Winner describes, or even moving in that direction, it would indeed be undesirable, but this reductio ad absurdum bears so little resemblance to reality that it's difficult to take it seriously.

(Incidentally, the design of his homepage speaks of somebody profoundly uncomfortable in cyberspace , on a mission to make his readers feel the same way.)

I see Rheingold has more to say about LW in chapters I've not yet reached, so I may be revisiting this one.

SCORM can wait

OK, I tried. Some websites define it as "Sharable Content Object Reference Model" (eg the official US Advanced Distributed Learning site) while for others it's "Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model" (eg the, um, official US Advanced Distributed Learning site). Glad we got that sorted out.

So, let's look a little more deeply. Ah, now this sounds promising: Virtual University Systems.

"ADL Co-Lab defines Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model (SCORM 1.2)? which includes a Content Aggregation Model (CAM) and a Run-time Environment (RTE). The Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model (SCORM) and other instructional technology specifications are designed to facilitate interoperability and reuse of courseware across learning management systems (LMSs). Toward this end, CourseMate Course Builder course authoring software fully supports the creation of mandatory SCORM meta-data for discovery, use of SCORM data model elements for tracking the progress of learners at run-time, and the creation of SCORM-conformant manifests for exchanging content between repositories and Learning Management Systems (LMS)."

Got that? Good.

Time for bed, said Zebedee.

Course Taster

The OU Course Taster page for H806 doesn't seem to be quite ready for public consumption yet, but it will be worth keeping an eye on.

Learning Objects & H806

Putting the pieces together: What working with learning objects means for the educator

This 2002 paper by Weller, Pegler & Mason outlines the thinking behind H806's use of learning objects, along with a largely positive evaluation of their implications for course designers & authors. It looks ahead to their anticipated benefits & drawbacks during the first (spring 2003) presentation of the course.

Of particular interest here:

• learning objects have their roots in a training rather than academic context


• they are generally designed for use in online rather than F2F learning situations - hence the definition of a learning object offered by Pegler et al:



"a digital piece of learning material that addresses a clearly identifiable topic or learning outcome and has the potential to be reused in different contexts"



• the loss of "narrative" implicit in a course built from learning objects may be beneficial, as students are required to make their own connections, rather than passively accepting the links put in place for them by course authors.

The paper concludes by noting that the learning objects agenda is currently "dominated by discussions between the various standards bodies and developers of e-learning platforms" & that the time is right for debate to "move into the practitioner's arena".

Learning Objects

I decided to look into learning objects, since H806 is, according to Weller, the first OU course to be developed purely in this form. Now, in 2001/2 I wrote some learning objects for the OU, admittedly for its corporate division (COROUS) & that's where I first encountered the term. So I wondered if the meaning was perhaps subtly different from the one I'd been carrying around with me.

Use and Abuse of Re-usable Learning Objects

This paper gives a useful overview of the confusion surrounding learning objects, arguing that it's inappropriate to define them so broadly that everything in the world becomes a learning object, yet equally unhelpful to narrow the definition down to a particular length or method of study, since this works against the principles of interoperability & re-usability.
The definition offered here:

A Learning Object is an independent and self-standing unit of learning content that is predisposed to reuse in multiple instructional contexts

seems a reasonable compromise between the general & the specific.

Learning Objects and Standards

This resource page from the e-Learning Centre offers a range of material on latest developments in the world of learning objects. I may need to spend some time on SCORM...

Martin Weller's homepage

http://iet.open.ac.uk/pp/m.j.weller/

Martin chairs H806. I've studied with him before, on T171 (continuing for a while as a colleague). This is his homepage in the IET. I was fascinated to learn from it that H806 was the first (& last!) course launched by the ill-fated e-University.

His publications page looks rather like a reading list for H806.

Using text messages

A small 'local' application of mobile technology occurs to me.

One frequent complaint amongst OU tutors concerns inactive students who can't easily be contacted because they aren't reading their OU email & haven't provided a landline number. We resent making private calls to mobiles, because our pay doesn't allow for incurring that sort of expense. So we grumble & resort to writing letters. Paper, ink, envelope, first class stamp... total cost 30p+ & still no guarantee of a response.

Solution: send the student a text.

"Urgent msg from your OU tutor: pls check your mailbox asap"

"No TMAxx rcvd - problems? Pls call"

Cost to tutor: 10p max (unless the student turns out to have left for exotic climes). Likelihood of being seen: high. Comparing response rates to letters/texts would make an interesting bit of research!

Knowledge Economy

I kept bumping into this phrase on my travels around the education & training sites. It's one of those terms I've read, & even used, without properly looking into what it means & where it comes from. So that was tonight's assignment....

Google offered me this page:

The Knowledge Economy - What Is The Knowledge Economy? from the New Zealand Ministry of Economic Development.
The explanation here is quite clear & comprehensive; it doesn't assume too much about the reader's previous acquaintance with economic theory (just as well, because mine is slight) & talks about areas I do know something about ("death of distance" for instance). So far, so constructivistly good.

Narrowing the search to pages from the UK (because I was a little thrown by the NZ focus) took me back into the fluff'n'guff zone.

So I did what I always do at times like this & asked Wikipedia.

Knowledge economy

Statements such as the rules and practices that determined success in the industrial economy of the 20th century need rewriting in an interconnected world where resources such as know-how are more critical than other economic resources. told me that this is a topic of some relevance to H806! Good job I looked, really...

In one of those neat coincidences, I learned that the phrase is attributed to Peter Drucker, a management theorist I'd never heard of until earlier today, when his death was mentioned in a blog written by a fellow prospective H806 student. I'd even read the Guardian obituary out of curiosity & been none the wiser. (It doesn't mention the knowledge economy concept amongst Drucker's contributions to management theory.) Then tonight, there the name was again!

I do have a lot of gaps to fill.

Ferl & Becta

Ferl Homepage

Becta Homepage

Ferl (Further Education Resources for Learning) is an organisation run by Becta to support the use of ICT & e-learning in post-compulsory education.

Becta ((British Educational Communications & Technology Agency) is the government agency responsible for ICT & e-learning in schools, adult education, workplaces & public bodies.

I know next to nothing about the institutional side of today's UK educational system. I also have an unfortunate tendency to nod off before the end of sentences containing more than three acronyms. This entry is a first step in unravelling the mysteries.

Ferl for you

This looks to be one of the most immediately useful pages. It highlights popular areas of the ferl website, including an introduction to VLEs & a range of downloadable online teaching resources.

How to get it all wrong

A light-hearted look at how not to introduce a VLE.

ferl Interview of the month

Interviews with practitioners, with links to related information & resources.

I've included these as good examples of the accessible way much of the material on ferl is presented.

Post-16 e-learning strategy

Typical sample of the official material on becta's site. I'll need to revisit this when I'm feeling more receptive to what I currently dismiss as "fluff'n'guff" writing.

Enough for Lesson One!!

Digital divide

Where in the world is the digital divide?
BBC News Online "At-a-glance" feature with some startling statistics.
There are fuller sources, I know (& an argument that the true digital divide is not between the haves/have nots, but the use/don't use) but this struck me as a useful starting point.
Opening text:
In 2003 leaders at the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) agreed that by 2015, more than half the world should be in reach of the net.
The world is still a long way from that goal.
The second part of the summit in November 2005 takes stock of how far the world has come.

Reed's Law

The successor to Moore's Law (microprocessors) & Metcalfe's Law (networks), Reed's Law is key in what Howard Rheingold calls "the next social revolution" - the role played by technical networks - wired or wireless - in fostering the growth of social networks.

I suspect that an understanding of Reed's Law will be important.

Reed's Locus is David Reed's Group Forming Networks Resource Page


Reed's Law - An Interview is included in Reed's Locus, but worth identifying separately. It's one of the first resources I found about Reed's Law, & reports an interview conducted by David Weinberger, probably my favourite guru on online matters.

Reed's Law - Wikipedia's somewhat dry summary!

Routes

Routes

This page lists the H806 Course Team's recommended websites for H806 students. I haven't explored them yet - except Blogger, of course!

About this blog

In February 2006, I start studying the OU post-graduate course H806, Learning in the Connected Economy. I've been writing a personal blog for a while now & it seemed natural to use the same medium to make an online notebook to capture some of the ideas & resources I may want to draw on during the course.
The title speaks for itself, I think. H806 should provide an exciting way to study "connecting" in the context of education, & this blog is my tentative way of "connecting" with the course before it begins.