Category Archives: Learning communities

Alpine Rendezvous: Workshop overview

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About 116 people registered to attend the Alpine Rendezvous this year – 10 workshops, almost every country in Europe represented and several attendees from outside Europe.

Report from Workshop 1: Orchestration

How do teachers orchestrate events inside and outside the classroom?

First model – started with a very dry mathematical model. How does the teacher manage their workload? This only applies if you think of the classroom as a shoebox.
Second model – takes the context and the students into account.
Third model – include meaning making.
Fourth model – take emotions and feelings into account (emotional intelligence of teachers and learners).
Fifth model – include identity as a driver of learning.

Grand Challenge: Link with the emotions of teachers. Make teachers happy throughout their working lives – and still believing in and expecting things from all their students.

Workshop 2: Data analysis and interpretation for interactive LEs (DAILE13)

Mainly computer scientists

Paper along the lines of analytics for intelligent tutoring systems, and also to support decision-making for different actors

Grand challenge: Interactive learning analytics: from accountability to ‘opportunity management’ in a multi-actor perspective

Moving beyond the focus on learners and including data from other actors. Want to use analytics in a socially responsible way. Consider the interdependence of analytics feedback on decisions and ultimately on power relations and empowerment. Make human responsibility explicit. Support reflection and openness.

Grand challenge: towards adaptive and adaptable learning in massive online courses

Workshop 3: (Our workshop) – Teaching Inquiry into Student Learning, Learning Design and Learning Analytics

Grand challenge: Empower the future teacher

Workshop 4: Smart Cities

Concerned with well-being of people in those cities. A way of optimising resources, including time. Smartness is different from country to country. The UK doesn’t care much about environment, Finland scores very high on governance. So there are cultural issues involved.

This can become a consumer approach – in which citizens consume the smart cities that have been developed through them. An alternative approach would be a bottom-up approach, achieved with and through learning

Should we talk about a smart city or about a smart territory? The most important thing seems to be the space of flux around the city – for example the commuter belt.

They used Villard as a case study including interviews and tour. Identified perceived needs and came up with actions such as a Vercors card giving access to benefits and facilities in the area, learning through space gamification, learning about Villard life by monitoring relevant traces and emergent behaviours.

Multidimensional monitoring embedded into the learning (learning analytics aspect).

Grand Challenge: International observatory on smart city learning. To raise awareness and attract people to get involved.

Grand Challenge: Promote smart city learning and people-centred smart cities / territories

Workshop 5: Crisis and response

Some of the questions that emerged: Political and pedagogic implications of the interpenetration of real and virtual worlds. How are digital cultural resources distributed? What are the candidates for a mobile, highly networked pedagogy? Investigate and advocate for pedagogies of meaning making, identity formation, contingency and (resilience to) provisionality

Grand challenge: How can TEL contribute to resolving educational inequalities?

Democratise access to learning through digital means. Need a more rigorous identification of the role TEL developments are playing in the systemic inequalities. Europe has some of the historically most democratic and emancipatory education systems in the world.

Crisis of legitimacy in the face of open online education

Can we significantly alleviate inequalities of educational outcome?

Examine the big picture of digital capital and capability across Europe.

Workshop 6: Technology support for reflecting on experiences and sharing them across contexts

If you search ‘technology enhanced learning’ and ‘vocational’ on Google you don’t get many hits.

Vocational learning is dual centre – you have your workplace and you have your classroom. How can what you learn in these two contexts be integrated?

The partial solution is called the Erfahrraum (experience space). This has collection, validation and exploitation phases, bringing together practical and conceptual knowledge.

Workshop 7 (Coming up): Challenges of analysing multi-scale and temporal data

Existing research methods to not fully utilise the temporal information embedded in the data which reduces their explanatory power and limits the validity of their conclusions.

Twitter as coffee

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Another set of notes from Handheld Learning finally making it into my blog.

This is from a talk by James Clay. He argues that Twitter is about the community having coffee together and having a conversation. Like coffee-break chat, it’s a stream you dip into and it’s a leveller that can improve efficeincy within an organisation.

Within Twitter you can:

  • Share links
  • Collaborate
  • Share blogs and news
  • Crowdsource
  • Backchannel
  • Find out what’s happening
  • Chat

Tweeting makes your job bigger and smarter and faster.

With Google you have to do the searching, but with Twitter the information comes to you, and you have the opportunity to dip into other people’s communities. If you do ask questions you may get a lot of responses, and those responses are likely to have authority.

Just share it

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Interesting post on issues relating to SocialLearn by Scott Leslie in his EdTech blog. These are his sub-heads:

  • Planning to Share versus Just Sharing
  • We grow our network by sharing, they start their network by setting up initial agreements
  • We share what we share, they want to share what they often don’t have (or even really want)
  • We share with people, they share with “Institutions”
  • We develop multiple (informal) channels while they focus on a single official mechanism
  • What to do if you are stuck having to facilitate sharing amongst a large group of institutions?

Open or malleable?

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My original proposal for my PhD was about virtual international communities in primary schools. Why? Well, apart from the excellent, and convincing, reasons I gave at my initial interview, it was what I thought I was most likely to be accepted for. With a 25-year-old degree in English, and a 20-year-old masters in history I wasn’t the most obvious candidate to be funded to research educational technology. So I built on my PGCE (hey, only 10 years old) and my school governing experience to put together a proposal. And the international element? Well, travelling abroad has to be one of the perks of PhD research 😉

So, what happened? I am still interested in the virtual international school communities – and involved in one via the Schome project. But in my PhD work? Well, first of all the international bit went. Lots of international travel is fine when you’re footloose, but when you have three small children who need to be at school, and Brownies, and Cubs, and swimming etc it begins to appear as more of a chore. And then I shifted focus from primary schools to higher education, because studying higher education fits in more with my department.

But I stuck with virtual communities for a long time. Until Etienne Wenger said that what I had in my data wasn’t a community, but a group.

And now here I am studying asynchronous dialogue, with the emphasis on the asynchronicity. And I’m very pleased with how it’s going (OK, a lot of it is still a confusing muddle, but I’m relatively sure that I’ve found the end of the string and will be able to unravel the tangle of data and theories). I’m even, tentatively, beginning to critique the touchy-feely concept of learning communities.

But I can’t help noticing that my work is now very well aligned with that of my supervisor, whereas my pilot project was aligned with the very different work of my MRes supervisor. Am I sensibly open to expert guidance, or am I just malleable?

Research questions revisited

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Well, I’m working on my literature review, so I’m bound to tinker with my research questions, aren’t I?

Also, an initial pass over my data showed me that if I just look at the skills and resources that people use to learn together online, I’m going to end up with a list. And not a very interesting list, at that.

I’m trying to look at what it buys me to consider the students as a network or one of various types of community Network doesn’t feel quite right, and I’m not entirely sure why. Something to do with it not being completely people centred. Community of practice isn’t right, either, because you can’t really argue that six students and two tutors make up a community of practice.

So I think I’ve either got a community of learners or a learning community. Whichever, I need to look at what I gain by looking at them as a community. I get all the elements of what a community is – reason for being a community, history, language, boundedness, members…

Today’s research questions are therefore:

How do students mobilise the resources of their online learning community in order to build knowledge?

What constrains them from mobilising these resources?

(I could use ‘affordances’ instead of ‘resources’ but then I’d have to go into the whole ‘what are affordances and what do I mean by them? debate – and I’d get saddled with a word which I think will date fairly quickly.)

Community or community of practice?

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I’ve run into a real problem with the idea of ‘comunity of practice’. What is the difference between a CoP and a community?

Lots of people just take the CoP idea as is, and run with it. People who critique the ideas seem to do so in terms of thinking the model through – do people really move from novice to expert, what does it mean to be marginalised or excluded?

Lave and Wenger developed the idea when thinking about apprentice-based learning. Now, there seems to be a fairly clear distinction between learning by doing and learning by studying, so they were looking about learning by doing – and, of course, it was more complex than it looks at first glance. And this led them to the communities of practice model, which makes a lot of sense.

And, largely in response to this, people developed the idea of a community of learners or a learning community. Because, if learning is social and situated, then the non-vocational learners must be doing it as well, mustn’t they?

But has anyone really taken this back to the notion of community and asked how these subsets are useful?

There seem to be two literatures. First there is the virtual/physical community literature. This looks at communities and asks whether they are possible without a physical basis. And the answer is generally yes, except for the people who feel that network is a more useful term than community in an online context. Then there is the community of learners/community of practice literature. This explores these concepts, but relates them to learning rather than to community. So, if you think along sociocultural lines then you use these models and if you think along other lines you either ignore them or haven’t really noticed them.

But nobody seems to be saying – once you take away the geographical criterion for a community – then all communities are communities of practice. And, if that’s the case then the ‘of practice’ bit becomes redundant. And it particularly becomes redundant because it’s almost impossible to uncover what ‘practice’ means in this context, because it seems to mean everything that a community does and all the resources which it draws on. And a community that does nothing and has no resources isn’t a community in my book.

I think Lave and Wenger have held on to distinction which is not valid at their level of analysis – the distinction between book learning and practice-based learning. Once you have a definition of learning as a collaborative situated process then that applies equally to all learning – and it is a feature of a comunity. I think then, the appropriate distinction is between communities which intentionally focus on learning and those which do not. What is more, I think that those learning communities are invariably sub-sets of other communities.

Types of learning

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I keep losing this, and I keep needing it. Forms of learning in a psychologists’ community of practice:

    1. They learn about psychologists’ resources and how to access these 

    2. They learn the skills which are required of a psychologist 

    3. They learn how to behave as a psychologist 

    4. They learn how to think like a psychologist. 

    5. They learn the values of a psychologist. 

    6. They learn about the problems faced by psychologists
    7. 7. They learn the language of the psychologist.

Are students ever off-task online?

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This is an extract from my supervision minutes from last December. It contains a lot of points which are important to the development of my research, so I’ve put it here to remind me of these.
Examine the resources used by students – local resources and broader social resources – and at how they use these to build a sense of togetherness and  to create a context.
Read Van Oers and Hannikainen’s 2001 article in the International Journal of Early Years Education 9 (2), which privileges a relational approach and deals with how groups are sustained by togetherness.
Investigate how groups build contextual foundations for joint working, mobilise social and community resources and build a sense of mutuality and confidence in the group. This is not just off-task talk, they cannot do cognitive work without this relational work. Together they build contextual links, which is important for distance students who are limited by the bandwidth available.
The ‘approaches to study’ is a limited lens, which looks at how individuals learn. It is a cognitive schema. However, cognitive elements do not stand on their own. It is important to look at the salience and significance of other important aspects.
The group must negotiate their roles and actions in order to achieve things collectively. Their actions and learning are highly relational, not just resourced by course material. Learning is an interactional accomplishment.

CAL Monday 12.20

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Emergence v design – a case study of an emergent community of practice in a blended learning community in postgraduate education Tim Savage, Trinity College, Dublin. https://www.cs.tcd.ie/Tim.Savage/scholar.htm

Once again, very relevant to me. I’m particularly interested in the idea of a blended community which brings together the online and the F2F, strengthening both.

Tim used an ethnographic approach and grounded theory to study a supportive online community which runs alongside a course and has done for five years. He looked at the differences between the design space and the community which emerges. He also looked at the processes of emergence – the impact of the online F2F blend.

The emergent community is neither face to face nor virtual. It is  community with aspects of both. There was recognition of people’s online persona prior to F2F contact. The blended approach seemed to bring together a community more quickly than either an online or a F2F community would manage. People felt there was a lack of cliques. They had a sense of pride in the community. In-class groupings were more fluid than would have been expected if they had been based only on F2F contact. Cliques teded to exist only when people had met on previous courses. There was a strong commitment to the community a well as to the personal social network.

DZX222 Tutor Day

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Interviewing Gill via email reminded me, indirectly, that I ought to blog about the DZX222 tutor day at the beginning of the month.

Some of the points raised included: the virtual sumer school is not a break from everyday life for students like a residential school. Students may feel isolated and vulnerable to both doubt and distraction.

A week online equates to a day at residential school. Tutors need to get students to summarise their progress regularly. They shuld encourage discussion of ideas and suggestions. They should avoid providing instant solutions.

Tutors also need to remember several things. One student can tend to take over a  group – there is a need to be on the alert for this. It’s easy to think you are replying to one student but others will read replies and may be daunted by a complex answer – even if that answer is appropriate for the student you are addressing. On the other hand, students may not read replies to other students, so important information needs to be put in bold with a changed header.

There are three major causes of argument amongst students: (1) students have the perception that they are carrying others (2) the chosen project is too complicated (3) an unofficial grup leader emerges.

There is also a danger of bullying. If postings make students feel daunted or overwhelmed that is a form of bullying. There is a need to investigate student silences. Are the students unhappy? Do they understand what is happening?