Pearls of wisdom

I've been spending a lot of time of late transcribing the interviews that I held with a few teachers after the Learning Event (LE) last year. It can be quite a laborious task which brings you close to the data but risks creating a feeling of 'I cannot see the wood for the trees'. Today I had the pleasure of writing up a long discussion that I had with a more mature teacher via Skype with a camera. I feel that the quality and depth of the dialogue is a reflection of the stronger feeling of connectedness and intimacy that we had, thanks to being able to see one another.

Several reflections were provoked by the discussion:

• It is perhaps harder for more mature teachers to express themselves online and to feel connected with their peers via their writing. As my interviewee said "may be this is a matter of being an older generation, but anyway I find it really funny just writing my ideas all the time and sending them, as if I were a writer instead of a teacher". She mentioned that as a teacher she has spent thirty years of her life talking and therefore moving to writing is not easy for her. She had noticed that it seemed to be more natural for the younger teachers. This can make online collaboration quite a frustrating experience for the more mature teacher, especially if they have little time to spend online.
• Despite the lack of time for participation, reading the contributions of others and seeing what they have to share can be very useful (lurking). It can be motivating to see that some teachers have clearly mastered the use of technology with their children and are really adding value to learning "I could get this from the level of the conversation they held". That said, in order to really learn something you need to be applying it: "it is very difficult for me to build-up an ability unless I am using it everyday".
• Developing a community is more than just posting messages and replying to people, "I suppose I still can’t feel the web community as a real community"; "Simply reading or writing to someone else doesn’t mean we are in the same room or in the same train of thought, and we are understanding each other in the way that we are supposed to really". On the other hand, the LE did engender a feeling of connectedness and it was interesting to see some teachers still posting messages to the forum once the event was over: "at the end there were messages of people asking for help saying 'what is going to happen now?', 'are we being left on our own?', 'is it finished?' ".
• The situation in some countries concerning the availability of internet connected PCs is far from ideal and for my interviewee she explained that there is only one lab in the school, with ten PCs which often have problems maintaining their internet connection. She is able to use the lab for only a few hours per week and this changes both the opportunity for learning with ICT and the way one learns: "They have to plan everything in their books, in their exercise books. We plan everything ahead, we write, we draw, we do everything by hand and then we go to the PC".  So what we see in these circumstances is that the children are not using the PC to create and produce ideas in situ, but rather they use it to transpose what they have already produced in advance. So ICT is not transforming learning but transposing it.
• Despite the resistance perhaps of colleagues and parents to using PCs and the internet, my interviewee was convinced that ICT could help to bring teachers and pupils closer together: "even ten years ago they (pupils) were much nearer to us, now they are really just going away because they are using different tools as a means of getting to know each other or just playing around".This concurs with the feedback that I have received from other teachers on their experience of using web 2.0 tools: it seemed to increase pupil motivation and the respect they have for their teachers (pupils are impressed with their 'cool' teachers who know about technology).
• However, my interviewee reminded me that simply using ICT doesn't improve learning, "being happy with your being very skilled with all the tools that you have learned to use doesn’t mean that you are empowering the way you are teaching children". She reminded me of the fundamental values of teaching and of the need to ensure that we use ICT appropriately to add value. This is why it is important to allow teachers to try out what they are learning in their everyday teaching practice and then to reflect on it with peers.
• She reported that she had found the staff room useful as a familiar place to come back to and reorient oneself "I found myself going very often back to the staff room just to be able to understand what was going on, because I thought that was the best way, the best place to try and understand if I was being left behind by my lack of time or whatever"
• Finally she suggested that the LE could be improved by embedding activities which demonstrated progress to the participants, in terms of their own skills, and by having occasional synchronous meetings with visual contact for the round-table groups.

Food for thought indeed.

Brian

eLearning 2.0

A paper by Lim, So and Tan (2010) compares learning online using web 2.0 technologies (what they call eLearning 2.0) with learning before the advent of social media (eLearning 1.0). They remind us that web 2.0 brought with it a paradigm shift in the way users interact with content, moving from consumers to contributors in a 'social and participatory web'. 

They suggest that to put eLearning 2.0 into practice we need to understand how tools that are primarily aimed at entertainment can be used for educational purposes. Moreover, the underlying learning philosophy needs to embrace the web 2.0 ethos of participation and community-based social practices. However, this may be at odds with formal learning where the emphasis is often on traditional literacy practices, individual learning and personal performance; what the paper refers to as a cultural contradiction. 

We may also face a ‘”digital dissonance” in which neither teachers nor students fully recognize and use the potential of emerging technologies for learning’ (p.206). Indeed, if one is used to learning in a conventional way it may be difficult to change your ‘cultural belief’ that teachers are authoritative sources of knowledge:

To transit from eLearning 1.0 to eLearning 2.0, it requires a shift of learners’ identity to that of a knowledge builder and a shift of teachers’ identity to that of a critical friend or co-learner. In terms of power and control in learning, learners need to embrace empowerment given the space to construct learning, while teachers need to become comfortable with fluidity and uncertainty. (Lim et al, 2010, p.208)

This is hard to achieve if teachers continue to instruct, give lectures and direct discussions. And if instructional designers continue to determine learning paths, focus on individual learning and assess individual performance. ‘Our notion of knowledge and knowing should shift from an epistemology based on possession to an epistemology of practice’ (p.207). 

These messages concur with those give by Ryberg (2010) in his presentation at a workshop at Online Educa last year that focused on new ways of assessment, where he emphasised that simply using web 2.0 tools for learning does not imply that the underlying process is following the web 2.0 ethos. One has to move away from knowledge as acquisition to knowledge as participation. Referring to the work of Dohn (2009) he asks the following pertinent questions:

What happens when:

-       Internal goals of participation, communication, knowledge construction, and knowledge sharing subsumed under external goal of acquiring the knowledge and competence necessary for their future working life

-       Dynamic and distributive views on knowledge and competence enrolled in an individualistic, objectivistic view of knowledge and competence

-       Learning as participation understood as a means for realising learning as acquisition
                                Ryberg (2010, slide13)

Lim et al (2010) go on to present the results of their research on a course concerning the integration of web 2.0 into the curriculum for pre-service teachers and in particular a three week period in which they worked together on a wiki. Their observations show a propensity for the teachers to focus on grammatical edits and changes to the form of the text, rather than ‘knowledge edits’ that reflect critical thinking. In addition, there was a tendency to cooperate in a task-orientated way rather than collaborate to build collectively knowledge. They noticed an absence of higher order discourse that would encourage reflection and critique, and remarked that changing someone else’s text was at times perceived as being rude. 

They note that these results concur with other research which suggests that peer-to-peer interaction in online communities mainly focuses on lower-level cognitive tasks than on critical collaborative discourse. They go on to suggest that that the instructor can influence the level of discourse by encouraging learners to use dialogue that questions, critiques, challenges and builds upon the contributions of others. 

My experience of the recent eTwinning Learning Event for teachers and the results emerging from my analysis seem to concur with these arguments. Left alone to discuss informally how to carry out activities, the teachers would often take a pragmatic approach in which the first ideas to emerge were adopted by the rest of the group and the focus was on completing the activity. Whereas in forums where initial questions were presented in a manner that encouraged reflection and critique, and where the tutor would participate in the dialogue (if he/she felt it was necessary) the discourse reached a higher level. Here there was evidence of critical thinking with participants building upon the contributions of their colleagues and adding in their own experience. In other words, an appropriate level of teaching presence seemed to act as a catalyst for critical collaborative discourse. And by appropriate I don’t mean instruction or the tutor leading the discussion, but rather preparing an environment that is conducive for collaboration and contributing to the dialogue when it falters or to encourage reflection through questioning; leading learners to autonomy – Boud (1988). 

Brian.

Boud, D. (1988) 'Moving Towards Autonomy ', in Boud, D. (Ed.), Developing Student Autonomy in Learning, pp.17-39, London: Kogan Page

Dohn, N. (2009) 'Web 2.0: Inherent tensions and evident challenges for education'. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 4 (3), pp.343-363
 
Lim, W.-Y., So, H.-J. & Tan, S.-C. (2010) 'eLearning 2.0 and new literacies: are social practices lagging behind?'. Interactive Learning Environments, 18 (3), pp.203 - 218

Ryberg, T. (2010), 'Social Media Practices and Assessment Irreconcilable Differences or True Romance?', Assessing Learning in a Digital World, Online Educa, Berlin European Commission. (ONLINE - http://eacea.ec.europa.eu/llp/events/2010/online_educa_conference_berlin_2010_en.php - accessed 20.01.2011)

Social presence supports cognitive presence

Shea and Bidjerano (2009) conducted a survey of more than 2000 higher education students participating in a fully online learning network across 30 different institutions. They wanted to know whether teaching presence and social presence are linked to cognitive presence, as suggested by the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model (Garrison et al., 2000).

Using statistical analysis of the results (factor analysis, Structural Equation Modelling - SEM, and chi-square automatic interaction detection - CHAIAD analysis) they posit that their results show a correlation: ‘As predicted by the CoI model and confirmed by the SEM analysis, both teaching and social presence play a major role in predicting online students’ ratings of cognitive presence.’ (Shea and Bidjerano, 2009, p.549). They argue that 70% of the variance in cognitive presence can be linked to the students’ reports of their instructors’ skills in fostering teaching and social presence, and that the latter (social presence) is dependent on the former (teaching presence).

The authors further posit that the social presence element associated with comfort in online discussion was the most significant item correlating with cognitive presence; low levels of comfort in online discussion were strongly correlated with low levels of cognitive presence. In other words, in order to achieve critical thinking (high cognitive presence) students need to feel comfortable with discussing online. In addition they report that cognitive presence is significantly influenced by the participation of the instructor and by his/her attempts to focus the discussion.

These research results suggest that instructors have a significant effect on the success of an online learning community and the ability of learners to experience epistemic engagement

.. it is crucial to assist learners to gain comfort and confidence in the online discussion format in order to foster cognitive presence. Without this comfort, epistemic engagement in online learning suffers. A sensible approach would be to encourage students to reflect on their comfort levels with online discussion. If some students report lower levels of comfort, one strategy would be to promote reflection on why they feel this way and how they might overcome this discomfort, at the same time emphasizing that facility with online discussion appears essential to productive learning in this environment.
                                     (Shea and Bidjerano, 2009, p.551)

These results are similar to what I experienced during the Learning Event last year on web 2.0 tools and I wondered to what extent this is reflected in my results: in my final questionnaire is there a similar correlation between social presence and cognitive presence? In one of the survey questions, question 13b, I presented the respondents with a list of five activities and asked them to rate them in order of importance:

13b - Which statements best describe your experience of posting messages?

Number them in order of importance, from 1 to 5 (1 = most important, 5 = least important)

I enjoyed reading the comments of others

I enjoyed posting comments and giving feedback

I enjoyed receiving feedback

I enjoyed asking questions to clarify my understanding

I enjoyed socialising and making friends

It is likely that those who put the last of the five options - socialising and making friends – first (i.e.1/5) in their list of choices felt comfortable with online discussion. Whereas we cannot argue the contrary for those who put it last (5/5), it would be interesting to see the relationship between these answers and cognitive presence.

Cognitive presence is associated with critical thinking (Garrison et al., 2001) and the final reflection that we held at the end of the LE was a specific activity aimed at encouraging the sharing of experience, reflection on practice and increasing understanding. One of the questions in the survey, question 31c, asked respondents whether or not they found the final reflection useful in this respect. The question was posed as a dichotomy of two equally valid responses and the respondent was asked to what extent they agreed with one or the other:

31c - What best describes your experience of the time allowed to apply ideas in your own teaching practice and the final reflection activities in the Learning Event?
Statement E	<...........?.........>	Statement F
I found it not very useful to share my experience with others in the final reflection		I found it really useful to share my experience with others in the final reflection

It is likely that those who chose statement F rather than statement E experienced higher levels of critical thinking. So how do the results of question 31c relate to those of 13b? The graph below illustrates (click on image to make it larger):

 

The graph shows that the majority of respondents who indicated that they mostly enjoyed socialising found it really useful to share their experience with others in the final reflection. Whereas those that put socialising with others at the bottom of their list of preferences were less certain of the value of the final reflection. These results neither prove nor disprove the arguments put forward by Shea and Bidjerano, but they do correlate with the idea that social presence supports cognitive presence.

In my research I am using my final questionnaire to guide my qualitative analysis and whereas I am not intending to use statistical analysis, I found the paper by Shea and Bidjerano interesting. One area where I would tend to disagree is with the emphasis on the involvement of the instructor. It is true that the instructor or tutor can greatly influence the performance of an online community through their design of the environment and the cognitive activities. However, when it comes to participation in the community, much of what is prescribed by Shea and Bidjerano as being instructor intervention can be achieved equally well by the learners themselves providing the teaching presence by leading a discussion, guiding others and threading the discussion in their contributions.

I finish with a final observation from Shea and Bidjerano:

Additionally, qualitative research that examines the nature of the discourse in online threaded discussions would shed light on the kinds of instructional conversations that lead to social and cognitive presence as well as those that result in lower levels of engagement and learning. It is only through such varied research approaches that we will gain further insight into the ways that online education can benefit from ongoing advances in technology, pedagogy, and the science of learning.             (Shea and Bidjerano, 2009, p.552)

Indeed.

Brian

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Garrison, D., Anderson, T. & Archer, W. (2001) 'Critical thinking, cognitive presence, and computer conferencing in distance education'. American Journal of Distance Education, 15 (1), pp.7-23

Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T. & Archer, W. (2000) 'Critical Inquiry in a Text-Based Environment: Computer Conferencing in Higher Education'. The Internet and Higher Education, 2 (2-3), pp.87-105

Shea, P. & Bidjerano, T. (2009) 'Community of inquiry as a theoretical framework to foster ‘‘epistemic engagement” and ‘‘cognitive presence” in online education'. Computers & Education, 52, pp.543-553

BERA Annual Conference 2011, 6th – 8th September, Institute of Education, London

I am thinking of submitting an abstract for the British Educational Research Association (BERA) annual conference in London in September. It looks like a good event to present my work and the process  of producing a paper will give me something for which to aim. A short abstract is due by next weekend.

I may also have the opportunity to work with Tiina again for a workshop at the eTwinning conference, scheduled for 31 March - 2 April in Budapest, Hungary. This would be great as the recent Learning Event has given us a rich source of material and experience to call upon when discussing web 2.0 and moderation skills.

Brian

Teachers' expectations

I've started to analyse the data from the Learning Event (LE), looking firstly at the transcripts of the interviews that I held with some participants before they started. I held 8 interviews over Skype and 43 by email, asking the same questions in all cases. The first question was What are your expectations for this event? and using Atlas.ti, as an experiment, I've coded the replies.

The image above shows a section of a reply to the first question from a participant, submitted by email. On the right you can see the codes that I've applied, which on this occasion are Web 2.0 and tools and Digital skills and competence - you will probably need to click on the image to expand it and read the information . The other codes you can see, for example Channel were added automatically by Atals.ti as I imported the data and represent the headings for each chunk of data - in this case, whether the information was submitted by email or by Skype.

The overall coding results from the 51 participants are as follows:

In other words, there were 25 instances of participants including reference to the use of Web 2.0 and its associated tools in their answers to the question on What are your expectations for this event?. Similarly, 20 people made reference to using these tools in their teaching practice. Some of the codes could possibly be combined, for example Cooperation and collaboration could be joined with eTwinning project, as one is usually done within the context of another. This is easily achieved with the tool.

The results in themselves are not too surprising. They reflect a full range of expectations, with a focus mainly on learning specific web 2.0 tools and gaining experience of using them in their teaching practice. What perhaps will be more interesting is to compare these to results obtained from the final interviews were the same questions were asked.

This experience of using content analysis techniques and Computer Aided Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS) was interesting but also raised a number of concerns for me that are to some extent echoed by Enriquez (2009). Analysing dialogue using coding schemes tends to focus your attention on the detail, the individual words, perhaps at the expense of seeing a bigger picture. Indeed, in an attempt to keep one's coding scheme limited, in order to achieve parsimony, one is encouraged to group together different expressions under the same heading. Yet they may hide important different latent meanings that would add depth to the analysis if they were surfaced rather than suppressed. I also note that the very process of coding using a CAQDAS leads you to quantitative data results - for example, in the case above, it is convenient to report that only 20/51 respondents (i.e. ~40%) referred to learning how to use web 2.0 tools in their teaching practice as an explicit expectation, but what does this result actually mean?

Enriquez (2009) raises discontent with the prevailing use of content analysis in online discourse, suggesting that the written word only reflects part of the context for knowledge production. In order to have a fuller picture, one should take into account the external environment for the discussion (the situation of the learner), the internal environment (text in chats is of a different nature to that in forums), the temporal structure (asynchronous is different to synchronous), the purpose of the discussion (topic or  project related, for example) and the characteristics of the members of the group (experience of online collaboration, English skills, etc), to mention a few. In order to do this, she proposes the use of genres as an alternative to content analysis. Whereas I find her arguments compelling, I do not fully understand how genres could be applied in practice (she refers us to other papers for examples of application). I would also say that I will be comparing two very similar situations, the LE held earlier this year and the recent one, where several of these variables will be largely stable. I therefore feel that it should indeed be useful to analyse the content, though my recent experimentation has highlighted to me the dangers of getting to bogged down with the coding and the use of a tool which makes simplifications so easy to implement.

Brian.

Enriquez, J. G. (2009) 'Discontent with content analysis of online transcripts'. ALT-J: Research in Learning Technology, 17 (2), pp.101 - 113

More than just a Learning Event

I've been interviewing teachers recently who took part in the Learning Event (LE), via Skype. In particular, those who I interviewed before they started and who managed to complete the event, and were able to contribute to the final reflection.

A few things have struck me from these discussions. Firstly the enthusiasm they portray from their experience. For several of them, this was more than just a LE addressing web 2.0 tools, it was a life changing experience that has opened up new avenues in their teaching practice. I've heard from teachers who used such tools for the first time, but were able to try them out with fellow teachers in their schools and saw a marvellous reaction from their pupils. For them, this is the start of a new adventure which has only just started. It is gratifying to see how happy the teachers are when they are able to provide something new for their pupils, that engages them and increases their personal kudos as teachers.

Secondly it is interesting to see the extent to which their initial expectations were met. Many expressed their original goals in terms of learning about new web 2.0 tools. They learned about these, but more importantly they also learned about how to use them in their teaching practice, they shared concrete examples with their peers and they developed personally in terms of their own competence.

So everything sounds perfect? Well not exactly. The experience from these pioneering few is not necessarily representative of the majority. As I said in my previous post, this transformation only happened (generally) for those that managed to complete the course and invested time and effort in the activities. The others still learned, but perhaps not at quite such a deep level; they learned about the individual tools but not necessarily about how to use them in their teaching practice and the lack of collaboration, of 'learning-by-doing', meant that they didn't develop their own competence to quite the same degree.

So I've also been asking those teachers who didn't complete why they thought this was. Their answers reflect a complex picture of busy teachers with difficult personal schedules meaning that they had insufficient time to be able to invest themselves in the time-consuming collaboration, of teachers so new to online collaboration that they simply felt left behind by the experience (to the extent that the LE could have a negative impact on their motivation), and of some who simply did not expect this type of LE and were expecting to be more autonomous, independent learners, following the LE at their own pace.

I also noted that for some teachers the learning philosophy of reflection-in-practice is not something they have previously experienced. Indeed their own teaching style is more instructional and they in turn expected the tutors/facilitators to be more instrumental in summarising the learning outcomes of the group.

This run of the LE has, I feel, managed to achieve a level of collaboration that was missing or was less evident in the previous run earlier this spring. As such, needs have arisen  that we had not anticipated. These included, at a certain point, a need for Tiina and I to raise the issue of netiquette and awareness of what might be considered to be inappropriate behaviour in an online community. On reflection I feel there was a need for the small groups that we had set up (the Round Tables) to openly discuss and agree what they expected from each other in terms of contribution, timing, etc (this may have helped addressed the legitimate concerns raised by Daniela in her comment on the way the groups were established). As it was, the absence of such an agreement led to some groups experiencing frustration - examples from my analysis include:
- some participants contributed whilst other didn't, leading to a sense of inequality or even resentment for the effort invested;
- several natural leaders emerging within a single group who (in retrospect) might have been rather dominant in their approach to setting up blogs, Google docs, etc as places for the group to collaborate;
- perhaps unsympathetic replies (or certainly less supportive messages) to peers who arrived late in the group to find ideas had already been "decided", etc.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Certainly my feeling is that for every innovation we employ in learning, there are important disadvantages that may emerge. These may be in terms of uncomfortable power shifts within the group, of the different starting levels for the participants (experienced collaborators compared with inexperienced novices) leading to unequal opportunities for growth and feelings of inadequacy, of reinforced teaching presence (such as clearer guidelines) for some leading to the loss of a valuable learning experience for others (who might have learned more through initial failure), etc. So each new innovation leads to a rebalance of the pros and cons, and to the need for us to reconsider our teaching practice. Nothing can be taken for granted.

Food for thought, and there is certainly plenty of fodder for me in the data from this experience!

Brian.

What an experience

The revised Learning Event (LE) on web 2.0 tools and collaboration finished recently and what an experience it was. We tried out some of the ideas that emerged from the first LE earlier in the year and I participated as a facilitator in the Staff Room and in the final reflection. I was again impressed by the level of enthusiasm and commitment of the teachers involved.

It will take me several months to analyse all the data - and boy is there lots. So what can I say from what I see so far? Well I think we can consider it a success as far as the participants were concerned. The final questionnaire conducted by the European Schoolnet shows 66% indicating that the event was excellent and 30% very good (n=127). There was a terrific response to my final questionaire with 87 replies that is 58% of those that started the event. Here is a summary that I added to my presentation at Online Educa:

I need now to follow this up with more interviews and with an analysis of the discourse in the forums. However, from what I have seen so far, it appears that those teachers who persevered until the end - trying out what they had learned in their own teaching practice and then sharing their experience with their peers in the final reflection - learned not only about the tools but also about how to apply them for teaching and about the consequences for their own professional development. Whereas those that finished after the first 12 days of activity tended to learn only about the tools. If this can be confirmed in my analysis then it will be a significant result as this is precisely what we were aiming to improve.

39% of the teachers who started the LE completed the final activities, that is 59% of those that were still active after the first 12 days. This is a really good result; I was talking to a friend of my who delivers face-to-face training courses for HR professionals in the UK and she remarked that it is always a challenge to convince participants to come back to the course after a period away. Indeed, given that these figures only reflect postings to the forums (contributions), the number actually involved will have been higher as I am sure there will have been some who will have read the postings and benefited from the experience of others without posting themselves (lurkers). Such vicarious learning is surely valuable.

The quantitative results are useful in terms of offering immediate feedback. However, my research is primarily qualitative in nature and so I must now press on with the time consuming task of walking through the interview scripts and forum dialogues, coding and analysing. Onwards we go ...

Brian