SocialLearn

Following The Open University’s decision to adopt Google Apps, I took part in a workshop (liveblogged by Doug Clow) on the use of these apps to enhance the OU student experience. For me, some of the main issues related to what happens when the flexibility of social learning in an informal environment comes up against the needs and concerns of a more formal setting.

We so often come back to assessment – how is individual assessment possible in a collaborative environment? How valid is an examination that denies you access to the many resources and collaborators you can access in any other situation? One proposed solution was to credit students for creating course content, and thus to shift to a model in which course design and material are dynamic rather than static. This would be a culture shift for The Open University, where most courses require years of painstaking production and may then be studied by thousands of students over a period of many years.

Culture shift was a recurrent topic. We know that OU students are already using these apps – as many as 33,000 already have Google mail or Gmail accounts. Our ‘walled garden’ of educational Google Apps can’t lag significantly behind the set of apps freely available elsewhere. To keep up with the pace of change, the university needs to be more agile in course production and development, to shift its assessment practices and, perhaps, to integrate work-based learning more closely with its formal courses.

And we need to stay in touch. It makes no sense to create a culture that splits the ‘Googlers’ from the ‘Moodlers’ – or that splits OU Googlers from potential collaborators in a wider community of Google Apps users.

Ideally, the university will add value to these apps, rather than restricting their functionality. From a social learning point of view, this could involve supporting learners to use them to frame relevant questions, identify relevant resources and engage in meaningful discussions.

Our project title – SocialLearn – focuses attention on social learning, but our remit is wider. From the start, SocialLearn has faced the challenge of aligning current thinking on good pedagogy with the use of Web 2.0 technologies.

There is a continuing tension between social learning, with learners freely ranging the Internet and constructing meaning together, and institutional provision of selected high-quality resources and individual assessment.

I’m currently looking back at SocialLearn’s work over the past year – not only in terms of how it supports learning, but also in terms of the principles articulated at the start. These are currently available in various articles and blogs, and I am linking them together here in order to support evaluation of what we have done so far, and development of what we will do in the future.

Two years ago, Martin Weller identified six principles of SocialLearn (the hyperlinks are mine):

• Openness
• Flexibility
• Disruptive
• Perpetual beta
• Democracy
• Pedagogy

These articulated the underpinnings of the project, connecting it with the underpinnings and origins of The Open University, where SocialLearn is based.

Following a series of workshops and discussions, Gráinne Conole set out the proposed learning principles of SocialLearn in her blog and, in a related article, articulated how these would be linked to characteristics of learning, specifically: thinking & reflection, conversation & interaction, experience & interactivity and evidence & demonstration.

• Supports a range of pedagogies and styles
• Formalises the informal; informalises the formal
• Is built on relationships between people
• Harnesses the net
• Aggregates learning events, resources and opportunities
• Provides structures and scaffolds for the learning process
• Uses metaphors and simple approaches to impart pedagogy
• Encourages a range of participation
• Provides evidence via range of informal and formal assessment mechanisms
• Provides lifelong support across different learning goals
• Provides access to expertise
• Supports collaborative elements
• Helps surface incidental learning
• Wraps learning around an individual’s interests
• Enables learner control and learner responsibility
• Allows users to build reputation within the system
• Encourages legitimate peripheral participation
• Encourages learning through observation
• Supports different subject areas and styles
• Encourages mentorship

Over the next weeks, I shall be investigating how these sets of principles have influenced the development of SocialLearn.

One of the crucial aspects of becoming a more open project is that we can share our thinking, opening it up for debate and discussion. We want to discuss the principles underpinning SocialLearn, to show how they were implemented on our Closed Beta site, and to share what we have learned.

To start with – what do we mean when we talk about ‘social learning’? What is learning ‘based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions’ (Seely Brown & Adler, 2008).

To give an example: I want to learn why someone has sawed down half of the beautiful cedar tree outside my office window. I can’t easily find this out from a book or a website, and I don’t know anyone with the precise knowledge that I am looking for. It is as I engage in conversations with different people that my understanding of what I see outside my window increases and I learn more about the tree’s history, health, ecosystem and future possibilities.

It’s not just the social construction of understanding that’s important – that is a part of most human interactions. My intention to learn is part of what makes this social learning, as are my interactions with others. This isn’t a one-sided engagement with books or with online content, it involves social relationships. As such, it has lots of  ‘affective’ aspects – people must be motivated to engage with me and I must have the confidence to ask questions in the first place, as well as some way of assessing the expertise of the people I’m talking to.

I’m not convinced that ‘social learning’ is a useful term in a purely face-to-face context. Without the Internet, social learning is just a subset of social constructivism, with an emphasis on affective and interpersonal elements. It may sound more user friendly, but it’s just another label – and not one that adds much to our understanding.

Web 2.0 extends the possibilities for social learning, making it possible not only to locate and access a vast amount of content from all around the world, but also to engage in extended interaction around and about this material. Learners – particularly those learning outside formal settings such as schools and colleges – may find themselves adrift in an ocean of information, struggling to solve ill-structured problems, with little clear idea of how to solve them, or how to recognise when they have solved them. It’s here that social learning has its place – helping people to use these resources to construct knowledge together effectively.

Social learning can take place when people:

• clarify their intention – learning rather than browsing

• ground their learning – by defining their question or problem

• engage in focused conversations – increasing their understanding of the available resources.

These three actions help us to build meaningful connections online, and offer learners the benefits of co-operative activity and of collaboration.

The challenge for SocialLearn is to support and encourage users to clarify their intention, ground their learning and engage in focused conversations.

‘A quarter unable to read properly’, ’150,000 children unable to read and write at 11′ – these were some of this year’s education headlines in the UK. These were simplified summaries – these school children are not necessarily unable to read; they are ‘functionally illiterate’. In other words, they can read, but they are not judged to do so well enough to deal with the everyday requirements of life.

My children bring comprehension passages home from school: extracts from tv guides, bus timetables and the like. And, yes, like many adults, they find it difficult to make sense of these. But these aren’t part of their world. They can text for bus information, and find anything they want to watch on BBC iplayer or YouTube.

Why not test yourself on their terms? Here’s an extract from the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card game official rulebook:

“Continuous Effect
“You use this type of effect just by declaring its activation during
your Main Phase. (See Turn Structure, page 26) There are some
Ignition Effects that have a cost to activate, like discarding
cards from your hand, Tributing a monster, or paying Life
Points. Because you can choose when to activate this type of
effect, it’s easy to create combos with them.”

Did you understand that? Now that you have read it: could you use continuous effect within a game? What would be the advantages of using it? Could you explain why anyone would tribute a monster, given that there is a cost to this? Or do you find that you are functionally illiterate when you try to operate in a ten-year-old’s world?

At this year’s Handheld Learning conference, John Paul Gee argued that children in the UK and the US who have been graded functionally illiterate can and do read high-level texts comparable to those read by doctoral students. They can do this if they are passionate about the subject – and if the reading relates to their experience. Give a child a manual in isolation and they will ignore it. Give a child a set of Yu-gi-oh! cards and they’ll play the game. Later they may choose to find the manual and make sense of it. No one fails Yu-gi-oh!

And the relevance for social learn? This is how social learning can – and should – be. It starts with, and is driven by, a passion, an interest, an experience. It is informed and guided by others, it takes place in a social setting, and it is a process of growth and development – not a scramble away from failure.

(This is Martin Weller – I’m going to be taking over some of the blogging role from Laura as she has moved to a new position of Global Ruler of Supreme Power).

So I finally got my Google Wave invite and enthusiastically went in to play. The aim of Wave is to provide a collaboration environment. Users create ‘waves’, which you add other users to. You can edit posts and there is a neat ‘playback’ function so you can see how a wave has unfolded over time. You can of course add all sorts of cool widgets, such as maps, to messages and edit other people’s so what you have is a sequence of collaboration unfolding over time.

But the overwhelming feeling I had, and most of those I waved with, (may as well get used to that as a new verb) was a sense of ‘now what?’. This is partly because the interface is, surprisingly for Google, unintuitive – for instance, to edit a message you need to click on the little arrow in the top corner of a message. But I think it is largely because Wave is a solution to a problem we’re not sure we have yet. It is a tentative technology. Despite all the hype, I’m not sure Google even know how people will use it. It’s a ‘put it out there and see what happens’ approach. It’s not that Wave is a disappointment or failure, it’s more that it will require time to grow. I expect someone will suggest we try brainstorming a research bid in Wave, or conducting a global debate, and we’ll find that it really is a useful tool.

This raises a couple of issues in relation to SocialLearn for me: firstly it demonstrates that if you have clout and presence like Google you can afford to launch something that takes time to establish itself. Had Wave been launched by a small start-up we wouldn’t have been clammering for invites and the time it will take to establish itself may not have been granted. The same might well be true for SocialLearn, and indeed any learning focused applications. They are not like Flickr where it is an easy, and obvious, sell. They take time and people to demonstrate their advantage – to illustrate they are a solution to a problem you didn’t know you had.

The second point is that tools like Wave begin to look awfully close to VLEs, and HEIs simply cannot compete with this level of technological innovation. It is pointless to try and create a Wave like tool for learning – Wave is that tool. So educational technologists and HEIs need to concentrate on what they are best at – applying such tools in an educational context. This, I think, strengthens the hand of the loosely-coupled approach where different tools are knitted together to create a learning environment, rather than one centralised system.