monika’s w e b l o g

Last week I visited Leeds Metropolitan University together with my study colleagues. Besides meeting our supervisors, we all had the chance to participate at the Mini Conference on March 24.

My presentation was about “How can Aspects of Informal Learning through Blogging be Measured?”. And is a work in progress on my recent struggling with the vast field of learning. Sorting ideas about informal and incidental learning (where definitions diverge a lot), their classification into the learning theories, models of learning to ground empirical research, limitations of learning models, etc.

The presentation is available as PDF.

March 29th, 2009. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: conferences, visualisation|presentation. .

It is now official:
“I am pleased to be able to tell you that your paper has been accepted for presentation and for publication in the conference proceedings.”

After the abstract acceptance, now our conference paper submission (co-authored by my supervisors David Moore, Janet Finlay, Andrea Gorra, Reinhold Behringer) with the title “Weblogs in Higher Education – Why Do Students (Not) Blog?” has been accepted for the 4th International Conference on e-Learning ICEL 2009, taking place 16-17 July 2009 in Toronto.

More info’s on conference and content will follow…

March 2nd, 2009. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: conferences, e-learning and weblogs. .

13. Europäische Jahrestagung Gesellschaft für Medien in der Wissenschaft – Offener Bildungsraum Hochschule: Freiheiten und Notwendigkeiten
(13. European Conference of GMW – Open Educational Space University: liberties and necessitities):
I have for the last two days attended the conference, hosted this year by the Danube-Universtiy Krems and the Fachhochschule Krems.

While the lectures that I picked on the first day did not convince me too much, the second day held some very interesting lectures for me. In particular:

Tom Reeves: ‘Open Learning Requires Open Minds: The Challenges of Online and Blended Learning Environments for ‘Generation Me’ Students and their Instructors’

The lecture starts off with a view on the “net generation”. Authors like Don Tapscott (‘Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation’), Neil Howe & William Strauss (‘Generations’, ‘13th Gen’) and Marc Prensky (‘Don’t bother me Mom – I’m learning’), have written about the net generation which grew up with digital devices and digital communication channels, and, thus, their thinking patterns might have changed and with that the demands for education (Prensky 2001, ‘Ditigal Natives, Digital Immigrants). At the same time, “Students may be unafraid of technology, but the don’t necessarily understand it” (Diana Oblinger 2005, Podcast From Diana Oblinger – The Students Are Back!). Today’s students expect wealth, they want to become stars, and at the same time live in an always more competitive world, with student loans, difficult university access, etc. (Jean Twenge 2008, Generation Me).
Universities and also students (reported to have grandious fantasies and being narcistic) are focussed too much on degrees, while the focus should shift on outcomes. 21st century outcomes include: being creative, critical thinking, communication skills, problem solving, etc.
After Tom Reeves, these outcomes can be reached by involving students with authentic tasks. This would lead to restoring the conative domain in Higher Education. While the cognitive domain includes thinking and knowing, and the affective domain includes feeling and emotion, the conative domain includes behaviour, willing, doing.

Martin Ebner, Mandy Schiefner, Walther Nagler: ‘Has the Net Generation Arrived at the University?’

“Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.”
(Source: Marc Prensky 2001 ‘Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants’)
Starting from this quotation, the lecture presents the result of two surveys conducted at the Technical University Graz (A) and the University of Zürich (CH):
About 1100 students (more than 500 students at each university) were asked about their technical equipment (laptops, mobile phone, mp3 players, etc), internet communication practices (email, instant messaging, skype, etc), and use of web 2.0 technologies (active and passive).
It resulted in the insight that most students have a laptop and other digital devices, Internet is almost everywhere, digital communication canals are established, but web 2.0 means mainly passive use of wikipedia and youtube for the new students.
Among the conclusions, Martin Ebner points out that the new generation is a ‘technically equipped generation’, but not a net generation (yet).

Nina Heinze, Thomas Sporer, Tobias Jenert: ‘Projekt i-Literacy: Modell zur Förderung vo Informationskompetenz im Verlauf des Hochschulstudiums’

Once again, this lecture starts with a view on the “net generation”. Nina Heinze reports results of a survey conducted at the University of Augsburg (D), with similar findings than described above – students possess digital devices and use digital technologies with ease. But they also lack information literacy, for instance, in the survey a high percentage of students was not able to solve an internet research task.
Therefore, the university (Institut für Medien und Bildungstechnologie) has started the “information literacy project”, to support students in aquiring skills in handling information and working scientifically. The project implements a combination of self learning materials, lectures and tutorials throughout the different phases of the study, where students can learn to do research (digital and analog), find and process information, etc.
What I liked very much about the project was the notion that students are involved in the design of the material. It becomes “their” material, corresponing to their taste and preferences.

Some Thoughts:

Omnipresent in this conference was the critical discussion about the “net generation”, with the common agreement that today’s students are technologically equipped but not media literate. The presence of Web 2.0 and the – at least partial – use of it does not implicate that today’s students are being media literate. Rather, it is a major challenge for educational institutions to support students on that way.

Another notion, connected to the first one, is that Web 2.0 is perhaps not so much a phenomenon of the net generation. Yes, they share content and connect in social networks, but active participation, content creation, wisdom of crowds?

There is a shift in the discussion: Some years ago, everybody talked about possible learning scenarios with web 2.0, whether it was blogs, or wikis, or social netwiorks. How could you possibly apply some new technologies in your courses? And could you be sure that it makes sense, thus having some positive effect on learning? Now that the technologies have established, the view opens up for the next challenges: media literacy, student involvement, and – just marginally touched in this conference (mainly brought into the discussion by Rolf Schulmeister) – the ever increasing digital devide (within European countries and the US, i’d like to highlight, not just between hemispheres).

The conference was closed by Nicolas Apostolopoulos, hoster of the 2009 GMW conference in Berlin. He suggested that next time also the students should be included more into the discussion/ the conference. I like this idea a lot and am looking forward to it!

September 19th, 2008. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: conferences. .

Some actual conference calls for papers include:

EduMedia Conference 2008: “Self-organised learning in the interactive Web” – A change in learning culture?
Salzburg, 02-03 June
“The focus of most technological development for learning and competence development was the support of institutions as a provider of learning opportunities. With the widespread acceptance and use of social software this focus is starting to change towards supporting consequently the individual and her/his competence development throughout life. This change of perspectives has a significant impact on the way learning technologies are envisioned, planned, developed and evaluated. This special track is dedicated to advanced learning technologies supporting the self-directed learner in all phases of competence development.”
(Extract from call for papers)
Submission deadline: 15 March, 2008

EDEN Conference 2008: New Learning Cultures
Lisbon, 11-14 June
“Besides addressing the significance and impact of cultural factors in distance and e-learning development in Europe and beyond, the intercultural issue will also be understood for the conference as the pooling and sharing of experience of the successful design and implementation of learning solutions in diverse environments.”
(Extract from the call for papers)
Submission deadline: 1 February, 2008

Microlearning Conference 2008: Microlearning & Capacity-building
Innsbruck, 25-27 June 2008
“Microlearning 2008 will concentrate on 5 focal points: Classrooms Without Walls, Microcontent Technologies & Infrastructures, Changes in Workplaces & Enterprises, Mobile Learning & The Mobile Web, Evaluation of Digital Learning”
(Extract from call for papers)
Submission deadline: 29 February 2008

ICL International Conference 2008 (Interactive Computer Aided Learing)
Villach, 24-26 September
“ICL2008 will have a focus on Educational MashUps, Collaborative Learning Environments and ePortfolios.”
(Detailed topics of interest: call for papers)
Submission deadline: 16 May 2008

To be continued …

January 16th, 2008. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: conferences. .

Back to Microlearning – the Microlearning 2007 conference has been taking place since yesterday.
From the various presentations and discussions (many of them, since the conference programme focussed on discussion groups and micro-cafe’s) I’d like to point out one subject, pretty new, but incredibly fascinating to me:

Widgets

Ajit Jaokar, author of the book Mobile Web 2.0, talks about widgets in his presentation on “Mobile Web 2.0 & Education”.
In a simple sentence, a mobile widget is “a third party item that can be embedded in a mobile phone” (Wikipedia).
He draws a line from Web2.0 –> Mobile Web 2.0 –> Learning –> Microlearning –> Widgets, following the idea of a fragmented web being reassembled based on widgets, and of everything being “intertwingled” (term coined by Ted Nelson)
In his article “The dawn of the Widget widget web“, Ajit draws a connection from the beginning of object-oriented software towards the development of web 2.0 and widgets.
He mentions iPhone, Nokia and Opera in connection with widgets. This makes me go to widgets.opera.com and download a few widgets for the Opera browser right away to see how they work. And wow- this is the beginning of something new…

Widsets
“WidSets brings you information normally accessed via the Internet, directly into your mobile phone. Using mini-applications called widgets, it sends you updates made to your favorite websites. The system uses RSS feeds to push information from these websites directly into your mobile phone the minute theyre updated.”
(source: widset faq)
Teemu Leinonen pointed to this service.

What is the educational value – Which impact does this have – Does it change learning – Are participants involved in the process of innovation – Why did this project work out … Similar questions were posed a few times at the conference.
Behind the enthusiasm for the new technologies in the Web2.0, the collection of more and more practical experiences by teachers, raises these new questions. Or is it just me to notice them now, being involved more and more in studying social software and learning?

Other people’s voices about the conference:
anaj
Martin Hofmann
Martin Ebner genau darüber
Ulf Ehlers
Mark Kramer
many participants on twitter

… and probably some more people through various channels …

June 22nd, 2007. von Administrator. (1) Comment.
Kategorie: conferences. .

Nice way of presenting a conference programme, isn’t it? Super clear, at a glance.
Could just be topped by being interactive…

June 15th, 2007. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: conferences, visualisation|presentation. .

Among various interesting lectures about legal conditions for publishing and re-using e-content, I’d like to mention Georg Pleger’s talk on the Creative Commons Licensing System, to keep the basic features in mind.
When opening the own work for distribution, the conditions/rights can be set in a modular system: credit, no commercial use, no modification, distribution under same conditions. This weblog is also under a CC license (see end of page…).
The license is released in 3 versions: legible for humans; legible for jurists; legible for machines.
The website allows for licencing the own work as well as finding CC licensed work with various search engines.
OER Commons is a project supported by Creative Commons.

April 18th, 2007. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: conferences. .

Gerhard Schwed talks about The Distribution of Open Source in Schools in Autria.
He starts with a comparison of Fair trade and Open Source. “The difference lies not in the product itself, but in what is behind – the making of and distribution properties.”
After some explanation of key terms, he talks about the relevance of Open Source Software for schools, and about the distribution and use of it.

What I particularly like in this lecture, is the notion that – yes – it might lead to a cost reduction to introduce OSS. But that is just a marginal effect. The awareness building effects are of much more importance for education:
- product independent teaching
- plurality
- education of students towards “co-designers” and not pure consumers
- omission of illegal software copies

Links:
Why “Open Source” Misses the Point of Free Software, Richard Stallman
Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU

April 18th, 2007. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: conferences. .

Partners of the EU-project OLCOS (the Open eLearning Content Observatory Services Project) sustain this conference.
Indeed, the first keynote speaker Guntram Geser from Salzburg Research presents the OLCOS roadmap 2012. He explains that the roadmap builds up on ten key findings of the OLCOS project. These findings include the fact that at present most OER content is static teaching and learning material in closed format, and the model of teaching through teacher-centred knowledge transfer has not changed largely through the massive investments in ICT.
“The OLCOS road mapping has been carried out to inform and support a transformation in educational practices that brings learning processes and their outcomes closer to what individuals will need to participate successfully in the knowledge society. Acquiring the competences and skills for the knowledge society will demand that educational practices give priority to learners’ own explorative, constructive and communicative activities instead of a teacher-centred knowledge transfer model of education.”
(Source: Conference book, p.32)

Bernie Dodge, creator of the WebQuest method, furthers the thoughts of a learner centred approach in his keynote. He emphasises that having access to free resources is not yet learning. Learning requires action, struggle, context. He juxtaposes a transmission model of learning to the constructivist model of transformation of information.
The concept of Webquests is “an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the internet, optionally supplemented with videoconferencing.” Critical attributes of webquests include an interesting and doable task, a set of information sources, a description of the process the learners should go through.
(Source: http://webquest.sdsu.edu/about_webquests.html)
Finally, Bernie Dodge presents his taxonomy of learning – Bernie’s taxonomy:
life verbs: decide, design, create, predict, judge
(somewhere in the middle): apply, analyse, explain
classroom verbs: know, tell, remember

Thoughts:
Constructivist learning to acquire skills for the knowledge society, and the importance of Web 2.o technologies for enabling this learning, are pointed out throughout the conference day. This is supportive for my research (“protective belt”).
As I understand the concept of Open Educational Resources so far, although collaborative learning and communities of practice are enabled on one side, the importance of the individual is huge. In the sense that the individual’s contribution counts, and the various personal digital environments weave into each other; the tags or thoughts produced by the individual are key factors for others to find it worth reading/watching the content. Are strong individuals supportive for strong communities?

April 18th, 2007. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: conferences. .

It has been a while since I’ve attendended a conference, but today I had the chance to be at “Offene Bildung im/mit dem Web 2.0 – Open Educational Practices and Resources for Lifelong Learning”.

“At the heart of the movement toward Open Educational Resources is the simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the Worldwide Web in particular provide an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge. OER are the parts of that knowledge that comprise the fundamental components of education – content and tools for teaching, learning and research.”
(Source: Website of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, cited in the preface of this conference’s book).

I followed tracks on Open Didactics in Web 2.0, Trends and Perspectives for Open Source and Freeware in Educational Sectors, and Legal Conditions for Publishing and Reusing E-Content. Connections between the concept of Open Educational Resources and Web 2.0 concepts/applications were drawn by many lecturers, as well as to constructivist concepts for learning. A motivation for me to investigate further in this topic. Some notes on lectures and reflections in the following posts…

Like last year, also this 3d Edumedia conference organised by Salzburg Research and Bildungshaus St.Virgil was an intense and interesting event, well organised, and with a good atmosphere.

BTW: Podcast episodes of the conference, including interviews with visitors and lecturers, will be published soon on the conference website.

April 17th, 2007. von Administrator. No Comments.
Kategorie: conferences. .