StigmergicWeb

I’m getting started on a couple of interesting instructional design projects right now. One is the design of an online computer science class for Grade 11 students. I’ve taught CompSci many times before and used a blended instructional model where the students and I were all in the same room, and all the resources and assignments were online. It shouldn’t be too much of a stretch to adapt that to being completely online. I have a personal stake in how well the course is designed because I’ll be teaching it next semester.

I’m also working with Alec in the design of a grad level class (Ed Curriculum and Instruction 831 from the University of Regina if you’re interested in joining the fun). We’re going to be looking at open, connected and social technologies in the classroom and appropriate pedagogies in the connected age. It should be a lot of fun, but I guess that’s the whole point of these things.

My problem with both of these projects is where to organize all my notes and ideas. I have OmniOutliner Pro for organizing all my hierarchical lists like to do lists, learning objectives and that sort of thing. Or I could use Notebook from Circus Ponies, or Journler to keep track of general sorts of notes in addition to hierarchical things. Freemind is a great program for brainstorming or mind mapping, and it’s even open source to add to the goodness. In keeping with the spirit of the EC and I class, I could use some of the terrific online tools - Google Docs and Google Notebook for collaborative writing/note taking. How about Mindmeister or bubbl.us for some mind maps online. Of course, there’s always good old Wikispaces or PB Wiki (or many others that I don’t use or know about). My brain is addled with the surfeit of tools and choices that I’m not sure where to begin.

Maybe I’ll just go back to the basics!


(by Olivander, released under Creative Commons AT,NC,SA license)

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I’m reading a paper right now entitled Comparing Weblogs to Threaded Discussion in Online Educational Contexts by Donna Cameron and Terry Anderson, published in the November edition of the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning (thanks to Stephen for the pointer to this). When I write that I’m reading it right now, I mean that pretty much literally as I flip between the windows for this entry and the paper. I’d usually wait until I’m done reading the paper then write about it, but this is too compelling to resist putting thoughts on paper - er, web in real time.

Donna and Terry discuss the use of blogs as tools to create and sustain a community of inquiry. The community of inquiry model was developed by Terry Anderson, Randy Garrison and Walter Archer. It describes three elements of educational transaction - cognitive presence, social presence and teaching presence - and their use in designing online education. Their original research is available online at the Communities of Inquiry (CoI) website, and is well worth the read. At the time of the original research, they were looking mainly at threaded discussion, but these elements also work extremely well if one looks at blogs as the communication tool. This line of thought actually occurred to me two years ago when I was at a presentation by Walter Archer entitled Fostering Critical Thinking in an Online Environment at the Instructional Design conference in Saskatoon, in which he discussed the community of inquiry model. Dirk Morrison had also used the CoI model earlier in the day. One of my first thoughts when looking at the CoI model was that blogs could be used to create cognitive, social and teaching presence, not in any sort of centralized location, but in a much more diffuse and distributed fashion. Here are my notes from the presentation - Fostering Critical Thinking in an Online Environment. (I also blogged some notes about Alec Couros’ presentation on education blogging, and Alec has his educational blogging presentation slides online) My first podcast also describes the conference - StigmergicWeb podcast #1. (link is to blog entry)

OK - back to the paper. Donna and Terry (I keep wanting to retreat back into academic speak by saying “The authors …” or “Cameron and Anderson …”, but that wouldn’t be very blog-ish of me, would it? Informality is an inherent part of the medium. But I digress …) then show how blogs have positive and negative aspects with regard to all three types of presence. One particular thought I like is about teaching presence:

This means that the design of LMS based courses tend to exclude use of emerging Internet tools such as collaborative bookmarking, FOAF, podcasting, synchronous web conferencing and other social software and external database systems. Thus, the design and organization component of teaching presence is generally more restricted when LMS based conferencing systems are used as opposed to blogging tools.

Hmmm - maybe the choice of an open-source LMS versus a proprietary one is not as important as the consideration of why we need an LMS, and what other tools we might need to bring into the design of online learning. But again, I digress …

I enjoyed the paper and did a lot of nodding as I was reading it, more from my own ideas being affirmed rather than from any new perspectives. I think that these ideas have been around for a while; I’ve written and presented (at AMTEC - audio also posted - and a LORNET research symposium) about the utility of blogs as tools in online learning, along with many others far more intelligent and well-spoken than I am. If you are reading this, then you might have the same sense of familiarity. I think that having what we know fit within an established framework of online education should help in trying to get our ideas out to the larger educational structures we work in. Why not print a couple of copies of the paper, leave them strategically placed in your staff/faculty room and then see what happens? Of course, if you want to blog about the experience, that would be even better!

Stephen pointed out a good analysis of the Podcast Theory Gap by Susan Smith Nash. She points out the implication of many theories in learning with regard to podcasts as part of online courses. But one point at the beginning of the article puzzles me:

Although instructional designers do not often like to mention this, the fact is, it is the rare learner who will sit at a computer and willingly watch a 20 or 30-minute presentation. However, the same learners are happy to listen to an audio file (podcast or book on tape).

I can only speak to my experience, but I would willingly watch a well designed 20 or 30 minute presentation. Lawrence Lessig’s presentation on Free Culture from OSCON 2002 is one of the most coherent arguments for rational limitations on intellectual property. There is also an audio only (MP3) version of the presentation, but the full multimedia (slides and audio) experience is not to be missed.

But I am also quick to admit that I am not most learners. Indeed, I didn’t think of watching and listening to Lessig’s presentation as learning, at least not in a formal sense. It was just something that I found interesting and more worthy of my time than an episode of Seinfeld. I think that Susan is meaning learners in a formal, course-based context. Would they be willing listeners to the an audio track that was narrating some powerpoint presentation? It doesn’t sound any more onerous than attending a lecture, so I assume that they would. In fact, in an online course a podcast might be the only time a student would actually hear the instructor’s voice, and the effect of this might be to reduce the affective distance between the students and the instructor. The value of the podcast might not be strictly in the content it contains, but in the sense of connection the listener has for the speaker.

A quick google search for online courses that use podcasts yielded no results, which is not surprising considering that podcasting is barely a year old yet (the first entry for podcast in wikipedia is dated from August 4, 2005). I’m sure that there will be at least a few teachers and instructors integrating podcasts into their online courses this coming year, and then we’ll have some actual student experiences to compare to theory.

I’ve heard about this through a number of sources, including Alec, who views this as I do - a signal that North American institutes of higher learning may start adopting open source software as part of their learning infrastructure. Alec puts it aptly:

Leading innovative institutions will continue to switch to open source software once there is a clear realization that good software does NOT have to be purchased, and that decisions around software are best made in rooms without salespeople.

The original source of this news seems to be this thread on the Using Moodle forum at moodle.org. (You can log in as a guest to access the forum, but you might as well create an account for yourself). The thread begins by quoting this from Cindy Xin’s summary of CADE:

Athabasca faculties were using three different LMS systems at the same time. The University finally decided that it would only support a single system. The questions was which one. Sounds familiar? Selection committee was formed and it decided on WebCT. Bear in mind that Alberta has province wide license on webct. Faculty member didn’t like the decision and consequently formed its own committee and conducted its own evaluation to rate the three systems - webct, moodle, and Lotus Notes Learning Space. Moodle won head and shoulder. The University accepted faculty’s decision. Now Moodle is the choice at Athabasca.