Hypo-media

It turns out that trees (and other members of the forrest community) form networks, which are key to cross-species ecologies. So they are not so stupid after all, and got into "hypo-media" before we did (sorry, couldnt resit it)

See here 

Benchmarking and Mastery

Some affordances are sought out, and even designed. Some fall into your lap / onto your desk.


The affordances for benchmarking and mastery, in e-assessment at Portsmouth University are a case in point. We set up a new version of the first year mathematics courses in calculus and linear algebra about a year ago, and found, as we proceeded, that the software allowed us to set in-class exams in which students could repeat individual questions three times (with new values each time), instead of repeating whole assessments three times.

As we monitored their progress, we noticed that they were shifting from 'collecting grades' to 'accumulating competencies' - quite a different set of affordances and behaviour.

This raises the intriguing possibility that it might be possible to relegate assessment to certifying benchmarking and mastery that the students have already achieved - i.e. to transform externally dirven 'summative assessment' into internally motivated benchmarking and mastery. And get the 'learning tail to wagy the assessment dog' for a change. That has a nice ring to it too!

See the presentation slides (with a brief narrative) on the (copied) wiki page here:

Consumers or Contributors

Mike Caulfield recently wrote an interesting piece about a class-less society. He means of course school ‘class’, and he advocates for the use of ‘cohort’ instead, because of its associations with “’generational cohort’ … a group of people that experience a certain set of events simultaneously together.
He references John Seely Brown: too, and Stanley Fish:
“Together, members construct and negotiate a shared meaning, bringing the group along collectively rather than individually. In the process, they became what the literary critic Stanley Fish calls a “community of interpretation” working toward a shared understanding of the matter under discussion,” and what Tony Hirst calls OCW content delivered serially:.
Caulfield says …
“What you would need, ala Hirst, is a serialization mechanism (and here, again, talking in terms of the original meaning of serialization, not it’s specialized meaning). You and your friends sign up to watch the mid-90s series Earth 2. and it delivers you an episode a week.
“In other words, you become a cohort, moving through this series in sync so that everyone shares a similar interpretative environment. …The “class” is dead, as is the “audience”. Long live the cohort”.
From the perspective of my own practice, this is an interesting idea, however …

1. “Cohort” sounds too formal and too constrained, but what's in a name? My personal choice is Community of Inquiry.

2. Much more fundamental though: In designing "digital ecologies"/ "virtual adaptive networks" for learning, the crucial shift is to move completely away from content-driven events to activity-driven events.

This gets us to the starting blocks for connectivist / inquiry-based / problem-based / activity-based learning /networked / CoP or workshop -based learning. Pick a term and an approach to suit your needs, but this is the threshold for learning now, surely?

So the serialisation mechanism is often required - it is a key driver for community, and learning is social and contextual, in many ways, no?

But ...
Focus serialisation on what the 'community' / cohort will DO, not what they CONSUME - sorry to put it so starkly, but I am not sure there is that much 'grey' left in this issue.

affordances

The more I think about design, the more I like Gibsons radical notion of affordances (which are not a property of a thing, or a technology, but are the result of a dynamic interaction between the learner and the environment).

And we are trying to get together a research project specifically informed by this notion of affordances so, inevitably, this has spawned another blog:

http://roytwilliams.wordpress.com/

Affordances and Media Selection

We are putting together a reseach proposal that is framed in terms of affordances.

I have started a new blog, specifically on affordances and on the research project, on:

http://roytwilliams.wordpress.com/

Might be of interest.

Paradigms and Applications

It struck me when I was writing up a draft of materials on databases that the differerence between content-centred design and activitiy-centred design is actually a difference of paradigms. The two paradigms or approaches differ substantially in the role that resources, and the role that learners play in the process. And if the design is indeed a 'learning' design, then this has implications for the role of the teacher/ faciltiator (and not vice versa).

What also struck me was an interesting question:

If it is the case that the nature of web-based learning is that the learning 'byte', or 'event' is much smaller and shorter, does this mean that the design needs to be more mindful of the balance and links between theory and application?

To wit - if the basic learning event is a lecture, it is quite feasable for the lecturer to explore theoretical issues at some length, and only to tie these into examples and applications later on (still in the same lecture), without losing the students in abstraction.

However, in web/screen based 'events' the parameters are quite different: the time on task is likely to be much shorter - 5-15 mintues perhaps, and the process of moving from one screen to the next remains disruptive, however neat the navigation is. As one of my students said: screens are so difficult to read, as when you browse through material you find that you can 'see through paper' but you cant 'see through screens'.

Does this mean that apart from the general benefits that arise from activity based learning (in online or blended learning), there is a more fundamental requirement, if the material is provided on screen,
which is that we need to tie in applications and exemplars to theory earlier, and more frequently?

Principles of design

John Rosbottom recently wrote:

"For the last few decades I've been saying that "computers program people" and what I mean by this is that what we do with computers tends to be circumscribed by the software tools we know. Insidiously the way we design can become similarly circumscribed, so it is quite important for us to have a good range of flexible, powerful tools. Anyway back to design. I find Braun's 10 principles make a good guide:

1. Good design is innovative
2. Good design enhances the usefulness of a product
3. Good design is aesthetic
4. Good design displays the logical structure of a product; its formfollows its function
5. Good design is unobtrusive
6. Good design is honest
7. Good design is enduring
8. Good design is consistent right to the details
9. Good design is ecologically conscious
10. Good design is minimal design"

which is very useful, and a considerably more comprehensive specification than my current shorthand, which is that e-learning design should be:

Elegant, rich and delightful

Though I like to think the two versions of the design spec. are similar in spirit.