New Education

Final reflection

2008-06-03T09:29:00.000-07:00

Personal impression
I started this course with strong preconceptions. I had them not about the course but about elearning. I do understand that elearning is here to stay, but I still prefer face-to-face learning. Since elearning is so young then perhaps we have not found the right way how to do it: theoretical concepts are arising and practical experiences as well. After 5 years the world (concepts) of elearning are bit different.
I also do realise that the facilitator/professor is no longer the only source of the truth, but I still miss classroom discussions (IRL), somehow it seems to me that synergy is better there. You can argue and you hear answers straight away. In elearning everything takes place in some time period. If not msn/or skype (but skype is not so easy to use yet, the quality of connection is not
stable) then there is always some time between arguments. Sometimes it is good (if arguments are angry), but to me it kills the synergy.
It seems to me that to have an excellent online project together is a huge challenge. This kind of projects will be more successful when participants have met each other or are the same level (possess similar knowledge). If not, then there will be some frustration among participants.

What else did I learn?

First some practical note: communication between representatives of different cultures can be problematic. Not everything is understood the way you think. This is for sure. After one episode I tried to be more careful while writing my posts. The result of that was perhaps my statements were not so strong as they should have been. But in this i am not sure.

The patterns of behaviours are different. It was interesting to see how different people behave. As learning in formal educational system to me always has something to do with the power, it was interesting to see how representatives of different cultures deal with it. It would be interesting to analyse these patterns.

How hard it is to come out with common understand about something. For example: I proposed several times to use in our course design term "football" and not soccer and did put also some links what did support my proposal (to me FIFA is a strong argument). Still we had no common understanding and used football and soccer at the same time. Create common understand before you act? Or act anyway? In my opinion common understanding is very important and this can be created only with cooperation (this was the reason why I tried to comment other work in our wikispaces as much as I could).

It is hard to motivate somebody if you can't have a personal contact: emails are easy to miss. (so have telephone number and an address!). About motivation I did write several times. To me intrinsic motivation is very thin and it depends on several other aspects than just a will of humans. It does not mean that it does not exist, but during learning process intrinsic motivation is easy to die. If learner will have the feeling of failing then intrinsic motivation gets damaged and does not drive anymore.

Don’t cover the facts. I think that the students of this course should have known before that some students will join later. It would have helped to avoid the feeling of loneliness in the group.

If some members of the project-group do know each other and live/work together - it is easier for them to cooperate with each other than with members of the group with whom they have not met. If one school has several students participating in this course the learning outcome might be better because they have a chance to discuss things/subjects with each other.

In online course always accommodate students with good channels for discussion. Even if some students don’t understand the subject it is possible for them to observe the discussion and still have a better understanding about the subject. I'm not sure if everybody did get what is course design all about.

If you want to have an excellent project and communication - first you must have some plan and structure. Otherwise you will loose a lot of time while scratching and gain nothing.

What else? I thought a lot about self-directed learning and intrinsic motivation. The problem with them is that even though I like the concepts I have never seen this working out in formal course at university level. My presumption is that the preconditions for self-directed learning and intrinsic motivation are not preformed.

I did learn something about football :). The idea that football could be the subject of our course was great (so we have to thank Oleg) and now it seems to me that everything can be taught in online / elearning way. Wow, this is something! So there is a huge plus to elearning / online courses side 

As learning process is a development process then learners want frequent feedback (especially if they are not having weekly classroom meeting): am I considering every (most) aspects of this phenomena? Is my argumentation logical? In formal educational system were there are some home assignments: how are my assignments done?

Taking responsibility for your own learning.

Well …
I think I did take the responsibility for my own learning. In my opinion learning materials were great and they raised several new ideas. I tried to reflect the practise (incl this course) and the feelings/thoughts/ideas I had during this learning process. Actually this was a first experience to me to formalise (write down) my thoughts and comments. This gives a good overview when and what I learned.
At one point I thought about self-directed learning and intrinsic motivation as how far these concepts are from real life. Now I think that perhaps the preconditions of these things are misunderstood.
If we are taking a look to our students in this course, it can not be that only some 20% of students take a full responsibility of their learning. (Around 25% did finally the tasks required to complete this course). To me there is a conflict between theory and practise.

About feedback - If I would have to decide now again whether to join this course, then I would think hard and probably would not join.
I wrote into several posts my feedback: materials great, course too intensive, more feedback and support from the facilitators is needed, next time try to use the forum also and discuss there interesting subjects (not formal information about the course) and add some pictures or jokes about elearning :) (have some fun); clarify your target group, be in dialogue with students (and make sure that the learning takes place - that people learn 'right' things). Elearning is more demanding and that includes facilitators also. If you want students to take the responsibility of their learning than you must take it (responsibility) also. Analyse this course: what worked out and what did not. I don't know whether there are some quality measures, but to me it seems that if from the group of 8 only 3 graduates, then this is not a success story. Sry. Try to get some information (data) when and why people decided to leave this course. Read reflections and try to understand why do people have negative feelings about this course (last reflections of participants describe having negative feelings about this course and I share their feelings, the conflict I had/described several weeks ago is still there). If necessery collect data about it. Analyse your pedagogical approach: I'm not sure that everything was ok there. Give students more freedom: some elective material, alternative assignments (wikis, more than 1 possible headings for essay per week). Have plan B for the course.

So, this was the last post. Dear reader, have a wonderful summer and take care!

Reflection week 13

2008-06-03T09:06:00.000-07:00

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
You can improve something all the time, but it is important to understand that there is a time to draw the line. I'm kind of perfectionist sometimes and I can see the mistakes and want to improve them. We can't do it for ever ;)

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
We finished our course design and this was interesting. Unfortunally only 2 of us had the strength to carry out all the course more-or-less on time, but I'm glad that Robert joined us eventually.

3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more about it?
This time no :)

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?
How to improve our course. What are the weaknesses right now and what should we do.
but well: we don't do with our course anything anymore :) I'm glad this is over :)

5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools
MSN - to communicate with my friends, MS Word - to write reflections, blog - to post reflection, Wikispaces - to reorganise our space. Skype also.

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
Jasna to discuss/synchronise our activities.
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Feedback for group1

I have observed your work from the beginning and first I would like to congratulate you: nice work!

So just few comments what you might consider:
It would be great if you could specify what can students expect from facilitators? What kind of activities or feedback and when.

Your structure of course web page is good, but seems a little statical/boring. Just something 'extra' - a picture or joke could do the job. One recommendation: just look at the pages through eyes of the students and try to make it more student-friendly.

About schedule: 10 weeks seems a long time (for every iteration 2 weeks). I just wonder whether students will remain motivated. Maybe you don’t need 10 weeks for this subject?

And a little about evaluation: there was one question I did not understand: "Evaluate the quality of the overall concrete arraingements of the course". Perhaps you can specify that? This was the reason why I did not answer to this question.
The second thing is that I did not understand were you want me to put my free feedback? As in evaluation-page says " post free comments on the discussion area of this page for evaluating our groups course prototype" I tried to do that (leave free comments on the discussion area), but failed many times.

Learning contract: self-reflection

2008-05-28T15:46:00.000-07:00

Self-reflection:
Did i achieve my objectives? Use the criteria what you developed to assess how well did you work. Reflect, what worked and what did not?

Basically yes.
First category of questions was about educational science and I have deeper understand about them. I have gone deeper into theory, I tried to observe the environment around me and I tried to make sense about my previous experience, to analyse how learning takes place; how to understand self-directed learning and intrinsic motivation. Non of those questions is black or white question with only one correct answer - so there is a lot of discover in the future as well. But: with this (theoretical) part and with my thinking about it I am actually extremely satisfied.
Second goal was: to have some knowledge (just facts) about different technological possibilities how to implement good elearning course. Well: I did have some knowledge about it. Some of them while reading course materials, going through different environments and writing/reading stuff about good/bad criteria.

With my criterias I am not very satisfied because they are not fully supporting my goals :). Some feedback about this would have been useful. But still:

1. Know how to use different technological tools while implementing good elearning course.
I know how and why to use different social technologies.

2. Reading and learning reflections are done.
They are done.

3. Reflections and/ or comments and/or contributions to the group-work consists argumentation about self-directed learning, intrinsic motivation and different approaches to the learning.
Here I have not formulated my criteria correctly (one reason is my developing skill writing in English). Reflections and comments to the reading material do consist argumentation. My contribution to the group-work does not. But I'm not sure whether it would have been helpful to write there thoughts like I have about these subjects. Still: the contribution to our group-work has not been small and during discussions I tried to add ideas and support them with some argumentation.

What worked and what did not….

I wrote quite many comments on that what did not work :)
I still think that course needs to be redesigned. Sry for that :(. The load of the first weeks was extremely high and left no room for groups to start communicate. The communication part (why I have to write so many reflections about learning and reading if nobody reads them and we have no discussion about them???) did not work. I think that forum might help here and writing comments to each others blogs as one weekly assignment, but surely facilitators comments are the one's everybody is waiting.

Students of this course had too different backgrounds: from undergraduate to doctoral studies. It is clear that those people do have different needs, but the course did not consider that. Plus we had different backgrounds (some IT, some education). Again: forum might have helped to find people with common knowledge or background. I think it would have big help to me. The idea about people sharing their knowledge with each other works better for people with similar backgrounds. Otherwise some don't understand and some are not motivated because there is nothing in it for them.

Materials were good. Most of them I liked very much and they helped me to achieve my goals and they made me think. One suggestion: have some material as compulsory and some as elective. This gives you also possibility to support self-directed learning and intrinsic motivation.

This different cultures thing … it's a bit problematic. One possibility is to set up some common rules how to communicate. And it is very important for facilitators to know and understand different cultures. I discussed this with my husband (who has lived in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Croatia, Bulgaria and Romania) and he said that these all are quite different cultures: although people are the same everywhere the attitudes about them selves and about the power (!) is still quite different.

One of my criteria was satisfaction with me. Well, I am satisfied. First: because I did not quit this course and endured. There were many thoughts about leaving this course. I was not so enthusiastic as I might be, but all assignments are done and I don't think that my contribution to the group-work has been small. So: I'm satisfied.

Explain, which type of learning environment is best suitable for your e-learning course? (week 7)

2008-05-28T14:40:00.000-07:00

Well… we have a different kind of course  Our course is about football which is rather practical thing (requires practical skills) therefore our course environment has to be different as well. We can not have only electronic learning environment: practises have to take place with real football. When science gives us haptic-tools (or something like this) then it would be interesting to have only electronic environment, but I'm not sure whether it would be wise considering our goals, tasks and practical character of this course.
But of course: learning environment has to support deeper learning, motivation of students.
I strongly believe that it must allow discussions (dialogue and argumentation). As humans are social beings and learning is social activity - discussion (forum) in electronic environment (our environment is divided: practical environment and electronic environment) is extremely important (in practices discussions and communication takes place anyway).
It is important to support curiosity of learners. Curiosity supports intrinsic motivation.
Of course it would help students if the material would not be statical (just articles to read). Some videos and pictures might do the job here. At the same time you must be careful because to much of videos, sounds, (moving) pictures might disturb the learning.
Learning environment must support achievement of goals and it is very important whether this environment supports assignments we have for our students.
For reflections and tasks we might use blogs. Although I don’t like using blogs in learning too much: first - academic writing disappears and in the universities this is not a mark of quality. Blogging is like writing a diary (very personal) and there is a certain group of people who like to do that. But not most of us. I know that blogging is becoming very popular and it helps to reflect, but still: reflection does not have to be visible to everybody.
But as we have rather practical subject then academic part is not a problem and blogs are easer to follow. So blogs it is.

Some other thoughts:

About the role of facilitator: domain novices don’t have strong domain-specific cognitive schema and therefore they cannot determine which information might help them. Here again the power-questions rises to me. And at the same time it seems to me that self-directed learning can not take place in this stadium (novice) of learning because all the preconditions of self-directed learning are not met.

Organising your own learning - personal learning environment - this was interesting idea. I have never thought about it in systematic way: how to organise my own learning.

Pedagogically neutral software - somehow this troubles me. At one point I think this is not a real problem (different tasks need different approach - Ertmer and Newby’s idea of taxonomy of learning - so there is no problem with neutrality of software. But then again the question of self-directed learning and democracy rises.

For conclusion:
For every task there are professionals in the world. I can brainstorm with them, but environment is not my 'thing'.

Reflection - week 12

2008-05-26T13:41:00.000-07:00

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
Well … technology can not be trusted. First I had a difficult week because our internet connection failed. It required several days form us to make it work again. The second problem was with our wikispaces: the system somehow did get craze. But I do hope that everything will be ok this week.

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
Reading feedback to our course was interesting, to see what happens with our wikispaces was interesting and unpleasant at the same time. Boring: it seems that only Robert; Jasna and I are worried about our group-work. This makes evaluation of the group-mates difficult. There is nothing interesting going on in their personal blogs as well….

3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more about it?
What happen with wikispaces and my internet connection :)

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?
How we should move on with our course design? Are there only Jasna and Robert left?

5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools
MSN - to communicate with my friends, MS Word - to write reflections, blog - to post this reflection, Wikispaces - to reorganise our space and left there few comments, Skype - to have an emergency meeting with Jasna and Robert.

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
Jasna and Robert to discuss/synchronise our activities.

Reflection week 11

2008-05-19T16:48:00.000-07:00

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
I was in Paris for few days in this week and I learned how wonderful world can be. How good the food can be and that it is possible to paint like Monet' did. I saw water lilies and I would now I know that it is possible to fall in love with … paintings.

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
Reading material offered again good ideas how to improve our course design. I do hope that my group-mates will contribute to do that.
Evaluation form I found very useful. It would have been good idea to introduce this earlier so that students would get more information about what is required. It certainly helped me - we are not so capable that we could think about everything.
Boring: I had no discussion about evaluation form with others. It seems that our group activated for one week only.

3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more about it?
I guess not …
I'm not sure in evaluation criteria of this course. If some of members of group don't contribute and even local facilitators can't help to make it happen, then what can other members of the group do?
I'm not sure how I will evaluate the outcome of others. As this is experimental course and everything is not gone as planned earlier I don't think it is fair to be very hard on my course-mates. But at the same time: few of us are working quite hard and I don’t want to be unfair to them as well.

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?
How to evaluate my group-mates….
And one other remark: even group 1 did not finished their evaluation form on time ….

5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools
MSN - to communicate with my friends, MS Word - to write reflections, blog - to post reflections, Moodle - for materials, Wikispaces - to write my part of course design and comment the work of others, e-mail - to clarify with Teje who should be our evaluators

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
I posted few comments into our wikispaces area.

How to formatively evaluate e-learning course designs? week11

2008-05-14T13:10:00.000-07:00

All assignments beginning with the word "how" somehow bring into my mind some "10 steps to hapiness" handbook. And I want to begin my answer with the words first take some ….. after this …. I'm not sure whether I should come up with some handbook or not.
In the reading material page 16 there is a cycle how to do it. It just needs some supplementary components like create evaluation form according to the objective what you expect to reach. Then collect data, analyse it and of course make some conclusions and improve your course.
It is possible to use electronic advises for this, but it is also possible to do it without them (let students write an essay).
Answering in this way seems a bit … meaningless to me. Sorry.
So I just write my thought about the reading material of this week.
About first- and second-hand learning. I'm not familiar with this concept and it seems a bit strange to me. The example about computers raised a question: is online course/ university really a place for first-hand learning (taking a part and rebuilding a computer)? Don’t we have vocational schools for that? Is it a degradation of universities? I know that there are different schools about 'pure knowledge' and 'learning', but I'm kind of 'pure knowledge' girl. I expect universities and e-learning/online courses to share/create with students knowledge (and meta-knowledge) and not so much of practical skills.
This week reading materials had a lot of suggestions what we could take into consideration in our course:
1. to have flexible course with a basic level of content to be mastered and as well some supplementary material for those who are more capable of interested.
2. we should think about how to encourage engagement in our course and how to provide two-way communication between student-facilitator, but also student-student
3. we need to provide students plenty of motivation and written feedback for students
4. virtual office hours where students could log on to the chat area and ask questions
5. satisfaction survey in the end of the course.
6. weekly e-mails and weekly assignments would be a way to keep students engaged
7. criteria for online discussions/reflections/analysis

About constructivism: knowledge is constructed rather then transmitted… Well, I agree, but before we can construct something we still need to transmit/gain some knowledge. It is not possible to construct from nothing, we still need something: facts, experience, ….
So I rather see it like a cycle or spiral: first transmission and then construction. (Before we can create online course or develop design we need to know what it is; or before we will integrate something into our mind/beliefs, preconceptions, world of thinking) and they are both equal parts of learning.

About results: i think that for the students who participated in this course the online part was very exciting because for them it was a variation from their everyday work or learning. Some variation is usually more interesting then routine.

Reflection - week 10

2008-05-12T10:53:00.000-07:00

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
Learning is social activity. I read just today Terjes question why our group did not communicate and discuss like this earlier. Well, we did not have a forum before and now we have a common goal to work together.
If we are talking about new generation (generation 2.0) then we must take into consideration that not only they are using different tools, but their way of thinking and contributing is also different. Forum enables quick discussion for many people, but the contributions are usually short. To communicate with many people blog is not flexible enough.

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
Interesting was how do different people think and work in forum. This was great. I really liked Olegs contribution (he knows a lot about football), but not only. I liked very much Olegs willingness to work further with the material and openness to have a dialogue.
What was interesting to me also was how do different people interpret the same information (vision in our case) and work with it.
It was nice that we did not have any reading materials for this week. I’m getting tired of this course as this is intensive.
What annoys me is that I can’t find enough time to write answers to my comments. I find these comments usually very interesting and I see them as part of discussion about elearning, but as we have always something new to do I put my priorities there. But I think that these comments are more useful to me to understand better the elearning world. So it makes me unhappy that I can not find enough time for this.

3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more about it?
No.

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?
What are goals and sub-goals in course design?
And one remark also – during last week when it was clear to everybody what to do and how to do it, everything went well. Now we as a group are a bit stuck again and it seems that members of our group do not know what to do next.

5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?
Skype – group meeting to clarify our plans and activities. MSN - to communicate with my friends, MS Word - to write reflections, blog - to post reflections, Moodle - for materials, Wikispaces - to write my part of course design and comment the work of others, e-mail - to clarify what Teje meant by sub-goals and to communicate friends/colleagues.

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
With our group and Terje.

Learning contract

2008-05-05T13:41:00.000-07:00

Objectives
Why I wish to learn/do something, what is meaningful for me/for my group as part of the assignment I am responsible of?

As we have just divided roles this part of contract might perhaps have some supplementary lines later :)

The question why is quite difficult. I want to want to have an understanding about:
1. theoretical basis of elearning (education science)
a. self-directed learning
b. intrinsic motivation
c. different approaches to the learning

I want to have some knowledge (just facts) about:
2. different technological possibilities how to implement good elearning course.

So that I could understand the (e)learning better and have some knowledge how to create a successful elearning course.

What resources will i need:
What software tools and resources i am going to use? Resources can be people, different artifacts, materials.
People
• Members of my group (incl facilitator), discussion with them.
• Other members of this course as source of information

Materials
• Communication:
o Blogs: Reflection and personal communication (how to
o Wikispaces: collaboration between group-members
o Skype: communication between group members
o Email & feeds in blogs
o Doodle: for polls
o Moodle: assignments and learning materials
• Documents
o MS Word: reading course materials and writing my own contributions.

How will i do it:
What is my strategy to achieve my objectives? What is the order of my actions? How will i use different resources in my actions?
Go through the weekly materials as a basis for the decisions made for the course design by the end of the course. Follow the weekly assignments to gain better understanding about the subject and also test this in practice by evolving our own course what is under development. Deepen and broaden my knowledge and views through writing reflections and comments to my group-mates.

Evaluation criteria:
How do I know that i was successful? Develop measurable criteria to evaluate your activities in respect of your objectives.
1. Know how to use different technological tools while implementing good elearning course.
2. Reading and learning reflections are done.
3. Reflections and/ or comments and/or contributions to the group-work consists argumentation about self-directed learning, intrinsic motivation and different approaches to the learning.

As I am rather critical then satisfaction with myself is a good criteria? ;)

Self-reflection:
Did i achieve my objectives? Use the criteria what you developed to assess how well did you work. Reflect, what worked and what did not?

What are the best ways of finding a social network of your interests? - week6

2008-05-05T12:46:00.000-07:00

Hmm…
Reading material was interesting (as usually), but the reflection theme of this week is not perhaps the best. Maybe it is just me, but i did not find an answer to the question. I can list here what are the possibilities to find the social networks:
1. through people - you know somebody who is a member of some community or you just know some names and you will start looking for them. And then you see who is connected with whom and so you can go on.
2. through material - i read something what is interesting to you and you choose some keywords and start looking for them
3. through web - web pages of different associations, social bookmarking tools, Blogs, links, tags, ….

But: important is the ability to understand the content and assess the quality of the network (or regular web-page).

Could this week assignment be about communities of practice and learning networks? How to build it up (model) or describe a successful community of practice or learning network? Or how learning networks support learners?

Reflection - week 9

2008-05-05T12:44:00.000-07:00

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
What kind of passion is required to create something powerful and good in the world level. Yesterday I heard Berliner Philarmoniker with sir Simon Rattle. Wow, the fame they have does not come from nothing. I think you can do something really good if you like it and feel passionate about. I think that Estonian National Symphony Orchestra performs also good, but what differs them from BP is passion. Same thing is about teaching - to be a good teacher you have to feel passionate about it.

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
As this weeks assignment was reading and commenting the work of group-mates. Well, there was not much to read. First we don’t have learning contracts (this required divided roles). Then there are no materials in our collaboration space (but we will have them by the end of this week). I do hope that all group-mates will contribute finally something.
The only one who has done everything on time is Jasna. As usually I looked up some course-mates blogs: some of them are doing really great job and I admire the group-work of group1.

What was interesting: as I'm trying to write some reading reflections I did not finished on time, it is rather interesting to see how my thought about something change in time.

3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more
about it?
Is self-directed learning only a nice theory? Self-directed learning and intrinsic motivation are so complex terms and they both have so many preconditions that maybe this is the reason why it is hard to see qualitative self-directed learning? Or maybe it does not succeed in formal education system as this system does not meet these preconditions? So many questions… I graduated andragogy few years ago and somehow I do believe in self-directed learning, but I don’t know success-stories from formal educational system. But there is always a chance that this theory has no real practical background.

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?
How I can review something what does not exist :)

5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?
Skype - to communicate Jasna and Terje, MSN - to communicate with my friends, MS Word - to write reflections, blog - to post reflections and see whether others have done something, Moodle - for materials, wikispaces - to set up common space for our group, e-mail - to communicate friends/colleagues, doodle - to vote.

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
With Jasna and Terje via Skype to discuss our group-work and how we should go further.

How can a conversational personal contract improve self-directed learning? week5

2008-05-05T12:10:00.000-07:00

I read reading materials of week 5 twice. At first I something happened and I just did not have time to write reading reflection. When I started to write this blog I realised that to understand my own comments I have to read it once again.
What I liked in this week reading was the practical guidance was practical part: quite a lot practical samples how to write/create learning contract.

First some thought about/ from material:

Self-directed learning requires intrinsic motivation and this can not be underestimated. But we are not alone in this world. Learning takes place in social environment. If this environment does not support intrinsic motivation then adults don’t want to take the responsibility. In the middle of learning process almost everybody need support: from relatives, friends, facilitators, learning environment, …
So we can not count only on students intrinsic motivation - they do have a lot of influencies from outside. So we have to talk about external motivation at the same time.

"Self and self-direction are the subjective concepts influenced by many factors. Self-directed learning activities take always place in a certain social context and cannot be separated from that social setting and other people (Brockett & Hiemstra 1991). Thus, we cannot talk about pure autonomy and absolute freedom, rather self-direction is framed by other individuals and groups (Lindeman, 1926). Furthermore, environment and surrounding culture, social spaces and communities we create and belong to, people we communicate determine our consciousness and dictate our self-directed activities."

I really liked efficiency matrix.

Conversational contract

"Learner defined contracts (e.g. in ePortfolios) are facilitated and periodically evaluated by other knowledgeable persons when learning proceeds. Conversational contracts presume that, as learning procedure continues the contracts should be updated according to facilitators comments. "

In my opinion conversational contracts are just feedback and they influence self-directed learning in the same way any feedback influences learning. This offers to the learners the possibility to review their learning and improve their aims, expected outcomes, resources required. Facilitator can support learners development and (intrinsic) motivation, give some suggestions/ directions how to move forward. Conversational contract supports interaction/discussion between learner and facilitator and therefore can
• increase the quality of learning and
• be a basis for mutual learning (facilitator from learner and learner from facilitator).

Reflection week 8

2008-04-28T14:22:00.000-07:00

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
From theory I found Garrison, Anderson, and Archer model about "community of learning" brilliant. The theory behind elearning is quite new then the level of maturity is still not good. We have some first thought and surveys about it, but we still can't say that we understand how elearning is different of 'normal' learning. Even if we can say the difference between two of them, it is still not clear how to manage effectively elearning. Reading materials did not answer. Instead of an answer I read how almost everything in elearning is a challenge. Well, life is a challenge :) But it made me think whether the theory has gone too far away from practical world and the use of theories in practice is getting harder and harder? Theory has gone into the level where there are no easy answers/solutions anymore.

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
This week readings I found particularly interesting and boring at the same time: I did get confused: readings were like about everything and nothing at the same time. Maybe it's just me: I'm kind of bored and don't find everything so interesting anymore.
There was no active communication between our group members. What worries me is that half of our group has not contributed and shared their vision about our course. This makes moving forward hard. Sometimes I am afraid that we don’t (in our group) fully understand the world behind course design and tend to take everything too primitive level. I'm not sure how (or whether) I can help here.

3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more
about it?
Fischer compared human and technology-based learning and it shows that technology is great enabler, but the question is how to use these possibilities without falling in love with technology and still preserving students attention. The importance of attention can not be underestimated.
There were two things I did not get: HOTS (seemed not systematic enough) and learning objects. Perhaps I have to do in the future some more reading about them.

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?
Should we reorganise our group since there are members who don’t contribute? It seems that we can not rely on them.
I'm still observing the work of other course-mates and it seems that if the group-work is going on well in the personal blog there is less activity. The question is why?
We should have some structure into our course design. Terje suggested to take the main aspects from our course weblog and I agree. This can help understand better the work behind course design (what needs to be done). Sometimes I do get the feeling that the readings are not done or are done very superficially and this blocks our work.

5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?
Skype, MSN, MS Word, blog, Moodle, wikispaces, google docs, e-mail, doodle.
6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
I actually contacted with my ex course-mates from andragogy to discuss theory of self-directedness and intrinsic motivation.

From the perspective of my tasks in our workgroup, what did I learn from theoretical materials, how to make/use the course materials/activities/assessment/tools? week8

2008-04-28T14:21:00.000-07:00

As we have not shared our roles in group it is difficult to read something concrete from theoretical material. So I write here just few short comments/thought about reading materials.

• One main question in elearning is probably: what supports intrinsic motivation? And there is no concrete answer. At one point while reading theoretical material I felt that this material is about everything and nothing at the same time. Although materials write that this is important I did not find good answer how to support intrinsic motivation.

• The importance of attention can not be underestimated. Learners participation supports this attention needed. The content and the way the content is reflected or brought into experience and the environment where it is happening are very important to get the students attention.

• HOTS-model I did not like. Don’t even know why, seemed kind of not finished.

• Fischer compared human and technology-based learning and this shows that technology is great enabler, but the question is how to use these possibilities what technology offers. At one point Fischers model seemed not objective and a bit favour of technology based learning. But this was still good reading.

• Online learning is still in its early infancy (Fahy, P. J). - and so is the theory behind it. This is very important to keep in mind.

• Garrison, Anderson, and Archer model about "community of learning" I found brilliant.

• Getting the mix right between opportunities for synchronous and asynchronous interaction, and group and independent study activities remains a challenge (Daniel & Marquis, 1988; Anderson, 2002) - this is also good to keep in mind. But again: from theoretical point it is good to know, but how to bring this into good practice?

Very often small (practical) tricks (behind the theory) will do the game. Sometimes if everything seems so complicated and "challenging" some small tricks / activities (without any deeper theory behind it) can help. I was looking from materials something similar. But probably my expectations are too high and I need to remember that "Online learning is still in its early infancy".

• Most online students are practical adults with much competition for their time; thus they are unlikely to participate in activities that are marginalized or viewed as supplemental to the course goals and assessment schema (Anderson) - goes together with learner participation and attention.

• … how these instructions guide students on both the quantity (“two substantive postings” per discussion question) and the quality of contributions expected - Levines assessment framework) - this was one practical thing I read (so 10 points for that) and this goes together with Terjes reflection. I not sure whether I like the quantity part - learning must always be qualitative change. I'm not sure whether quantitative measures are the best way to reach/create qualitative change. Assessment is always very complicated.

• In learning process rapid feedback is important - so there must be somebody who will give you the feedback (and has some authority) and it means that teacher/facilitator can not be equal as students (they never can because of the power)! Power-issue has followed me for a long time. As like very much the idea that facilitator is part of learning group (equal member of the group), but I'm not sure whether this can happen in real life. Only if facilitators delegate their power, but I'm not sure that this is a good idea. With power there is always a question of responsibility and competence. So this is a tricky one!

• Formalising reflective learning outcomes takes time. It is good, but if you want to do it in qualitative way, you have to take into consideration that this takes a lot of time! If you just write something quickly then this formalisation does not justify itself.

How far away is theory from practice…

Reflection 6 & 7

2008-04-23T14:36:00.000-07:00

I had several exams during the past few weeks. This is the reason why I have not contributed here for a while. I tried to participate in group activities, so I don’t think that the group suffered because of my lower activity. I'll try to catch up.
I have received several comments to my writings and I'll try to write some answers. Writing an answer to the comment is also reflection.
1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
Planning isn't everything. You can plan your time, but life can make some unexpected changes.
I believed that theory can explain everything. I had very interesting course during the past three weeks. From theoretical view this course was a disaster: monotonous lectures and professor, but the material was so intriguing that this course still changed my understanding of art, history, learning and life. I am very demanding when it comes to teaching and I had a lesson that: even if everything doesn’t follow the "right way", it still may be very interesting and useful.
2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
Struggles: with my English. I have never learned how to talk or write in English and sometimes this annoys me, because everything takes more time than I wanted.
It was interesting to see, that communication motivates people. We had with our group nice meetings via skype, but surprisingly: when it comes to private contribution some members somehow disappear.
3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more
about it?
About theoretical part I probably will have some questions, but first I have to read course materials. :)
4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?
First question remain the same: whether students still suffer with the overload of information and assignments? Is it too much to read, reflect your learning, reflect theoretical material and participate activley in group activities?
And one idea: we should have (in our group) some structure in our skype-meetings. If we discuss everything then nothing gets done :). Last time everybody talked about something (everybody had some questions and ideas) and it was kind of difficult to follow the discussion.
5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?
Skype, MSN, MS Word, blog, Moodle, wiki deki, google docs, e-mail.
6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
I communicated with my group.

Reflection - week 5

2008-04-07T15:31:00.000-07:00

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
Well … As I have one very interesting course called History and Visions of Interactive Media and all the material in this course is looked at through artistic approach then this shadows everything else what I learned this week. I'm beginning to understand where the roots of interactive media are and how interactive media developed. Sometimes it's not nice to look at (cutting eyes or things like this), but it has rocked my world. After this every other learning experience of this week does not seem too serious or important.
2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
I'm still struggling with the design of this course. I'm afraid that quite a lot of students will have negative impression about elearning. And there are real lives behind this course: real credit points, real money, real disappointments.
It was interesting to see learning contracts done by some other students (reading material).
3. Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more
about it?
Not really. I probably must do some reading about motivation to understand how to motivate (or what drives the motivation) people to learn. How in reality to support them.
4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?
Questions: whether students still suffer with the overload of information and assignments? I have understood that few students are communicating with Terje quite a lot. Even if this is just some social talk in the evening - why are they communicating only with the facilitator why not with the rest of the group? Is there a way how we could make our group blog to work? I'll try to write comments to our group blog if there is something to comment or something for me to say…
5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?
Skype, MSN, MS Word, blog, Moodle, wiki deki
6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
Had a nice conversation with Terje, Jasna, Robert and the outcome is that we will have an other session quite soon.

The course is dead? Long live the course??

2008-04-04T12:12:00.000-07:00

I am really worried about this course and where it is heading towards. I visited yesterday all my course-mates' websites to understand how far have they had reached in their studies. The picture was not nice. We have around 70 students and only very few of them (13-14) have had the strength to fully keep up with pace of the schedule. I didn't survey this in more detail. But if some trends are shown in the numbers the real situation would appear more visibly.

The picture I saw last night was not nice: the activity of participation is reducing every week. I read the reflections of some facilitators and it made me think. The argumentation that they use is mostly like: "all the students are grown-ups, they must base their learning activities on intrinsic motivation and it is their problem if they want to get a grade or not."

To me this kind of thinking from facilitators' side is unacceptable. Sorry. I know that I am reacting a bit too strongly now, but I can explain why.

In my bachelor studies we had a group of 21 students. After reaching in the middle of the 3rd year (it was a 4-year study) we had a course named 'proseminar', where we were supposed to write the theoretical part of our bachelor thesis (around 30 pages). We had had one course like this at the beginning of 3 year and the one that I am writing about was a follow-up course. So we reflected and wrote and discussed and it seemed to us that everything was quite ok. At the time of exam the facilitators came into class and said that only 3 of us could pass. Others were considered lazy, stupid and sloppy and we were lectured using similar key points:
• you all are grown-ups
• you must do more work - if you are busy or ill it does not count
• it is your problem how you get your grade.

I was among the 3 who passed in the first round. Despite we had a chat with our facilitators about the abnormality of the situation - nothing changed. Ultimately 9 of us graduated in time - we supported each other and had kind of psychological support-group were we talked and talked on what went wrong and what we could be doing.

Almost every course-mate remembers this whole experience like a nightmare… The only positive thing being that this experience made me into a education scientist. I think it put my priorities in place.

About our course now. If there were some 10 students who are not active anymore then I would not have to bother to write something like this. But there are the majority who have left - then something must be seriously wrong and we must do something!

We cannot allow the same unprofessional attitude that my previous facilitators had: that students are not acting as grown-ups; that the students don't have enough motivation and they do not contribute enough.

My first point is: we are surely all grown-ups. But at least students from previous soviet countries have the background were grown-ups did not supposed to be self-directed. Taking responsibility in learning is a pretty new concept and our historical background does not support this. (It would be interesting to do a survey about cultural differences of this course). So students still do need some active support from facilitators. Furthermore, I believe that learning is psychologically so complex that learners will always need active support because while people are learning they are vulnerable.

About intrinsic motivation … I believe that most of the students who signed up for this course have shown motivation and willingness to learn. So they had motivation at least at the beginning! For some reasons they lost it along the way. Intrinsic motivation is tricky and thin and extremely easy to kill. So the reason behind leaving the course is not so much about not having the motivation but losing it. Hence the key priority should be thinking on how to try to bring them back to learning process and our course. How? That requires thinking. But perhaps it would be a smart idea to ask them what have been the reasons that they are not so active anymore and how can we all make the course more acceptable for them.

I know that redesigning your course at the middle of it seems meaningless but it would seem worse that only 15 of us would eventually graduate.

By writing this emotional piece I do not intend to hurt anybody, but simply point out my concerns which could be a basis for some further discussion. It seems to me that we are forgetting the essence of learning.

question - future of learning

2008-04-02T15:16:00.000-07:00

By over floating students with information so that they need to read articles diagonally - are we not supporting superficiality?
Considering that students of virtual generation have always too much information and too many tools and still 24 hours per day, perhaps we should encourage students to go more deep into the materials?

The goals and objectives, design principles and process (roster) of your course. week4

2008-04-01T01:13:00.000-07:00

This weeks reading assignment was kind of fuzzy to me. I read post made by other students (course-mates, in our group there are only 2 bloggers left) and found out that:
• there are only few posts about this reading reflection and
• these posts have very different background and very different understanding about the subject.
Different viewpoints are absolutely normal for our elearning group (different cultures and understanding) but in some point I started to feel that perhaps everybody do still not get what this is all about. But then again - I did not understand the level of generalization either …
I read the material through and tied out the approach Terje suggested: first read diagonally and then decide what to read more deeply. So I tried and was not very successful, it is perhaps not my way of working. If I do get materials to read and if they are not absolute crap then I want to take more time and go more deeply through them.

Principles
1. goals must be carefully thought through: analyse need needs of students and curriculum, what skills and knowledge will be the outcome of the course and what is needed to for the task ahead.
2. Methods must involve students and enable use of active learning techniques.
3. Instructional materials are created
4. Implementation - registration, distribution of materials and teacher-student interaction
5. Introduction to course and statement of goals
6. Direction and advice regarding the preparation and submission of assignments
7. Grading scheme is provided
8. Style of course: academic or conversational
9. provide a study guide
10. program announcement - provides date and time, objectives
11. Ask good questions
12. Observation of students
13. determine the need for instruction
14. organize and develop content
15. select and develop materials and methods
16. Co-operation between students and teachers

From theory I think that our course might be grounded socially situated learning (I can't believe that I'm writing something like this!). From what I believe this might be perhaps the most motivating approach to online course.
to be continue ...

Good and Bad Course

2008-03-31T15:10:00.000-07:00

Bad example
Usually bad experiences with learning are bounded somehow unethical behaviour of teachers. But this does not depend on course design. Usually course design is something students do not notice. Once you have to pay attention how course is build up, it means that there is something wrong with it. Form personal experiences just few notes:
• too much material to go through and not enough time for this or too much material and theoretical terms and no context around them.
• no discussion: there is no space or time for discussion or someone (teacher) just will end this with some inappropriate comment
• no clear goals and no communication with learners about the goals of process
• learning materials are out of date or unsuitable (too simple or too complicated)
• no feedback during the process

Good example
Usually good course is something you just enjoy and don't notice how it was built up. And of course: teacher does always give some extra sense to the learning process.
But still few notes:
• clear goals of the process
• common understanding how the process will look like and rules
• support and feedback to students while learning
• good materials and enough time to discover them
• appropriate discussion channels, constant discussion
• flexible assignments and deadlines
• clear structure of course and materials

Reflection - week 4

2008-03-30T17:06:00.000-07:00

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
It's hard to say. This week I can not distinction anything. Somehow everything is at the moment blurry.

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
I struggled again with my motivation and thought a lot about course design. Terjes comments were really interesting and I'm thinking what to answer to them. I read one comment form Terje were she suggested that perhaps student's must not go to deep into all the materials but perhaps should decide what is important and what is not. I tried this approach this week and … did not like it. I can not read diagonally, if I want to take the best out of it, i have to go deep…

3. Was there something you didn't quite understand and want to know more
about it?
No :). I have always wondered if students answer that they do get everything - it is usually a lie.

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week's activities raised for you?
It was really great to read Terjes comments and it gives me motivation to write some answers and continue discussion. And this made me think: what not use this for motivation. What not to make it assignment for one or two weeks? No other homework - students just must read reflections and reading overviews made by others and write comments to them. As we all have read the same papers this might cause deeper reflection even.

5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?
Skype, MSN, MS Word, blog, Moodle

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
I did contact with Terje - we had nice chat about course, just some feedback.

What are the components of course design? week3

2008-03-24T09:21:00.000-07:00

It is a bit difficult for me to understand what is meant by components. Short answer would be: learner, teacher, and environment. After some thoughts I added to the list content and materials. After materials structure, methods and goals came. Then it seemed like an outline. To create some circle development and analysis are missing. I tried to draw these components, but it needs some improvement as learner and teacher /coach / facilitator are missing in the chart. But as I can not show this drawing here, I just type keywords:
* goal and need analysis
* content
* environment
- structure
- methods
- materials
* improvement / evaluation
- feedback
- analysis / reflection
* in the middle of this is construction of knowledge
* motivation
* interaction

Now it seems to me that feedback is very important component in elearning course. In classroom it is possible to see and hear the teacher talking and commenting the content, answering to the questions, opening the context in the same moment. In elearning course this is not happening and therefore continuous interaction and feedback are very important to compensate that.
I hope that I will come back to this and perhaps add some more thoughts about components. There are too many terms/words to have a nice chart...
About materials of this week ...
Somehow I don't like problem-based approach or activity-based approach. I call it "pragmatic view" to learning – shoot, shoot, shoot – think when ever you have time, analyse, discuss, reflect not before but after. First it was teacher-centred, then student-centred and now it is activity/problem-centred approach. When I read materials of problem or activity-based learning it makes me wonder: isn't this actually behaviouristic approach? Yes, it takes into consideration context, but something is missing, something what student-centred approach had. I don't like very much the name: problem-based learning. I believe in learning-by-doing, but I don’t see that this takes place only while solving problems. As in that case the base of learning is some situation from real life then it is perhaps better to call it case-based learning. Not every case is a problem!

I‘ve got it now: I don’t believe in student-content interaction. I believe in student-teacher interaction. But problem-based approach has student-content interaction background. Human part/role of/in learning is missing!

Reflection week 3

2008-03-23T18:05:00.000-07:00

1. What was the most important thing you learned this week?
I think that the most important thing I learned was how complicated it is to design and implement a good online course. Having students with very different backgrounds: some argue about socio-cognition (vau!) and some don't know what reflection is.

2. What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
I struggled all week with my motivation - it was sometimes interesting and sometimes annoying.

3. Was there something you didn't quite understand and want to know more
about it?
There are many questions. As theories behind elearning are quite new, they often arise more questions then they have answers.

4. What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week's activities raised for you?
How to design and implement a good online course?
When I joined this course I had intrinsic motivation. Course sounded so interesting but for some reasons I lost my motivation. So actually I was looking answers why it happened in readings of this week and I tried to reflect my thoughts and expectations just to understand what is going on with me.
I'm not enjoying this course and I'm not having fun. I do understand that I have not been very active during this course yet, but I found so many people among students who are even less active as I am. So the problem is not just me.
Materials of this course are great - very interesting but also difficult. The problem might be that even if students have questions they don’t ask them. I know that I don’t. Usually these questions do not have one right answer and they need some discussion. This is something what is ease to do in classroom: you just ask and you get an answer and then you can ask again and all the time you actually think along. Here, even when I do ask my questions - my thoughts are not all the time with the context. Here time actually disturbs learning process and synergy. Plus I do feel that we have to much information: over 100 pages of different articles, over 100 slides plus blogs of students/facilitators to read. Everything has different approach, different layout …
Second thing is that I don’t know were to start: where should I post my question? Wiki? Forum? E-mail? Blog? I tried blog but I don’t still have no answers. So this is a wrong way. But I don't know what is right! EMIM forum? Until now it is more used to test and it is unclear to me whether it is for deeper discussion or what kind of questions it is for? Here perhaps might be a good idea if facilitators would take a bit more active role and post some questions there. I spent a lot of time to go through other blogs in our course. There are few brilliant students who write brilliant posts. Perhaps it would be good idea that facilitators will choose every week some interesting ideas/questions to post there so everybody will have a visible opportunity to read/discuss with others. So good posts/ideas come visible for them who don't know much about elearning and we could have several brilliant discussions. Perhaps here some encouragement from facilitators side might help. At the moment there very little discussion about theories we read and questions we have. Another thing: I read that many students write that they have no questions … I can not believe this…
Another thing I thought about is that perhaps there are too many tasks for students. In the begging there are to many environments were we have to create an account. Perhaps this is a little scary? For me it was! And it takes time to get to know those environments - more then one week. All students have different background: for some it is technically to demanding (don't be in love with different environments!), for some it is theoretically to demanding (my background is in adult education and sometimes it is hard for me to understand everything or to select what is really important). As we don't have classroom discussions and explanations I do feel left alone with my study and struggles.
Too many challenges create frustration and kill motivation. My suggestion is to take some time off and give students more time to adapt.

5. Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?
Skype, MSN, MS Word, blog

6. With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
I wrote 2 comments for Jasna (actually one was more to Terje), one comment for Terje. Via skype communicated shortly with Oleg and Lesavik 
More I read different blogs (facilitators and studens) and their comments. I still need some time to adapt.

just some questions…

2008-03-20T14:48:00.000-07:00

... to think about.
Does e-learning enable students to be more self-directed? Or does elearning without good guidance just confuse students?
Is elearning more student-friendly or without good guidance does not attract to learn?
Does elearning support inside motivation?
Is the process of knowledge creation different in elearning?
How is it possible to develop skills (!) in elearning or support it?
How to compensate missing communication between students/teachers? Or is there a need for that?
How can elearning support the creation of new knowledge? Can e-learning develop students academic knowledge/academic reflection or does it support more handcraft skills?

Week 2

2008-03-15T12:45:00.000-07:00

What was the most important thing you learned this week?
From article: learning process must have fun together. This very important - perhaps even more important then knowledge about behaviourism, constructivism…
What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?
We still don’t have discussion, but it is not ease to have discussion with 70 persons and we just formed our group.
Interesting - I'm still trying to figure out how exactly work with this blog.
Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more
about it?
There are some thoughts in my readings blog. I must sure how do authors understand "tacit knowledge" and how knowledge becomes "tacit".
What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?
Experiences … I'm a little more experienced how to handle my blog… but I'm still not an expert.
Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?
Moodle, Blog. I looked some links Moodle offered.
MSN, Skype - to communicate with my friends 
MS Word - to write reflections.
With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?
There was no communication from my side with co-students during this week. I read blogs of co-students and facilitators and tried to figure out what kind of persons stand behind them.

Which principles of groupwork, communities of practice and collaborative learning should a distributed group consider, when planning the design of an e-learning course? week2

2008-03-14T17:32:00.000-07:00

Short answer would be: build trust: towards members of the team, towards technology used and towards learning process. Let learners decide how they want to learn (let them set the rules and roles). Support interaction between learners and give them feedback.
What is important: to give learners time to build trust. It does not happen overnight. Trusting each other means that learners must have time to develop common "language" and common understanding. They must learn to know each others' strengths and weaknesses.
Technical apprehension - this is definitely a problematic question when planning an e-learning course.
How can learners see what they have learned: reflection period and assignments must be thought through? How will they communicate and collaborate.
Networking, knowledge how to communicate, collaborate, how to communicate effectively, how to create opportunities for learning and growth, collect and provide feedback.
And of course: you can not forget the "fun" - this celebration idea in article was great!

But I want to share my thought about the article in the way which does not match perhaps the title of the blog.
First I did not like this article very much (readings last week were much better from my point of view). This one was not very well structured, cases described were not well bounded with literature analysis and differences/similarities of described cases were not deeply analysed. I did get too little new information and they raised more questions than I found answers.
Still there were some moments when I realised that this is something we are trying to do or what is still ahead of us in this class. Like we are trying to "learn about" and "learn how to" at the same time.

As team members know each other before then of course it was easier for them to build trust and to be more successful with online learning/working (this is similar in classroom as well).

What really disturbed me in this article was the approach of authors to the knowledge and more specifically to tacit knowledge. It might be because tacit knowledge is quite obscure term and authors did not explain what they meant with it or how tacit knowledge develops. From my point of view in successful e-learning groups learning process begins with explicit knowledge except for the teams who have worked together before or who previously have had e-learning courses (and have some technological skills), but this is not very common now. Otherwise e-learning is explicit and bounded with "aha"-effect or conflict situation (in both cases learning is explicit). Every team member has his own understanding about the process, has his own learning experience …. So to create a successful e-learning group, the first stage learning must be explicit.

There is one sentence in this article with what it is hard for me to agree: "once team members trust, they are more likely to make their tacit knowledge explicit, transform explicit knowledge into tacit knowledge …" First: if a learner makes (!) tacit knowledge explicit then it must be explicit already. Otherwise tacit knowledge becomes (!) explicit to others. And knowledge becomes more explicit more learners communicate/interact with each other. I'm not sure in the second part of this claim: if trust is the reason why explicit knowledge comes tacit. It has more to do with learners' competence development then team members trust.

Other question for me is: whether learners can learn something "tacitly" or tacit knowledge is something what expands from explicit knowledge?

Now about "Teachable Moments". Of course conflict situations and failures are teachable moments and the best way to learn is from one's own experience. Authors bound teachable moments with failure. It gives an impression like all valuable learning would happen through failure or conflict.
To create secured environment for failures, it means that the feedback to failure (learner does not always recognise this) must take place practically online. As e-learning tends to be more time consuming then it is not easy to do (it is a huge pressure to facilitator).
Other thing is that "teachable moment" can happen through positive success!

About "inciting conflict". I would be very careful to encourage inciting conflict. I have seen (so this is not based on academic knowledge ) some training where facilitator knowing that conflict in the group would take place trying to encourage conflict. The results of that were not great. If one wants to do something like this then one must have perfect knowledge in psychology and perfect sense of individuals so that the group could be put back work together again. Conflict appears in group processes usually anyway - so let it be normal and real conflict what is usable to all group members as well.
It is hard to agree with authors that learning "does not become "real" until conflict occur". Unfortunately authors do not offer definition to "real learning".

Week 1

2008-03-14T14:50:00.000-07:00

What was the most important thing you learned this week?

There were several interesting approaches in articles: content-content interaction; Ermter-Newby’s taxonomy and many more. Idea that web’s in-built capacity for hyperlinking has been compared to the way in which human knowledge is stored in mental shema.

What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?

Boring - there was no discussion this week, but this is normal.

Interesting - everything is new and therefore interesting.

Was there something you didn’t quite understand and want to know more
about it?

Two things:

1. content-content interaction - I have always thought that interaction takes place between to subjects (student-student; teacher-teacher; student-teacher). It is hard to me to accept that interaction could take place between subject-object or even object-object. How can to contents interact with each other?
2. “agent”-idea in Online Learning and the Semantic Web I did not get. It would be great to know a little more about Semantic Web.

What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week’s activities raised for you?

It is too early to say. Second chapter of the book was very interesting for me.

Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?

Scuttle, Moodle - to get started :)

MSN - to communicate with my friends, but it had nothing to do with this course.

With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?

There was no communication with co-students during this week. I read introductions/blogs of co-students and facilitators.

eLearning blog

2008-03-13T06:49:00.000-07:00

My eLearning blog continues during this semester: here

E-learning course: week 1

2008-03-10T07:58:00.000-07:00

As this is my first experience with e-learning then there was a lot of confusion with this environment, requirements and materials: lot of links where to orientate and too much information. So first few days I was only looking around and tried to make sense of it. Some links were very good and some did not open :).

What are the trends in e-learning and how do they influence online course design?

This is a good question and frankly I don't know yet the answer. Trends in e-learning we might say are the same as regular learning: it is movement from behaviouristic explanation of learning to constructivism. I really liked Ertmer and Newby's idea of taxonomy for learning (behaviourism = what, cognitivism = how and constructivism = why) - this is brilliant.

Although these learning trends reflect in e-learning as well, it is still hard for me to see behaviourism as ground of e-learning. If we want to train students then e-learning is perhaps not the best method.

But as understanding of learning process is changing the way how to plan (how to motivate, assess,…), create materials and learning environment (does it enable interaction; is it ease to understand and orientate), communicate with each is changing.

In behaviourism students do get the learning materials, in constructivism learners should be allowed to construct their knowledge. So the roles of student and teacher are changing: student activity changes from passive learner to active (therefore student motivation is changing as well) participant of learning process. (From personal learning to collaborative and cooperative, interactive learning). With taking active role in learning process student takes more control of his/her learning. Instead of cram facts deeper understanding of content is important.

For teachers understanding what is most significant rather than what most easily assessed is very important and at the same time this makes course design difficult.

About trends (what is going to happen next) - it is very hard to predict. Probably a lot of discussion/communication and therefore learning will move to web. This might cause the overload of information and people don't have time to deepen anymore.

It might happen that brilliant guys will get more brilliant and other will have problems with information overload and orientation and therefore they might give up and satisfy with secondary/ light information. So this is the worst what might happen…

We can not say now that e-learning makes learning more accessible when there are many people who don't have a computer and internet.
But for those who have access e-learning … It is still hard to predict. Two main things can cause learning: the will and the need. Will depends on motivation (inside motivation). But how many people you do know who have constant will to learn in formal or even informal way? So a part of learning comes from need (outside motivation). It might even depend on economy …Although form economy-side the future is bright: knowledge-based and flexible economy requires (constant) learning and if e-learning is more accessible then it might become more successful.

What was the most important thing you learned this week?

There were several interesting approaches in articles: content-content interaction; Ermter-Newby's taxonomy and many more. Idea that web's in-built capacity for hyperlinking has been compared to the way in which human knowledge is stored in mental shema.

What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?

Boring - there was no discussion this week, but this is normal.

Interesting - everything is new and therefore interesting.

Was there something you didn't quite understand and want to know more
about it?

Two things:

1. content-content interaction - I have always thought that interaction takes place between to subjects (student-student; teacher-teacher; student-teacher). It is hard to me to accept that interaction could take place between subject-object or even object-object. How can to contents interact with each other?
2. "agent"-idea in Online Learning and the Semantic Web I did not get. It would be great to know a little more about Semantic Web.

What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week's activities raised for you?

It is too early to say. Second chapter of the book was very interesting for me.

Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?

Scuttle, Moodle - to get started :)

MSN - to communicate with my friends, but it had nothing to do with this course.

With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?

There was no communication with co-students during this week. I read introductions/blogs of co-students and facilitators.

Hello

2008-03-10T07:57:00.000-07:00

My name is Kersti and currently I am studying at the University of Tallinn in Estonia. I am a student of IMKE.

I like travelling, photographing. Every country is different and there is always something to discover and perpetuate. So I have lot of pictures. If I should somehow categorize them, then the biggest catalogue would carry a name "Croatia" :)

Beautiful country (excellent food, good wine if you know what and where to eat and drink) and from my point of view Varazdin is not a typical Croatian city …

But we in Estonia have white nights in summer-time :)

I have used before: blog, wiki, msn, skype, orkut (community portal).

My interest in this course: what is e-learning, how can e-learning be successful, learning strategies, …

I am little sceptical about e-learning and this is my first e-learning course. I do hope it changes my preconception.

Other expectations:

I want to have some structured knowledge about e-learning.

I am curious whether e-course can create synergy between learners and teachers.

Hello

2008-03-08T04:03:00.000-08:00

My name is Kersti and currently I am studying at the University of Tallinn in Estonia. I am a student of IMKE.

I like travelling, photographing. Every country is different and there is always something to discover and perpetuate. So I have lot of pictures. If I should somehow categorize them, then the biggest catalogue would carry a name "Croatia" :)

Beautiful country (excellent food, good wine if you know what and where to eat and drink) and from my point of view Varazdin is not a typical Croatian city …

But we in Estonia have white nights in summer-time :)

I have used before: blog, wiki, msn, skype, orkut (community portal).

My interest in this course: what is e-learning, how can e-learning be successful, learning strategies, …

I am little sceptical about e-learning and this is my first e-learning course. I do hope it changes my preconception.

Other expectations:

I want to have some structured knowledge about e-learning.

I am curious whether e-course can create synergy between learners and teachers.

E-learning course: week 1

2008-03-08T03:49:00.001-08:00

What are the trends in e-learning and how do they influence online course design?

This is a good question and frankly I don't know yet the answer. Trends in learning we might say is movement from behaviouristic explanation to constructivism. I really liked Ertmer and Newby's idea of taxonomy for learning (behaviourism = what, cognitivism = how and constructivism =why) - this is brilliant.

Although these learning trends reflect in e-learning as well, it is still hard for me to see behaviourism as ground of e-learning. If we want to train students then e-learning is perhaps not the best method.

But as understanding of learning process is changing the way how to plan (how to motivate, assess,…), create materials and learning environment (does it enable interaction; is it ease to understand and orientate), communicate with each is changing.

In behaviourism students do get the learning materials, in constructivism learners should be allowed to construct their knowledge. So the roles of student and teacher are changing: student activity changes from passive learner to active (therefore student motivation is changing as well) participant of learning process. (From personal learning to collaborative and cooperative, interactive learning). With taking active role in learning process student takes more control of his/her learning. Instead of cram facts deeper understanding of content is important.

For teachers understanding what is most significant rather than what most easily assessed is very important and at the same time this makes course design difficult

What was the most important thing you learned this week?

There were several interesting approaches in articles: content-content interaction; Ermter-Newby's taxonomy and many more. Idea that web's in-built capacity for hyperlinking has been compared to the way in which human knowledge is stored in mental shema.

What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?

Boring - there was no discussion this week, but this is normal.

Interesting - everything is new and therefore interesting.

Was there something you didn't quite understand and want to know more
about it?

Two things:

content-content interaction - I have always thought that interaction takes place between to subjects (student-student; teacher-teacher; student-teacher). It is hard to me to accept that interaction could take place between subject-object or even object-object. How can to contents interact with each other?
"agent"-idea in Online Learning and the Semantic Web I did not get. It would be great to know a little more about Semantic Web.

What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week's activities raised for you?

It is too early to say. Second chapter of the book was very interesting for me.

Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?

Scuttle, Moodle - to get started J

MSN - to communicate with my friends, but it had nothing to do with this course.

With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?

There was no communication with co-students during this week. I read introductions/blogs of co-students and facilitators.

E-learning course: week 1

2008-03-08T03:49:00.000-08:00

What are the trends in e-learning and how do they influence online course design?

This is a good question and frankly I don't know yet the answer. Trends in e-learning we might say are the same as regular learning: it is movement from behaviouristic explanation of learning to constructivism. I really liked Ertmer and Newby's idea of taxonomy for learning (behaviourism = what, cognitivism = how and constructivism = why) - this is brilliant.

For teachers understanding what is most significant rather than what most easily assessed is very important and at the same time this makes course design difficult.

About trends (what is going to happen next) - it is very hard to predict. Probably a lot of discussion/communication and therefore learning will move to web. This might cause the overload of information and people don't have time to deepen anymore.

It might happen that brilliant guys will get more brilliant and other will have problems with information overload and orientation and therefore they might give up and satisfy with secondary/ light information. So this is the worst what might happen…

We can not say now that e-learning makes learning more accessible when there are many people who don't have a computer and internet.

But for those who have access e-learning … It is still hard to predict. Two main things can cause learning: the will and the need. Will depends on motivation (inside motivation). But how many people you do know who have constant will to learn in formal or even informal way? So a part of learning comes from need (outside motivation). It might even depend on economy …Although form economy-side the future is bright: knowledge-based and flexible economy requires (constant) learning and if e-learning is more accessible then it might become more successful.

What was the most important thing you learned this week?

What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?

Boring - there was no discussion this week, but this is normal.

Interesting - everything is new and therefore interesting.

Was there something you didn't quite understand and want to know more
about it?

Two things:

content-content interaction - I have always thought that interaction takes place between to subjects (student-student; teacher-teacher; student-teacher). It is hard to me to accept that interaction could take place between subject-object or even object-object. How can to contents interact with each other?
"agent"-idea in Online Learning and the Semantic Web I did not get. It would be great to know a little more about Semantic Web.

What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week's activities raised for you?

It is too early to say. Second chapter of the book was very interesting for me.

Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?

Scuttle, Moodle - to get started :)

MSN - to communicate with my friends, but it had nothing to do with this course.

With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?

There was no communication with co-students during this week. I read introductions/blogs of co-students and facilitators.

New Education

2008-03-07T14:20:00.000-08:00

Author

Kersti Peenema

Keywords

Education, competencies, creativity, e-learning, knowledge

Abstract

In this article Kersti Peenema from Tallinn University focus on the new goals of education. The main goal of article is to find an answer based on literature analysis to the question whether e-learning can meet the competencies of tomorrow. Peenema expresses her belief that using Web 2.0 tools in education will help develop creativity and competencies of tomorrow.

Intorduction

Development of technology is rapid and this has impact to the society and education. With the development of electronic forms of communication and World Wide Web new learning spaces are being created (Jarvis, Holford & Griffin 2003). As society is changing more knowledgebased the question arises: what kind of education we do need to meet the requirements of tomorrow.

Research Question

How can e-learning meet the competencies of tomorrow?

Method

Method used in this blog is literature analysis.

Future competencies

Ken Robinson (an expert on creativity) argues in one of his presentations, that we do have the same kind of educational system for a long time now: mathematics is still at the top of the curriculum and arts down of the list. He poses a question: whether the structure and goals of today's education meet new requirements of society 50 years in the future? His answer is no as for the future we have to support more creativity.

Quite the same is said in the Report of National Centre of Education and the Economy in 2006 where skills of future are listed as: collaboration, communication, creativity, innovation, information literacy, critical thinking, problem solving and global awareness (Rosenfeld 2007). Erica de Vries argues also, that people need in the future to have competence in defining problems, finding information and collaboration (de Vries 2003). The nature of work is changing: there are more people who are working in the knowledge-based professions. Knowledge-based professions have a continuous need for updating their competence (Severinson Eklundh, Groth, Hedman, Lantz, Rodriguez, Sallnäs 2003). These people are dealing with different mental problems every day. Based on this, we can say: problem solving will be the key issue in future, but successful problem solving can be based only on creativity. So how can we support creativity instead of killing it?

As society is becoming more knowledgebased more people who are part of educational system are representers of knowledge-based professions, it means that lifelong education and the availability of different educational possibilities are growingly important questions. Here e-learning can definitely help by offering different tools to learn in formal as well in informal education. But the question is: will e-learning meet the requirements of tomorrow?

Use of technological solutions and real life

When web changed to web 2.0 it brought along the change of goals and the essence of web. Instead of being just arbitrator of information (offering/receiving) web 2.0 is about creation of new information and knowledge. In web the user was passive and just gained information, in web 2.0 the user is active (!) and takes part of knowledge creation. This is qualitative change and it has changed the goals and structure of web. Similar to web 2.0 there is already discussion about education 2.0 but it remains quite technological. So there must be a qualitative change in education before it is legitimate to use the term education 2.0. Todays discussions about education 2.0 are supporting the same essence of education as it is today. Will there be education 2.0 or are we just using new tools of technology to fulfil old goals of education?

So we don’t have yet deep discussion about education 2.0, but still: can e-learning somehow support creativity as basis tomorrow's competencies? Roschelle and Pea in 1999 have pointed out, that today's web-based communication is pretty much text-based. This leaves knowledge creation to background and supports just passive reading (Järvelä, Häkkinen 2003). So today many opportunities stay unused. More active creation and use of videos, live-conferences, live-interaction, online communities and (why not) different simulations would help us solve that problem and fortunately we can see it already happening. But as the design of virtual environments is political (Gillespie 2003), it must be possible to create a learning environment to support creativity. Let us take for example virtual environment Second Life (SL) what has being used as a learning tool . Terry Beaubois created a virtual classroom on architecture . Since almost everything is possible in SL, it gives to the student's possibility to try out different architectural design. Students can try things what they would never try in a normal classroom: it is possible by either denying the laws of nature (gravitation) or it's just not too expensive. This all enables students to "think out of the box" and foster their creativity.

Of course there rises a question: how can we create a bridge between this kind of learning and real life with real situations. It is very important to know how to transfer our knowledge to the real world. In this transfer reflection has important role: does this kind of learning make students reflect more their knowledge? Visualisation of their knowledge helps to bring out tacit knowledge. Students are more conscious about it and it might become a ground to the creation of new knowledge. It might be even great that you have to visualises everything (even by writing) because if helps to reflect. So this is real win-win situation: tacit knowledge will become visible and conscious and knowledge will be available to others and used a ground for creation something new. The key question is how to do it so that people will want to make it visible.

Second Life is a multiplayer role play game (Doherty, Murphy 2007). As future games will be more complex and realistic and players will have more control over them (story, structure) (Goldstein 2003), this means that using different games in learning will add more fun and creativity to the process. And having fun in learning usually guarantees a good learning outcome. But using different games is hole different approach to the education then usual classroom study.

Different generations

There is one more problem in the field of new education. Differences between the generations are growing larger and larger and not only from an attitude side. Young people of tomorrow will still have another attitude toward life, but they will have a different skill profile and different thinking structure. As technology is more widely available, more people are using it. Because of use of technology there skill and thinking profile is different and this is causing a conflict between the generations. As more learning is becoming knowledgebased there will be a fundamental shift in the relations of teachers and learners (Jarvis et al. 2003). They will be from different generations and the old ways of teaching do not work. So it gets harder to understand and predict the needs of future and the essence of new education. If we can, then it's clear that new education requires radical change in the ways in which learning is organised and executed. E-learning may develop the skills and creativity; it is the great enabler (Thompson, Randall 2001). It all depends whether we can realised that.

Conclusion

In this paper I analysed impact of development of technology to education. Society is changing and therefore the goals of education need to change. With wider use of technology we have different technological tools to support new goals of education.

References:

Doherty, P., Murphy, P. (2007) "Science visit the metaverse and change your mind", Fantasy & Science Fiction 113 (3), 127-134.

Ecklundh, K. S., Groth, K., Hedman, A., Lantz, A., Rodriguez, H., Sallnäs, E-L. (2003), " The World Wide Web as a Social Infrastructure for Knowledge-Oriented Work", in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 97 - 126.

Gillespie, T. (2003), "The stories digital tools tell", in Everett, A. & Caldwell, J. T. (eds), New media: theories and practices of digitextuality, New York: Routledge, pp. 107-126.

Goldstein, G. (2003), "People @ Play: Electronic Games", in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 25 - 46.

Jarvis, P., Holford, J., Griffin, C. (2003), The theory and practice of learning, London and Sterling: Kogan Page Limited.

Järvela, S., Häkkinen, P. (2003), "The Levels of Web-Based Discussions: Using Perspective-Taking Theory as an Analytical Tool", in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 77 - 96.

Rosenfeld, E. (2007), "Beginning the conversation about education 2.0", Teacher Librarian 34 (4), 6-6, http://search.epnet.com/, [accessed 2 Oct 2007].

Thompson, P., Randall, B. (2001), "Can e-learning spur Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship?", Educational Media International 38(4), 289-292.

de Vries, E. (2003), "Educational Technology and Multimedia From a Cognitive Perspective: Knowledge From Inside the Computer, Onto the Screen, and Into Our Heads?", in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 155 - 174.

Interactive Television: Future of Television

2008-02-11T13:54:00.000-08:00

Television is something that people tend to take today self-evidently. But actually it is a pretty recent invention: according to Wikipedia it originated from the late 1930-s. Apparently, the first live TV broadcast in the world was provided from BBC studios at Alexandra Palace only in 1936 (Wikipedia, 2007).

Since I am not a technology expert then television to me is tied strongly with TV-set I own at home. I don’t know almost anything what actually lies behind the blue screen. So I will not step over my limits of competence and instead attempt to write an essay from a viewpoint of a so-called consumer of television.

Former director of Estonian National Television, Mr Ainar Ruussaar told in one of his public speeches about the opportunities that currently expanding digitalization of the TV provides (presentation at conference JuhtimisAju, 30.03.2007). According to him, the technology of the digital TV enables the viewers easily control the time-factor of our currently well-known Television. As coupled with a simple recording device (such as VHR or a DVD or hard disc recorder) the digital television enables to pause or review, skip or split any of the audio or video signals. Time Warner Cable has similarly established its Start Over service that allows customers to watch a TV show from the beginning if they come late to the screen. It however lacks the possibility for fast-forwarding (Atkinson & Klaassen, 2007).

Hence the viewers can easily manipulate from around the commercials that are the main source of income for TV stations. For this reason TV stations are forced to completely rethink their business models. We have seen one part of practice already: there are several pay-tv stations, especially in film-only or adult-TV channels where the screen is either fully or partially scrambled or the audio distorted unless you have paid for a renewable chip card. But there are other - much more elegant possibilities for getting around this. Apparently during watching a football match the TV station can program the Digital TV to affect the TV receiver in a manner to make the ball disappear. What would be the fun of watching that kind of match? Therefore - if the viewers are really up to enjoy the match they would need to send a pay SMS to disentangle the screen and make the ball reappear.

But then on the other hand my imagination should be running much wilder than simple reiteration of the obvious truths of incremental improvements of current technology. Probably TV-sets as we know them today will soon go out of date and it’s quite positive that different systems are going to be combined or joined. In the future there is no need to hold different systems like PC, radio, TV-set. They probably will all be united into one. There is a currently ongoing debate on whether the TV sets of the future will be small iPod like portable creatures or huge domestic entertainment centres that allow for a wide range of experiences. One possibility that has been left out of previous discussions is the opportunity of affecting other human senses. Currently the TV allows us to see and hear. The highest quality enables to view a crisp-clear picture of HDTV together with 7-channel surround sound that increases the chill of a horror movie. However, the live experience would be way more real if also the TV picture would be 3-dimentional, the TV set would emit smells to our living room and vibrations to our chair which would most probably make watching Indiana Jones movie a true adventure. Interesting - of course! Doable??? I’m sceptical, but it doesn’t mean, that it would not happen one day.

It might also happen that every person will have his own list of favourite channels and he can access them wherever he is or whatever system (new TV-set, PC, self phone) he uses at any given moment.

In the nearer future it might happen that every household has its own web camera. Whenever you feel desire for sharing your life with others, you can do it. Whenever you want to see somebody’s life, it is your possibility. There will be few families who would be extremely famous and huge celebrities. Something like this is actually already happening: in the ITU Telecom World 2006 forum director of Alacatel-Lucent presented My Own TV: users of this would create a Personal Channel with their own TV content. Users have possibility to upload their photos, videos and share this to their friends or other people (Hall, 2006). But this isn’t still the qualitative leap we would be hoping for.

Another example of wide possibilities of TV we can find in Liverpool where the residents of the city found a way develop democracy. Tenantspin is an internet TV station organised and run by and for the residents of Liverpool’s tower blocks. One purpose of Tenantspin was to increase community participation and it enabled to residents to produce, record and broadcast their own programmes. Finally it ended up by creating a new community (Stanistreeet, 2006).

It is rather entertaining to visit their website www.tenantspin.org and read about the experiences of a group of elderly grannies and grandpas from the same neighbourhood who have already more than 7 years of experience in trying to master the usage of video cameras and editing equipment to come out with the video shows of their own that they target to their nearby community. In warm-heartedly written feature story Stanistreeet describes the experiences of the participants in the TV programme:

“We’ve done around 350 shows now,” Mavis says, “some have been good, some have been awful, everything from quizzes, talent shows, look-a-likes, to interviews with people […]”

“It's been like a big adventure. And it's not over yet. When I first came here I knew nothing about computers. We used Mondays to train. We learned to use sound systems, cameras, we had to set up computers, and on a Wednesday we'd go out on the internet. That went on for about 18 months”

“We initially envisaged a virtual community”, says Alan. “For one reason or another, that hasn't really happened. But it has produced a real community of people from all the different blocks”.

“Community”, Vera says, “was only a word before […]. Now we have different things going every day for tenants in these high-rises. Years ago, you only met neighbours in the lift. Now there is something going on every day on every block. I'm not just talking about where I live, not only our block. Every block has something going for the tenants. When it was the council running the flats, nobody really cared about each other. You just lived there and that was the end of the story. And now everyone knows everyone and we send cards when people are sick. It is community living now. Tenantspin has made people friendlier. It's brought a lot of people out who wouldn't have come out. It's brought people together.” (Stanistreeet, 2006)

This is certainly one development of the future. There will be more community televisions and as television is often being accused to have too much of attention of people that they don’t find time anymore to their friends then Tenantspin surely proves opposite. So TV can be seen as an improver of democracy or just a tool what brings people together in their real every-day life. But as interesting as it is, even this still is not the qualitative leap I was searching for.

Where should we go next? As internet is very common nowadays, there are more and more people who have web cameras. You can sit in front of the computer screen and communicate online with others. By using web cameras television might have the same qualitative change or leap as web already has had by changing to web 2.0. Instead of being just giver, transmitter of information (TV-shows, films, videos, text-TV) television 2.0 might enable direct communication with other persons. This might lead us to new process – to the knowledge creation process. If we added here the community aspect then the result would be very interesting. It offers wide possibilities for example to professionals who can discuss, argue, show or do something like this in television and at the same time something new is born. This can be very successfully used in universities. As the essence of work is more and more knowledge-based the need to improve your skills and develop your competence is constantly growing, it means that lifelong learning and accessibility to the education will be crucially important.

Interactive television has already been used as a tool to deliver distance education at the Faculty of Health Sciences, Stellenbosch University. There are around 20 studios which have connection via satellite. Learning sessions are in real time and students must (still) physically be in one of the studios. In all the studios students can see and hear the tutor on a TV monitor. It is possible to interact with the tutor and co-students. Students and tutor in different studios can not see each other. Although this is interactive television in its beginning (it has a limited interaction, if there would be possible to have a online picture of every studio, it would be a qualitative change), the possibility to interact with each other was highly valued among the students and lectures. As educators did use virtual learning environments (VLE) these were a little bit more popular as students found that interaction in VLE was more supporting (Mash, Marais, van der Walt, van Deventer, Steyn, Labadarios, 2006).

The sky above the interactive TV is definitely not cloudless. There are several critics about, too.

A columnist of PC Magazine John Dvorak (2006) has written that already the conventional TV provides him with enough interaction possibilities that he needs: to turn it on, or off, to change channels, to switch to the TV text. He is afraid that the interaction that the TV moguls have in mind should instead be labelled invasive TV – the kind of television system where the TV stations would have the chance to mark the items shown in TV series with price tags and offering the viewers a chance to “immediately buy the same kind of sweater that Jennifer Aniston is wearing in a Friends episode.” However, this kind of intrusion would quickly become disturbing and replace the pleasure of enjoying the shows with annoyances.

He furthermore argues that even greater dangers would be brought about by the introduction of TV “spyware” which would start monitoring the actual behaviour of viewers.

It does not however matter too much what kind of name-tags we put on the changing landscape of the media. The fact is that the TV is changing and will not remain the same as it has used to be. And in the end it does not matter what is the key channel that we use it through – whether through a huge home theatre or tiny iPod screen. It still probably remains largely influential in the lives of people.

What concerns the content of TV shows, it is self-evident that this is going to expand. With the introduction of new Community TVs or MyOwnTVs, the future is also for BBC News-alikes that have been considered reliable and trustworthy sources of information. As the supply of information is increasing then it might call for further specialisation and integration for some of the channels. It also requires higher degree of media literacy of the providers and customers.

So there is nothing more to say – the television is dead, long live the television!

References:

Atkinson, C., Klaassen, A. (2007), “BEWKES: FUTURE OF DIGITAL IS CABLE TV”, Advertising Age 78 (16), http://search.epnet.com, [accessed 30 Oct 2007].

Dvorak, J., C. (2004), “The Return of Interactive TV”, PC Magazine, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_zdpcm/is_200411/ai_n7182224, [accessed 30 Oct 2007].

Hall, K. (2006), “Put Your Own Stuff on TV”, Business Week Online, http://search.epnet.com, [accessed 26 Oct 2007].

Mash, B., Marais, D., van der Walt, S., van Deventer, I., Steyn, M., Labadarios, D. (2006), „Assessment of the quality of interaction in distance learning programmes utilizing the Internet or interactive television: perceptions of students and lectures”, Medical Teacher 28 (1), http://search.epnet.com, [accessed 26 Oct 2007].

Stanistreeet, P. (2006), “Ways of seeing further”, Adults Learning 17 (10), 22-25, http://search.epnet.com, [accessed 26 Oct 2007].

Tenantspin (2007), www.tenantspin.org [accessed 30 Oct 2007].

Wikipedia (2007), “History of television”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_television [accessed 30 Oct 2007].

Open Source Management: The Quest of the Dwarves - Wesnoth developed by Blue Team

2008-01-07T13:50:00.000-08:00

First: I have never played as much computer games as now.

I played twice The Quest of the Dwarves - Wesnoth developed by Blue Team. Second time I was more successful but even then I used several times the possibility to go back a few turns. After playing it for second time I found surprisingly the first mission the hardest one although the third one was also very difficult.

The drawings in the beginning of the game and between missions are very nice. The landscapes are very different - it seems that Blue Team has used all possibilities in map drawing. This is definitely strong element of the game.

I have to admit that all missions were quite hard. I used in every mission back turns to win.

In the first mission the ground of landscape was mainly sand and mountains and it was very difficult to move. This was a problem for me because I had no flying creatures unlike the Vampire Bats owned by the "Bad" team.

Second mission I liked the best. It might even be that this was the easiest one for me (or the reason might have been that I liked green landscape much more...)

Third mission had very difficult landscape and it was very difficult level because lots of villages were located closer to enemy. So the "Bads" had a chance to collect many buildings and raise lots of money and that was used to recruit more fighters.

The main goal was to resist until the end of turns. At the final mission it would have been more logical if the end would be "killing" the bad guy?

I would have preferred a more interesting story line, but then again - the story of our team was not more elaborate either. For example, it would have made me happier if I would have got to know what "The Thing" was or for what it was good for... At the beginning of the third mission there was a "gem", was this The Thing?

These were all just tiny remarks. Anyway I am impressed that we could do something like this. And I would like to congratulate the Blue Team for their good work done.

FLOSS Business Successes and Failures

2007-12-31T03:13:00.000-08:00

While starting to analyze the business successes and failures I came to surprising finding about the size of the companies in question. Whereas the largest OSS company - North Carolina-based Red Hat Inc. employs 2000 employees worldwide[1] compared to its commercial competitor Microsoft that comes above 79000 employee headcount[2].

The second largest OSS company - Uppsala-based MySQL AB employs 360 employees[3] whereas its closest competitors are also significantly larger - 75000 in Oracle[4], more than 4000 in Sybase[5] or more than 1500 in Progress[6]. So in average the companies that have chosen to do business and provide the public with its source code are tens of times smaller than their fully commercial equivalents. Through keeping the number of employees down, making them work from their home-base open source also cuts down on essential research and development costs while at the same time speeding up delivery of new products.

Most of the other OSS companies seem to be small corner offices that usually employ a few fanatics. What is their motivation? In plenty of cases they indeed work with the passion to turn the world into a better place. This kind of approach together with user innovation probably makes them success already on the grassroots. When we look at them - there are a few who are proudly announcing to be geeks[7].

Success Story - How to make good money with OSS?

It seems to be an oxymoron - to make money with free / libre / open source software. When most of the customers would be able to use freely available source code to build their own - why would they pay anybody for anything related to the OSS?

However, there are still several possibilities how to make money with open source. Open Source Business Models and Strategies website [8] displays web-roll of numerous success stories.
The open source business model relies on shifting the commercial value away from the actual products and generating revenue from the 'Product Halo,' or ancillary services like systems integration, support, tutorials and documentation.)[9] In most cases this is associated with related services. One strong example would be JBoss, which is a division of Red Hat. JBoss has managed to sell conferences, support, certification, even reference manuals.[10]

How to fail with OSS?

But then on the other hand it is difficult to identify any failure stories. This is so probably because the very nature of the open source development principles. When a commercial company faces huge losses or enters bankruptcy then usually we can see big headlines - numbers of people were laid off, the managers were kicked out from their positions, shareholders were left empty-handed, customers did not receive their services. However, as the open source development is frequently based on the operations of volunteers - when they stop their activities usually none of the previous would either be applicable or hit a major news channel - the developers simply leave for other alternatives, no managers would have been employed, any financiers would not have committed their funds, and mostly the customers are psychologically ready to accept that whatever they got free until this moment should account for a new alternative thereafter. Hence looking around in yahoo finance, CNN headlines or even some hard-core IT portals did not provide good links on the events that would demonstrate a major failure in OSS business.

Hence I decided to take an approach of a social Darwinist. The very principles of social evolutionary theory provide that there is constant variation of new ideas where only the fittest are selected and retained in the long run. The variation of the OSS ideas is mostly captured in open source software development web sites. Looking at SourceForge.net website[11] their number of registered projects accounted at the end of 2007 to 165234! Appears to be a rather large number! When I tried to trace their discontinued projects - there are really hundreds of projects that demonstrate active development for a few months and have died out thereafter. Hence it could be concluded rather easily that the social Darwinism with combination of lack of stakeholder interests could be used in order to explain the silent failure stories of the open source software development.

References

[1] http://www.redhat.com/about/companyprofile/facts/
[2] http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=MSFT, with the history of the headcount during the past years displayed here: http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/library/msftemp.jpg
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL_AB
[4] http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=ORCL
[5] http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=SY
[6] http://www.progress.com/uk/about_us/index.ssp
[7] http://www.landley.net/
[8] http://www.opensourcestrategies.org/
[9] http://www.extropia.com/tutorials/misc/opensourcebiz.html
[10] http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/opinions/6417/1/
[11] http://sourceforge.net/

Wesnoth

2007-12-31T02:57:00.000-08:00

Red team

In the class of open source management was a home assignment to develop the game named Wesnoth. For some obscure reason I ended up as team leader. Teams were composed by Kaido Kikkas. As I have a background in the field of education, then open source and Wesnoth have not been present in my everyday life. So I was a team leader in the field I know nothing about.

Already at the begging our teams suffered losses: our team member from Ethiopia could not be part of our team having some problems with the internet. Hence we were left with three only!

We agreed in the beginning since everybody wants to have fun with map drawing that every member of the team will compose one level of the game. Although this kind of agreement did not match the best way with our profiles, we still decided to try.

First we (team) had to come up with a scenario. I wrote basis of the scenario and sent it to our team for reviewing and commenting. Scenario was received ok from other team members and we agreed on some deadlines when something must be ready.

As all team members were working and having extremely busy times at their daily work, we did not manage to keep any of those deadlines. As a team leader I had some doubts whether to choose some other style and start strongly controlling but I didn’t consider this right. Because in the end - what matters is whether we do development of the game not whether we succeed to hold on strictly our deadlines. Maybe it was wrong decision because it was understandable that one of our team members - Egert - has some problems and probably would not cope with the assignment. In the middle of december it appeared that he was still with us but a couple of days before the final deadline I have to say that unfortunately another team member has left us and at the end - red team today has only two members (and none of us has background in computer science). So as it became clear that our Wesnoth will have only two levels and we had to change our storyline a little.

About the game:
Development of this game was a huge challenge for me for several reasons. First: I don't like computer games that much. I almost don’t play them. Second: not having any previous programming skills it was at the beginning quite difficult to figure out how this stuff works. I had some help from my husband who worked with me and explained the logic behind it. I must admit that the most fun part for me was still drawing the map. The scenario-language become understandable after a while. As well did this how all those pictures, scenarios, map go together.
Although it was a really hard assignment for me I'm still quite happy about it. I don’t see myself as an open source developer in the future but it is good to know how these things work.

My thanks go to my husband for patience and to Geroli.

Science progress as example of free culture

2007-12-30T15:06:00.000-08:00

Our assignment was to describe an interesting case from outside software and Internet sphere.
To think to different - something similar is in use in the world of science.

Whereas lots of scientists prefer to opt for the protection of patents or copyrights, probably the most famous example of the opposite activity comes from Marie & Pierre Curie.

Namely, public pressure in France prompted the government to give the Curies money for research. They continued to produce radium using Marie's process for chemical extraction. For awhile they had the only supply of this rare element. Generously, the Curies gave away samples to other physicists like Rutherford and Soddy. Soon private chemical manufacturers wrote to the Curies asking for more information about how to produce radium. The Curies decided not to patent their extraction process, but to give it to the private sector for free. If they had sold it, they would have been millionaires many times over as radium was in great demand.

This kind of behavior is perhaps also a representative of free culture? Any person is free to conduct research. (S)he discovers/creates something, the results and methods of survey will be published and available to others. It is possible to others to use the results of the research, based on this create something new or add something extra to the subject. Appears that it is following the principles of free culture!

Lets go further and look at the principles of scientific publishing practice.

In many ways the social science publishing works in this way. Scientists publis their detailed findings in journals that are either available completely for free - at public libraries or public websites such as scholar.google.com or free working paper series or at a very low cost (cost of purchasing a journal or access to research research database). In many cases also the doctoral dissertations are freely downloadable or accessible for any interested parties.

Coming back to example of journals - even if the journal format does not allow to publish the full results of the research process, the journals also publish the original contact information of researchers so that anybody could contact them for additional information. In many cases the researchers are willing to share also their original data provided that this would not harm the ethics of the research process (disclosing sensitive data about research subjects).

Also the research community in peer review process operates on completely voluntary process. In top journals - every single article is subject for review process: 2-3 top researchers who remain anonymous would get responsibility to review the work of their peers. In practice this means that top scientists in their field would have to spend 2-3 days of their time to read, analyse and comment on how the authors should improve their work. Let alone they would not get any payment for this. They even do not get any credit for mentioning their names! Again - this process seems to fall under the principles of free culture!

Legal issues of FLOSS

2007-12-30T15:04:00.000-08:00

Since computers, internet, open source as a is still pretty new in the sense of legal proceeding history - there are several legal problems still to rise. Legal issues around FLOSS are not a criminal or civil code that has had over thousands of years to develop. So there is no clear-cut overview about what is strictly prohibited or what is absolutely allowed. Although there have been already many lawsuits, there are probably still many to come and they my estimation is that they will get more and more complicated.

It was fun to find out that there are already insurance companies that cover for the risks that what if some kind of legal problem is found in the piece of software that you use. They bluntly phrase it: they think that the IT geeks who develop open source software are not rich enough to sue them for copyright or patent infringements. Hence the best approach would be to go after rich users who have chosen to use the open source software developed by those geeks. It somehow strikes me how this would be in harmony with good-will of the customer. Should all open source software come with the disclaimer: "We hereby do not take any responsibility if we have violated any patents!" This definitely would leave the door open for any of us who naively has used Linux or Firefox.

What if somebody finds out that few lines of code in the Firefox that I use in my home computer had been stolen from Microsoft? Would I need to set aside some money for a potential claimant? Obviously there are much more wealthier users of OSS applications who would probably be vulnerable against those claims.

These types of questions appear to be still unresolved and would apparently leave possibilities for several high-profile legal cases ...

But lets look at two examples more closely

1) Busybox vs Monsoon
Lawsuit on behalf of Andersen and Landley (developers of Busybox ) against Monsoon Multimedia inc. Busybox is lightweight set of standard utilities and it is an open source software. Based on Busybox code Monsoon Multimedia developed it's own product: Hava. On the webpage of Monsoon there was a note that Hava is based on Busybox, but Monsoon did not publish the source code as required by the GNU General Public License.

Case was taken to the court, but after few days Monsoon reported that settlement negations are taken place. Case ended with settlement: Monsoon published the source code on its Web site and paid unpublished amount of money to Andersen and Landley.

This case demonstrates one side of OSS case - when one of the developers would not stick to the principles of GPL.

http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2007/sep/20/busybox/
http://www.linux.com/articles/120629
http://news.softpedia.com/news/First-GPL-Lawsuit-In-The-USA-66330.shtml

2) Firestar Software vs Red Hat
In June 2006 Firestar sued Red Hat and claimed that JBoss (freshly acquired open source provider what just become a division of Red Hat) claiming that one of their software applications - Hibenate - violated Firestars patent. In this patent a detailed method of interfacing an object oriented software application with a relational database has been described and protected. Firestar says that they have not patented only a method but the entire concept of object/ relational mapping.

Despite the fact that there are several news sites that raise this claim. Both company websites are silent on that issue. I also tried to look the further proceedings or final results of this court case, but I failed.

Two possible reasons: I couldn't search properly or the case is not over yet. Anyway: the stock price of Red Hat has definitely suffered a little because of this litigation.

http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS9631006534.html
http://www.crn.com/it-channel/192501606?queryText=red+hat+firestar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat
http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2006/07/

New Education vol 2

2007-12-04T21:35:00.000-08:00

Author

Kersti Peenema

Keywords

Education, competencies, creativity, e-learning, knowledge

Abstract

Intorduction

Research Question

How can e-learning meet the competencies of tomorrow?

Method

Method used in this blog is literature analysis.

Future competencies

2007-11-28T00:57:00.000-08:00

Second life

2007-10-29T11:37:00.000-07:00

This will not be an article. It is more like a blog entry. The reason, why I choose to write a blog lies in the problem that I don't get it. I just don’t get the phenomenon of Second Life (SL), but as SL has many users, then I admit that there must be something catching/intresting about it. I wondered for a some time already about the phenomena of SL. So instead of writing something smart in an article, I choose to write a blog to reflect my thoughts and feelings. Another reason might be that I looked for research about the SL but it was hard to find a concrete study what would be longer then 2 pages. As the SL was created in 2003, this is understandable.

As many researches (Childress, Braswell 2006; Yee, Bailenson, Urbanek, Chang, Merget 2007) have pointed out, the SL is a massive multiplayer online role-playing game. But for me it is hard to consider the SL just as a game. Huizinga (2003) has argued that game is different from a real life because game takes place, game has an end. In that sense the SL is like a real life - it is a virtual reality, it has no ending. Hence not a game?

We may ask: is the SL just a hype? It has around nine millions avatars (Bugeja 2007), but relatively few of them actually use it (Newitz 2007). In online communities one of the key questions is usability of community. How software is designed and developed has an impact to online community: the way people are communicating strongly affects its evolution. (Lazar, Preece 2003). There might be the reason of low usability in the SL - from my personal experience it was quite hard to figure out the basics.

When Linden Lab published the SL, it “gained a reputation as being little more than a hippy hang-out, where people had cyber sex, took virtual drugs “. During time it has become a virtual space that enhanced different forms of social interaction (Ananthaswamy 2007).

What still remains unclear to me is that this it not a game - people are putting real (!) money to the SL to gain pleasure and satisfaction. The question is: why are the not using the same money in the real world and instead of real pleasure they prefer virtual one? Or doesn’t it matter whether where do you get the satisfaction because the feeling (chemical reaction?) is still the same? But why do people pay real money to buy a virtual (!) dog? Why do they not buy themselves a real dog? They want pleasure, but they don’t want responsibility? Real dog brings along a lot of obligations: you can not afford forget to feed him, to go outside to a walk? These kinds of obligations are obviously forgotten in the SL.

But the SL proves that human nature is social. Even if these people choose virtual reality (VR) instead of staying in the real life (IR), they are choosing sociality. Otherwise they would be alone in a different place and not looking around in the world full of other people. People game (we can consider the SL here as a game) due different reasons: some get excitement out of it, some get the feeling of being successful, some find it educational (Goldstein 2003). All those reasons might be true for the SL also. I can accept that in some since the SL is interesting like a game: it is a simulation of a situation or life. You even have proper game tools: a toy (avatar) and playground (world). At the same time it is proven that social interactions in online virtual environment (SL) have the same social norms as social interaction in the physical world (Yee, Bailenson, Urbanek, Chang, Merget 2007). So the question remains: why do these people decide living in the VR instead of IR? Isn’t real life interesting enough? Why are they not social IR, why do they not dare to live a there own real life?

It is easy to leave the SL and not to think about it anymore as I don’t understand it, but I do realise the educational potential of the SL, what is still fully undiscovered. It might be a simple place where you can learn and communicate with different people (professionals), you can easily create something new or have a different profession (and no harm done IR). Virtual reality can be a medium to learn by doing.

Using VR in learning can be very helpful: it helps learners to reflect and get more deepen understanding of the learning process trough high-level interaction and active engagement by learners (Mantovani 2001). Improvements of environments (like SL) will lead to increased interactivity, the line between face-to-face learning and the online virtual learning will be not so clear. Improvements of virtual learning environments will create new ways of learning and models of teaching. It will depend on development of technology and on creativity of the educators who are using these kinds of environments (Childress, Braswell 2006).

And I have to say: this the SL enables.

References:

1. Ananthaswamy, A. (2007), „A life less ordinary offers far more than just escapism”, New Scientist 195 (2620), 57-57, http://search.epnet.com, [accessed 28 Oct 2007].

2. Bugeja, M. J. (2007), “Second Thoughts About Second Life”, Chronicle of Higher Education 54 (3), C2-C4, http://search.epnet.com, [accessed 28 Oct 2007].

3. Childress, M., D., Braswell, R. (2006), “Using Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games for Online Learning”, Distance Education 27 (2), 187-196, http://search.epnet.com, [accessed 28 Oct 2007].

4. Goldstein, G. (2003), "People @ Play: Electronic Games", in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 25 - 46.

5. Huizinga, J. (2003), Mängiv inimene, Tallinn: Kirjastus Varrak.

6. Lazar, Preece (2003), “Social Considerations in Online Communities: Usability, Sociability, and Success Factors”, in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp 127-151.

7. Mantovani, F. (2001), “VR Learning: Potential and Challenges for the Use of 3D Environments in Education and Training”, in Riva, G. & Galimberti, C. (eds), Towards CyberPsychology: Mind, Cognition and Society in the Internet Age, Amsterdam: IOS Press, pp 207–225.

8. Newitz, A. (2007), “Virtual worlds are becoming more like the real world”, New Scientist 195 (2618), 40-40, http: search.epnet.com, [accessed 28 Oct 2007].

9. Yee, N., Bailenson, J. N., Urbanek, M., Chang, F., Merget, D. (2007), “The Unbearable Likeness of Being Digital: The Persistence of Nonverbal Social Norms in Online Virtual Environments”, CyberPsychology & Behavior, 10 (1), 115-121, http://search.epnet.com, [accessed 28 Oct 2007].

Technology and new education

2007-10-29T11:16:00.000-07:00

Ken Robinson (an expert on creativity) argues in one of his presentations, that we do have the same kind of educational system for a long time now: mathematics is still at the top of the curriculum and arts down of the list. He poses a question: whether the structure and goals of today's education meet new requirements of society 50 years in the future? His answer is no as for the future we have to support more creativity.

Quite the same is said in the Report of National Centre of Education and the Economy in 2006 where skills of future are listed as: collaboration, communication, creativity, innovation, information literacy, critical thinking, problem solving and global awareness (Rosenfeld 2007). Erica de Vries argues also, that people need in the future to have competence in defining problems, finding information and collaboration (de Vries 2003). The nature of work is changing: there are more people who are working in the knowledge-based professions. Knowledge-based professions have a continuous need for updating their competence (Severinson Eklundh, Groth, Hedman, Lantz, Rodriguez, Sallnäs 2003). These people are dealing with different mental problems every day. Based on this, we can say: problem solving will be the key issue in future, but successful problem solving can be based only on creativity. So how can we support creativity instead of killing it?

As more and more people who are part of educational system are representers of knowledge-based professions, it means that lifelong education and the availability of different educational possibilities are growingly important questions. Here e-learning can definitely help by offering different tools to learn in formal as well in informal education. But the question is: will e-learning meet the requirements of tomorrow? Will there be education 2.0 or are we just using new tools of technology to fulfil old goals of education?

There is already discussion about education 2.0 but it remains quite technological. When web changed to web 2.0 it brought along the change of goals and the essence of web. Instead of being just arbitrator of information (offering/receiving) web 2.0 is about creation of new information and knowledge. In web the user was passive and just gained information, in web 2.0 the user is active (!) and takes part of knowledge creation. This is qualitative change and it has changed the goals and structure of web. So there must be a qualitative change in education before it is legitimate to use the term education 2.0. Todays discussions about education 2.0 are supporting the same essence of education as it is today.

So we don’t have yet deep discussion about education 2.0, but still: can e-learning somehow support creativity? Roschelle and Pea in 1999 have pointed out, that today's web-based communication is pretty much text-based. This leaves knowledge creation to background and supports just passive reading (Järvelä, Häkkinen 2003). So many opportunities stay unused. More active creation of videos, live-conferences, live-interaction, online communities and (why not) different simulations would help us solve that problem and fortunately we can see it already happening. But as the design of virtual environments is political (Gillespie 2003), it must be possible to create a learning environment to support creativity. Let us take for example virtual environment Second Life (SL) what has being used as a learning tool . Terry Beaubois created a virtual classroom on architecture . Since almost everything is possible in SL, it gives to the student's possibility to try out different architectural design. Students can try things what they would never try in a normal classroom: it is possible by either denying the laws of nature (gravitation) or it's just not too expensive. This all enables students to "think out of the box" and foster their creativity.

Of course there rises a question: how can we create a bridge between this kind of learning and real life and real situations. It is very important if we can transfer our knowledge to the real world. The second part of this kind on learning is: does it make students more reflect their knowledge? By visualisation of their knowledge, it brings out tacit knowledge. Students are more conscious about it and it might be a ground to the creation of new knowledge. It might be even great that you have to visualises everything (even by writing) because if helps to reflect. So this is real win-win situation: tacit knowledge will become visible and conscious and knowledge will be available to others and used a ground for creation something new. The key question is how to do it so that people will want to make it visible.

Second Life is a multiplayer role play game (Doherty, Murphy 2007). As future games will be more complex and realistic and players will have more control over them (story, structure) (Goldstein 2003), this means that using different games in learning will add more fun and creativity to the process. And having fun in learning usually guarantees a good learning outcome. But using different games is hole different approach to the education then usual classroom study.

There is one more problem in the field of new education. Differences between the generations are growing larger and larger and not only from an attitude side. Young people of tomorrow will still have another attitude toward life, but they will have a different skill profile and different thinking structure. As technology is more widely available, more people are using it. Because of use of technology there skill and thinking profile is different and this is causing a conflict between the generations. So can we predict at all the need of future and the essence of new education? If we can, then it's clear that new education requires radical change in the ways in which learning is organised and executed. E-learning may develop the skills and creativity; it may be the great enabler (Thompson, Randall 2001). It all depends whether we can realised that.

References:

1. Doherty, P., Murphy, P. (2007) "Science visit the metaverse and change your mind", Fantasy & Science Fiction 113 (3), 127-134.
2. Ecklundh, K. S., Groth, K., Hedman, A., Lantz, A., Rodriguez, H., Sallnäs, E-L. (2003), " The World Wide Web as a Social Infrastructure for Knowledge-Oriented Work", in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 97 - 126.
3. Gillespie, T. (2003), "The stories digital tools tell", in Everett, A. & Caldwell, J. T. (eds), New media: theories and practices of digitextuality, New York: Routledge, pp. 107-126.
4. Goldstein, G. (2003), "People @ Play: Electronic Games", in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 25 - 46.
5. Järvela, S., Häkkinen, P. (2003), "The Levels of Web-Based Discussions: Using Perspective-Taking Theory as an Analytical Tool", in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 77 - 96.
6. Rosenfeld, E. (2007), "Beginning the conversation about education 2.0", Teacher Librarian 34 (4), 6-6, http://search.epnet.com/, [accessed 2 Oct 2007].
7. Thompson, P., Randall, B. (2001), "Can e-learning spur Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship?", Educational Media International 38(4), 289-292.
8. de Vries, E. (2003), "Educational Technology and Multimedia From a Cognitive Perspective: Knowledge From Inside the Computer, Onto the Screen, and Into Our Heads?", in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 155 - 174.

Wesnoth

2007-09-16T12:35:00.000-07:00

Ollen täie arusaamise juures, et tegu on ingliskeelse õppega, aga kuna tegemist on esimese kandega ja pealegi teemadel, millest ma suurt midagi ei mõika, siis olgu sel korral kanne eesti keeles. Tõlkida saab selle inglise keelde hiljem ka.
Aga siis pealkirja järjekorras:

Wesnoth : ma ei julge väga oma tuttavatele öeldagi, et koduülesanne oli arvutimäng ... ;)
Tegelikult ma eriti arvutimänge ei mängi. Enamus neist on vägivaldsed ning see ei kutsu väga mängima. Peale kaht ebaõnnestunut katset õnnestus W ka alla laadida ning pärast pisikest jagelemist ja restarti sai mäng alata. Kahjuks ei ole W minu jaoks selles mõttes tore mäng, et ka see on vägivaldne. No ei ole mul suurt huvi vaadata, et kuidas arvutis pisikesed mehikesed või kollid üksteist tapavad. Aga väike hasart mingil hetkel tekkis ning veetsin W mingi 4 tundi, sain mõned tasandid mängitud sel ajal. Nõus sellega, et tegu on strateegilist mõtlemist õpetava mänguga, aga kuna arvuti taga istumisega kaasnevad mitmed kõrvalmõjud (ühed neist on mul kaelas praegu tunda), siis tekib paratamatult küsimus, et kas sama tulemuseni väiksemate kõrvalmõjudega ei võiks jõuda näiteks monopoli mängides? W eelis monopoli ees on muidugi tema tasandid. Monopol ei arene mängu jooksul kahjuks eriti kuhugi :(
Ühesõnaga: ära see mängitud sai. Mängu põhiolemusele sain ka vast pihta. See vist ongi kõige olulisem?

New Education

Final reflection

Reflection week 13

Learning contract: self-reflection

Explain, which type of learning environment is best suitable for your e-learning course? (week 7)

Reflection - week 12

Reflection week 11

How to formatively evaluate e-learning course designs? week11

Reflection - week 10

Learning contract

What are the best ways of finding a social network of your interests? - week6

Reflection - week 9

How can a conversational personal contract improve self-directed learning? week5

Reflection week 8

From the perspective of my tasks in our workgroup, what did I learn from theoretical materials, how to make/use the course materials/activities/assessment/tools? week8

Reflection 6 & 7

Reflection - week 5

The course is dead? Long live the course??

question - future of learning

The goals and objectives, design principles and process (roster) of your course. week4

Good and Bad Course

Reflection - week 4

What are the components of course design? week3

Reflection week 3

just some questions…

Week 2

Which principles of groupwork, communities of practice and collaborative learning should a distributed group consider, when planning the design of an e-learning course? week2

Week 1

Archives

eLearning blog

E-learning course: week 1

Hello

Hello

E-learning course: week 1

E-learning course: week 1

New Education

Interactive Television: Future of Television

Open Source Management: The Quest of the Dwarves - Wesnoth developed by Blue Team

FLOSS Business Successes and Failures

Wesnoth

Science progress as example of free culture

Legal issues of FLOSS

New Education vol 2

Second life

Technology and new education

Wesnoth