Productive MOOCs

Posted on April 5, 2013 by Colin Milligan — 5 Comments ↓

One of my frustrations with MOOCs is that while they provide value for the individual, their (lack of) collective value is a missed opportunity. Although I’ve had a blog post in the works for almost a year, I could never work out how to write it concisely. A recent post by Rachel Harris of Inspire Research provided a slightly different angle to address the issue.

Rachel is evaluating the ALT ocTEL MOOC and one of her evaluation questions is ‘Can new knowledge be generated via critical discourse in a MOOC?’. With our other research interests here at the Caledonian Academy we are really interested in knowledge creation and collective knowledge. So, in the comments I said:

I’m firmly of the belief that knowledge creation is a key component of learning, and successful MOOC learners will (through writing and responding to blog posts) create new knowledge and advance their thinking.

Of course I am talking about cMOOCs here (xMOOCs will have to wait for another day, but Dave Cormier has a related post from last weekend which explores similar issues). My comment continued with this observation (from participation in cMOOcs, and from researching Change11)

But one of my concerns in observing other MOOCs is that while each individual might advance their knowledge, there is little in the way of collective knowledge advancement. What this means in practice is that there is lot of duplicated knowledge produced during the MOOC.

Wouldn’t it be great if cMOOcs could be made more ‘productive’ – instead of advancing many people’s knowledge a little by re-creating the same (or similar) new knowledge again and again, can MOOCs be structured to stimulate the creation of new knowledge in a more coordinated way. Can you bring the learners together to produce something entirely novel as they learn? This is in the true spirit of connectivism.

Aside from my desire to see new knowledge created, there is actually an important learning observation here. As I went on to say in the comment on Rachel’s post:

To the active participants, this can be frustrating as the consequence is that there is too much ‘noise’ in the system.

You might read a number of blog posts by your fellow participants, each making the same point. In the Change11 MOOC, some participants found this boring, others (particularly the less confident) decided not to articulate their own view because they thought it had already been presented and didn’t want to ‘just repeat’. But articulating what you have learned is important so this is a missed learning opportunity.

On a more positive note, the emergence of self-organised spaces in the Chage 11 MOOC (the facebook group, the One Change a Day group) showed that co-creation could succeed, but it was only a minority of participants who managed to engage in this coordinated way.

Solutions. I’m not sure I have any, but here is one idea**: Can MOOCs be used to encourage interdisciplinarity? An interdisciplinary*MOOC could bring together experts from different fields to explore a topic from different perspectives and adopting each other’s methods etc. The ultimate product could be the new knowledge created as a result, perhaps a series of working papers. The immediate flaw in this is that it doesn’t seem very massive (or at least the productive element might be the result just of the collaboration of the instructors), but if you can structure the MOOC participants as disciplinary ‘tribes’ then you can focus groups on creation of specific knowledge – e.g. initially discipline sub-groups could cooperate to co-create a disciplinary view, then be re-assorted into inter-disciplinary groups to explore the overlaps and tensions. oriented towards a more specific goal that matches their existing knowledge and motivation, they can work together to co-create something that can be contributed back to the group. A structure such as this might also help counter the tension/imbalance between homophily and heterophily that I think is inherent in MOOCs.

* by interdisciplinarity, I mean ‘integrating knowledge and methods from different disciplines, using a real synthesis of approaches’ – taken from http://www.arj.no/2012/03/12/disciplinarities-2/ which in turn is from a paper by Stember (1990)

**I’ll dig out the notes for the original blog post and write more at a later date.

Tagged with: mooc
Posted in change11, mooc

From consumption to curation – but where are we headed.

Posted on March 27, 2013 by Colin Milligan — 1 Comment ↓

We have previously described four learning behaviours which we feel describe the ways in which an individual engages with their personal and work learning environment/ personal learning network. See Littlejohn, Milligan and Margaryan, 2011 and Milligan, Littlejohn and Margaryan, 2012 for academic papers). We term the behaviours the 4c’s: consume, connect, create and contribute. We tend to argue that learning networks and personal learning environments facilitate connection creation and contribution, whereas traditional learning environments (and their associated pedagogies) were more focused on consumption.

Although we’ve settled on 4c’s, a fifth option: curation describes an important and emergent behaviour in social networks which has clear overlap with these behaviours. This blog post (long and hastly written) captures some of my current thinking about tools in this area.

In the good old days we saved bookmarks. To our own computers. Then along came del.icio.us allowing public sharing of bookmarks, and through tags a great mechanism for discovering trusted knowledge sources and gaining an insight into how other people in our networks conceptualised and structured knowledge. I was an avid user of delicious from its early days – and I think it is an incredibly powerful social tool for learners and for learning. But I hardly use delicious anymore …

I used to have a simple workflow – find things via Google Reader, and save everything useful to delicious, organising with different tags. I shared stuff using the special for:username tag to individuals in my close personal network. and I used to make notes about the resources as i saved them in delicious. This is incredibly powerful in learning terms … Going back to the 4c’s I consumed content, I connected it to my existing knowledge structures (by tagging) and to people in my network (using the for:username tag), I created new knowledge associated with the new resources I’d identified (appending notes) and making all this public through an open social tool represented my contribution back to my learning network, and beyond.

Sometime in the last two years or so, my delicious tagging started to slow considerably and my sharing fell to zero. Sorry network. The reason: the other tools in my personal learning environment evolved, and new ones arrived, while delicious (and Google Reader) stagnated. These new tools have different affordances, but bring some limitations.

In the last 7 or 8 years, the web (and how we interact with it) has moved on, not least with the advent mobile devices and apps. My simple discovery and share workflow has evolved – but not for the better. Now I tend to put things in silos – I save recipes to ‘Pocket’ because they are then easily accessible when I am cooking and have my tablet with me. I store research papers to Mendeley or Zotero where I can search, music videos go on tumblr, tips and tricks articles to Evernote. I’ve gradually migrated many of my newsfeeds from Google Reader to Flipboard where the reading (consumption) interface is much nicer. Managing /curating and consuming my content streams is infinitely easier than it was before. But there’s been a silent cost. In some of these new silos I have retained networks, but not in all. Specifically. FlipBoard and Pocket feel very personal to me and not social at all (they support consume, but not so much connect).

And what about create and contribute … I really like Pocket, and if I am honest I don’t really mind that it is not ‘social’ (in the short run, I don’t suffer) but one thing that does frustrate me is that I can’t annotate the things I keep there. I want to be able to write ‘halve the quantities’ or ‘use butter not margarine’ somewhere to remind me when I make a recipe again, but this online version of a recipe folder doesn’t give that option (it doesn’t support create). And with it not being social, there is little option for me to contribute. That’s a real shame.

Likewise with FlipBoard. Up until now there was no coherent sharing within FlipBoard (you can ‘tweet out’ single articles from the Flipboard app) So it was interesting to read today that FlipBoard is adding a social layer to its app. This immediately made me think – hey, this is a great way to share stuff I discover – I can curate a bundle of content I’ve found which is interesting to me and share it with anyone else who is interested (connect). But a quick look at lunchtime confirmed that their view of social still doesn’t extend to giving me a ‘voice’to annotate my curated selection – there is no facility for creation.

So, where are we? it seems that our social web spaces are increasingly driven by content consumption and curation … and while tools supporting these actions have evolved, this has been at the expense of functionality for creation and contribution. If we are to make use of social web tools for learning, we have to recognise that the functions of the tools we find may not match with the balance of functions we would like our learning tools to have.

If anyone knows of a good tool that gets the balance right then I’d love to know. Scoop.it seems to get creation right (allowing annotation/commenting on resources), but I’m not sure about the others – though in truth i haven’t yet used myself, only seen other’s scoops.

Bibliography
Littlejohn, A., Milligan, C., & Margaryan, A. (2012). Collective knowledge: Supporting self-regulated learning in the workplace. Journal of Workplace Learning, 24(3) 226-238.

Milligan, C., Margaryan, A., & Littlejohn, A. (2012). Supporting goal formation, sharing and learning of knowledge workers. In Ravenscroft, A. et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL), LNCS 7563 (pp. 519—524). Heidelberg: Springer. Postprint (under green archiving arrangements):https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6017514/milliganetalLNCS_archive2012.pdf

Tagged with: charting
Posted in charting, research

Lurkers, lurking and labels

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Colin Milligan — Leave a comment ↓

Our SRL-MOOC study has been getting some attention thanks to a post by Phil Hill which built on the categories I had assigned to learners in Change11 that were emerging from our data analysis. There’s been some discussion going back and forth in the comments (where I think it ought to be), but a comment from Debbie Morrison last night on my use of the term ‘lurkers’ might benefit from a more extensive discussion, so I have written this post.

Debbie wrote:

I realized from reading your comment your choice of the term of lurker was not in a negative context – however the term does have a negative connotation associated with it – to ‘lurk’ according to the Webster’s dictionary, ” to lie in wait in a place of concealment especially for an evil purpose”, though I realize a modern definition has been added recently, “to read messages on an Internet discussion forum (as a newsgroup or chat room) without contributing”.

And it’s this second definition here that is critical. The term ‘lurker’ is already used in the academic literature. Discussing lurking in traditional online courses, Rovai (2000) describes lurkers as “… learners who are bystanders to course discussions, lack commitment to the community, and receive benefits without giving anything back”. This is exactly what we observed, so while I thought about whether to adopt a different term (I played around with lurking, but found it unworkable). I eventually concluded that Rovai’s definition described what we were observing.

Connectivist MOOCs (such as Change11) must accommodate learners of all types to satisfy Downes’ (2009) ‘Diversity’ and ‘Openness’ criteria. In practice, as long as there is a balance of these different types of learner, then lurkers can be accommodated, and the evidence from this study is that lurkers can learn effectively in connectivist environments: taking the knowledge they acquire to their external networks.

In contrast, in xMOOCs, where structures of peer-grading are put in place, or people are placed in small groups, then lurkers can be disruptive if they don’t participate in the designed learning environment.

Downes, S (2009) Connectivist dynamics in communities. http://halfanhour.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/connectivist-dynamics-in-communities.html Available online February 26 2013. [changed - had previously posted the wrong Downes ref]

Rovai, A. P. (2000). Building and sustaining community in asynchronous learning networks. The Internet and Higher Education, 3(4), 285-297.

Posted in mooc

LCL: The maps of My Childhood

Posted on March 5, 2013 by Colin Milligan — Leave a comment ↓

The activity for session two of the LCL course is to read the forward to Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms (1980) entitled The Gears of My Childhood and ‘write about an object from your childhood that interested and influenced you‘.

My object is an Atlas. I have been fascinated by maps for as long as I can remember and though I didn’t follow a career path focused on geography, or become an explorer, that early and constant love of maps has provided a framework on which I have hung so much other knowledge in my life.

The atlas was only the centrepiece of an obsession with maps and flags which extended to jigsaws of maps, road atlases, the Ordnance Survey (see the picture of my wall in my old flat above) and the maps form the National Geographic. As a young child (of 7 or 8, see later in the post why I can be sure) I used to take the Atlas, and a table lamp and trace outlines of countries and continents on a glass coffee table we had. I’d then colour in each country with the corresponding flag. Different continents lent themselves to this activity to different degrees: Europe was a bit rubbish, as all the countries were small; Africa much more pleasing with lots of big countries; North America too boring with only 3 countries and South America good, but with the nearly insurmountable problem of fitting the flag of Chile.

This is a nice innocent activity, a good way for a not very artistic child to be creative. But the real value of the activity was that the constant repetition (I must have done each continent dozens of times in my pursuit of perfection) cemented in the positions and names of countries (along with lots of incidental detail) along with their flags. Having this knowledge of maps helped me begin to understand world events – I’ve got a strong memory of following the Angolan Civil War (1975 – so when I was 7 or 8), and recognising the Communist/Marxist imagery (a cog representing workers, the sickle representing the land, etc). These symbols, repeated across Africa in the flags of the other countries such as Mozambique and Zaire, gave me an awareness of the role which armed struggle had played in these countries’ emergence from colonialism (and that while much of the map was pink – British empire – large swathes of Africa had been Portuguese or Spanish. I also saw patterns in the use of Red, Yellow and Green in the swathe of countries further north, and how these were similar to those of many nations in the West Indies and surrounding the Caribbean and how these in turn gave way to a different palette and set of symbols in the Muslim countries of North Africa and the Middle East.

From the combination of maps and flags I got a framework to hang new knowledge on but also a ‘way in’ to the political and historical changes that had occured not just in Africa but across the whole world – without ever reading a formal textbook or history book.

Tagged with: lcl-gears, medialabcourse, mooc
Posted in medialabcourse

LCL2: Interest-based Learning

Posted on March 5, 2013 by Colin Milligan — Leave a comment ↓

Writing deadlines mean I am a week (or so) behind in the LCL course, but I do still hope to keep up. Session 2 was about Interest-based learning and was based on the following readings:

Seymour Papert (1980): Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (Foreword: The Gears of My Childhood)
Joi Ito blog posts: Formal vs Informal Education, Reading the Dictionary, Dubai and Learning about the Unknowable
Joi Ito (2012). Keynote to Open Educational Resources meeting (video), Hewlett Foundation.
Mimi Ito et al. (2009): Selections from Learning and Living with New Media. Executive Summary (xiii-xx), Conceptual Framework (19-72), Conclusion and Implications (73-83). MacArthur Foundation.

We were asked to structure our reflections based on the following two questions:

What did you find most interesting or surprising in the readings? I liked all the readings for this week, and was particularly enthused by the very readable Papert piece (I’ll save my comments on that for a separate piece on ‘the gears of my childhood‘. My research interests are informal learning, so although I didn’t know the work I know the ideas, so it is interesting to reflect on the generalisability of the underlying concepts. For example, I’m struck by how the readings this week either explicitly or implicitly emphasise ‘affect’ as a key factor. In Joi Ito’s formal vs informal blog post, he asks: ‘is there a way to support and acknowledge the importance of informal learning …?’ I think the answer is yes (I’m thinking about Higher education contexts here). One way to motivate learners is to make learning meaningful for them – so rather than imposing a curriculum, try and negotiate it (as far as your quality procedures allow) and certainly personalise it – allow each individual student to own their own learning. That’s easy to say, but what does it mean in practice? Well, you could start by helping the students think about why they are doing the course, what they want out of it, how it will contribute towards their overall goal. Then, don’t just produce content for your students to consume – get them to contribute ideas, create new knowledge, make connections. Design assessments that allow them to demonstrate what they have learned (how they have changed during the course) and what it means to them in terms of their own learning and goals. This might be more work in terms of assessment, but you will have motivated your students and given them a learning experience that is valuable beyond exam time. I also liked the ideas in the Dubai post: unpredictability drives learning – it makes it easier to identify and articulate gaps in your knowledge and therefore to start planning to address them.

What did you disagree with or have questions about? In Papert’s ‘Gears of My Childhood’ piece, I loved the overall idea, but I was a bit concerned that he had overstepped the mark when talking about body knowledge, and the sensorimotor schemata of the child. I think I’d have to read the rest of the book to find out, but although it worked for his ‘gears’ it wouldn’t work for the thing that spurred my interest-based learning … maps.

Posted in medialabcourse

Piloting the WLBK survey instrument. Help Needed

Posted on February 26, 2013 by Colin Milligan — Leave a comment ↓

We have been developing a survey instrument for the ‘Work and Learning at the Boundaries of Knowledge’ project. (http://www.gcu.ac.uk/academy/wlbk/) and would like to test it out before sending to the main study participants. Would you be able to spend a little time piloting the survey for us.

The survey is at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/N853STG and includes space to provide feedback inline.

The instrument should hopefully help you to think about the learning you undertake at work.

We are interested in gaining feedback on:

Whether the survey functions properly (any broken questions etc)
Whether the questions make sense (the questions are aimed at knowledge workers)
How long you think it would take to complete (we have estimated 25 minutes, there are 50 items).

We will be collating any feedback this Friday (March 1st 2013). Many thanks in advance for your help.

Posted in Uncategorized

Learning Creative Learning: kindergarten learning

Posted on February 18, 2013 by Colin Milligan — Leave a comment ↓

The first week of learning creative learning (learn.medialab.mit.edu) is almost over. The course content consisted of just one paper and a google hangout, so not much to take in. I’ve not had time to watch the hangout: the format doesn’t really suit me, so i’ll probably miss it most weeks. I found some visual notes via twitter update from @ikbenjulie – https://twitter.com/ikbenjulie/status/301014444358643712. From this, it looks like the hangout talks through the paper and introduced the course.

Anyway, onto the paper: Mitchel Resnick (2007). All I Really Need to Know (About Creative Thinking) I Learned (By Studying How Children Learn) in Kindergarten. ACM Creativity & Cognition conference. [PDF]. I liked this paper, nice and simple, and thought provoking. The core idea of the paper is that the learning we encourage in kindergarten promotes exploration and creativity, but subsequent learning environments, at school and beyond are too focused on facts and measurement. Resnick argues that promoting learning approaches which focus on creativity should be extend to all ages, a simple cycle is presented: imagine, create, play, share and reflect, before a new cycle of imagine … begins.

Resnick then presents a couple of technologies which MIT medialab have designed to promote different aspects of the cycle. Crickets (physical programmable devices) and scratch (a programming toolkit) take a modular approach to promoting the type of free play and creation in kindergarten learning.

Some years ago I was involved in a project/ company / consultancy developing a software toolkit for producing educational simulations (some of the simulations are available from www.jelsim.org). The idea behind the toolkit was to separate the model from its visualisation: so a single model calculating the position of the sun in the sky could be used as the basis to create an interface to help architects decide what blinds to specify for windows (based on how much sunlight might shine through them at what time of day) or a simulation to allow young children to explore how day length varies at different times of year (see the java simulations at JeLSIM.org/applets/solar/). The jelsim tools focused on empowering the teacher (to tailor simulations to educational need), but we recognised the ultimate aim of empowering the learner to create their own simulations: supporting true exploratory learning where a learner could build an interface to test a hypothesise. If we had reached that goal, the JeLSIM tools would have been a good example of kindergarten learning.

Tagged with: learning, mooc
Posted in medialabcourse