The idea of learning online as being part of an ecosystem was very much part of my experience within this course. It was like wondering around the gardens meeting the inhabitants, looking at the grounds. During my walk I also began to get an understanding that without sign-posts an ecosystem can be mistreated and fall into disrepair. Diversity is encouraged through structure that scaffolds new learners into the experience. It is up to each person to think in terms of how they can add diversity. In many ways I am still understanding how that affects me as a learner but I also get the sense that collectively these are the lessons being learnt today. However, I’m still not entirely sure that view isn’t still part of my developing understanding and I believe this is probably part of the process as well.
This course has provided me with many different opportunities to experience collaborative, conversational and social learning. I have experienced both the massive potential and the challenges involved in participating in various communities.
Efimova in her blog on a Knowledge Work Framework explains that conversations are able to be either active or passive and that this process moves knowledge from being used simply for personal growth and knowledge required to complete a task and that within this process there are conversations, ideas and relations. As we move closer to task driven work the breadth of these becomes narrower. I found this framework useful for considering my own experiences within this course.
‘The distinction between tasks and PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) could be clarified using one-person enterprise metaphor: tasks would represent its core business, while PKM - its overhead activities.’ I have become very capable in the PKM area of my learning but require further insights to become adept in the task related aspects of learning.
Personal Learning
Over the semester my personal learning environment has grown to include a number of sources of information and ways of exploring questions.
I did find the combination of my RSS reader and blogs was where most of my key learning, the development of my thinking over the semester originated. As I blogged about in the post ‘Who Do I Learn From’ not only have I found that reading the blogs has been beneficial but I’ve also found that the connections between the people and content is beginning to help me understand the direction of information flows. If a person has a particular interest for example in collaboration and they are consistently engaged in discussion with other bloggers on this topic it is easier for me to make a judgement on the value of continuing to watch the evolving conversation.
Efimova & Feilder (p3) say ‘their (blogs) open-ended nature allows going beyond ‘group think’ by supporting diversity and bringing together multiple perspectives and backgrounds.’ I would think the situation is more complex than that. Sometimes blogs seem to be supporting ‘group think’ and sometimes they go beyond it. For myself I tried to get as many diverse opinions as possible. I found that the nascent musings of Prue Salter just as insightful as the more developed reporting of Stephen Downes with many others in between.
I do feel that particularly for teachers it is possible that the simple act of using these tools for example spending 90mins a week uploading content, linking to other blogs etc will provide them with new skills in building relationships and developing thinking skills that will be transferred to students. I also feel that I now have some of the skills necessary to help individuals start participating and finding their own connections.
I would agree with Efimova article which concludes that ‘existing knowledge work models depict only the ‘tip’ of the knowledge work iceberge and need improvements in order to be useful for supporting knowledge workers’. Additionally it seems as we add new types of media and new ways of collaborating to this mix the iceberg may be growing beneath our feet.
I have also been conscious that by sticking to the people you know in this kind of environment can blinker you to other aspects of learning. My RSS reader is full of blogs from people who I do know about. Google Alerts have enabled me to access that which I do not know about yet.
Also I found it challenging in terms of time to be assessed on the assignments only. When blogging I found that my most valuable and appropriate learning experiences came from posting on my blog and commenting on others blogs. It was difficult to devote enough time to this process, as it was not the assessable component. In order to more fully integrate this into educational practice I would see this would be an important question to explore.
In my view blogs are little nuggets of knowledge that should be able to be strung together in a number of ways depending on their relationship to one another. The importance of continuing to develop search functionality so that it supports revealing those relationships is also an aspect that I feel I will need to continue to explore.
In many cases reading blogs and participating in communities I did feel as though the authors, practitioners and advocates may be still opening themselves up to the requirement to mentor and guide new learners into the process. That for a community to be truly innovative it must open it’s doors wide to diversity. I think for me and others it’s a continuing process to live and breathe this. It is always more comfortable to be surrounded by like.
‘Innovation processes are based to a high degree on feedback loops between groups with different levels of technical expertise and knowledge. Many tools are developed as open source projects which allow all interested people to modify and advance the code or its components. They are often released early in the development process to encourage user feedback.’ (Schmidt, 03) It would be very interesting to see this type of model applied to developing a knowledge based community. For example providing very visible ‘L’ plate spaces. Particularly within the general teaching community it would be extremely difficult for them to gain enough context quickly enough to become fully engaged. I think this will be a challenge for Edna also.
‘From the technological standpoint, knowledge as expressed in documents and information resources is not well-organised enough to satisfy queries of the kind we are considering. From the social standpoint, people are not well-organised enough, which makes it hard to establish pathways from the people who need a particular bit of knowledge to the people who have it.’ (Paquet, p12) Additionally I would suggest without this being clear it can be difficult to even determine the piece of knowledge that is required. Another challenge for us all seems to be revealing both people and content. I’m not sure what my role is in this discussion, active participant or casual observer and what the impacts will be for myself, teachers and students if we are able to adequately reveal these connections.
For me when it came to working on the formal group task I found this challenging for a number of reasons. Initially it was difficult to organise logistically. This led to pressure and the final decision to work alone. One of the major difficulties was the fact that I had strong views about what I wanted to get out of the assignment and had a specific subject area that I wanted to participate in and the other participants had theirs.
After reading Efimova and others I now realise that some of this difficulty is innate. You have to recognise that working on a task within a community is different to working individually as part of a network. These are distinct and equally valuable tasks. This distinction means that you need to be prepared for different results.
Additionally I have mentioned a few times in blog posts here and here the importance of mentors. However in this particular situation due to the stress of dealing with language barriers, time constraints, distance constraints and ideological differences I was unable to put this into practice. It was eye opening to observe myself in this situation. It will be interesting to see how I am able to use these learnings to become a more patient, collaborative learner even when it feels like that is initially diluting my own learnings.
I also found the direction provided by yourself in terms of the tasks was very valuable. I guess again in a mentoring sense I had reached a stage in my learning where it was difficult to move forward because I had worn some paths through the content and people and now I was probably relying on them too heavily. The discussions and resources sent by you provided confirmation in some areas but also helped me find validation in my feelings that I was on two paths – one general and one specific.
So if we are just individuals working with a network and that the importance of the network is in its openness and the autonomy of the individuals with the network is paramount. How do you scaffold the learning? I don’t believe we have found the way just yet. The semantic web may offer some new ways of becoming participants but it doesn’t hold all the answers, the types of tasks both as individuals and groups we are undertaking is changing from within as well as the context in which the tasks are carried out. It’s a big challenge. As the technology becomes easier this may provide still more complexity.
My thoughts at this stage is that by providing more contextual information about the information and the people behind the information individuals will be able to make more sense of the complexity and diversity. A bit like a technological mentor - mashups (Spock, Dipity) will act as a scaffold across information to make it easier to draw analogies.
However we look at it, we still can’t even really see what we need to understand in it’s entirety yet. There is an enormous amount of complexity and I believe as learners and teachers we need to come to terms with how this will be managed that ambiguity is the new order of the day. I would like to continue to learn to be a learner in this world and I feel that it’s a completely new skill I need.
Resources consulted
- http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/cognitive_psychology_ia_from_theory_to_practice
- http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?presentation=191
- http://www.slideshare.net/gsiemens/technologyand-communityas-identity/
- http://www.bamberg-gewinnt.de/wordpress/archives/741 - identity, relationship and
- http://knowledgetree.flexiblelearning.net.au/edition04/html/blogging_to_learn_intro.html
- http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/05/14.html#a1208
- http://many.corante.com/archives/2007/08/03/usergenerated_neologism_indigens_content.php
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.html?curid=10477515#Link
- http://silkcharm.blogspot.com/2008/06/echo-chambers-are-good.html
- http://blog.eturner.net/?p=22 - Mashups in The Middle, Bridging the Gap to the Semantic Web
- http://mivanova.blogspot.com/2008/06/start-pages-as-environments-for-self.html
- http://www.dipity.com/user/coolcatteacher/timeline/Horizon_Project_2008_Timeline
- http://www.siliconrepublic.com/news/news.nv?storyid=single11198
- http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/05/20.html#a1216
- http://rexsthoughtspot.blogspot.com/2007/04/four-enterprise-20-success-drivers.html
Efimova L, 2004, Discovering the iceberg of knowledge work: A weblog case, Telematica Institut, The Netherlands
Schmidt J, 2003 Social Software: Facilitating Information-, Identity and Relationship Management, Otto-Friedrich-University Bamberg Germany, BlogTalks Reloaded
Paquet, S, 2003, A Socio-Technological Approach to Sharing Knowledge Across Disciplines, Thesis, University of Montreal
Efimova, L., & Fiedler, S. (2004). Learning webs: Learning in weblog networks. In P. Kommers, P. Isaias, & M. B. Nunes (Eds.), Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference Web Based Communities 2004 (pp. 490-494). Lisbon, Portugal: IADIS Press.
L. Cantoni & C. McLoughlin (Eds.) Proceedings of Ed-Media 2004 (pp. 2584-2591). Lugano, Switzerland: Association for theAdvancement of Computing in Education (AACE).
Efimova, L. & Grudin, J. (2007). Crossing boundaries: A case study of employee blogging. Proceedings of the Fortieth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-40). Los Alamitos: IEEE Press.
