Ginna note about research challenges: a great deal has been written about how to incorporate social media and online content management tools at the university level, but I couldn’t find anything about doing it on a small, no-budget classroom scale. Also, not to the ESL but the English-speaking classroom. Also, nothing for adult learners, and all for those on the safe side of the digital divide.

The articles that follow have applicability to what I’m doing, but they’re all looking through much bigger glasses. They talk about LMSs — Learning Management System. Moodle is one — and Moodle creates a PLE: Personal Learning Environment.

A Singular Vision for a Disparate Future: Technology Adoption Patterns in Higher Learning Through 2035
by Robert G. Henshaw

Note: This article was originally published in Innovate (http://www.innovateonline.info/) as: Henshaw, R. 2008. A singular vision for a disparate future: Technology adoption patterns in higher learning through 2035. Innovate 4 (5). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=533 (accessed June 24, 2008). The article is reprinted here with permission of the publisher, The Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University.

Talking about integration of tech on a university level, for nonresidency courses:

Online and hybrid courses will increasingly represent the vanguard of innovative and effective pedagogy adoption in higher education.

Uneven student access to technologies will continue to have implications for overall technology adoption. With both fairness and market entry in mind, educators will remain reluctant to integrate technology-enabled learning strategies unless they can ensure access to the relevant technologies.

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Educating the Net Generation. Diana G. Oblinger and James L. Oblinger, Editors. Chapter 4: Using Technology as a Learning Tool, Not Just the Cool New Thing. by Ben McNeely, North Carolina State University. Educause: Washington, D.C. (2005)

… [T]echnology must be relevant and interactive to the coursework. A faculty member who uses PowerPoint in a lecture is not using technology interactively. Students need a practical use for technology, whether to manipulate data or to explore the inner recesses of the human body without cutting up cadavers. Students need to communicate quickly with each other, but in a centralized manner. That is why message boards are great. Members-only message boards allow students and faculty to communicate with each other.

[T]echnology must be used for a practical purpose—that is, taking the fundamentals and technology learned over a semester and applying it to a final project, where creativity and uniqueness is required and rewarded… Using technology for some practical purpose, and not for the sake of using technology, must be the clear objective.

Both of the above are page 4.9

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Emerging Technologies for Learning. Coventry, England: British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (2006) (Volume 1)

The ambient web (Bill Sharpe)

p 16

We are living through a time of profound change in the landscape of digital technology and the way it interacts with our everyday lives… This shift creates an era of opportunity for education. At the heart of education and learning lie the encounters that an individual has with people, places and things, and the opportunity each encounter presents for interaction, challenge and growth. As digital technology pervades everything around us, we can enrich each encounter to harness the global resources of the information world and of learning communities, to make it more appropriate in that moment to that individual.

p 17

You only have to look at people’s absorption in their mobile phones and music players to realise that, as the personal digital environment evolves, people are likely to participate even more deeply in online worlds in parallel with the physical world.

Social networks (Leon Cych)
Collaborative tools

p 35

The word wiki is a Hawaiian term for hurry. Wikis are websitesthat allow users to add, edit and delete content; it is usually a joint collaboration on the part of several authors… Most wikis are self-moderated and any breaches of etiquette quickly pointed out and amended or discussed… [W]eb developers increasingly use wikis to brainstorm initial ideas and see them through to a finished product or service. The strength of such a learning environment lies in the ability to reflect on, model and share new ideas. Some educators are beginning to use wikis in imaginative ways – as jump-off points for projects, brainstorming, language teaching and creative writing…

Blogs have been used extensively in academia for some time and are increasingly being used as a tool for courseware development and personalised learning – indeed, they are one possible future route for content in electronic portfolios…

p 36

Moblogs – mobileblogs – are blogs with photos taken and sent by mobile phones to dedicated websites. Much of their use has been fairly trivial and this technology has only appeared in the public arena in the last two years, although some educational projects are being trialled…

Vlogs – videoblogs – are closely related to moblogs in that videophones can be used to post content, but some videoblogs have much higher production values and take far more time to produce using digital video cameras and complex post-production techniques. This is still very much a fringe activity in education, but new software and web services are making it increasingly easier…Podcasting – audio broadcasting over the web – is probably the best known of these emerging technologies. It gets its name from the combination of iPod and broadcasting. Podcasting technologies have been around for some years, but only recently has the delivery mechanism of RSS made it possible to broadcast audio both to wider and more specialised interest groups. Podcasts in the UK education sector are still emerging and are usually highly localised. Many traditional uses of audio in education become far more effective via this mechanism. Students can broadcast audio diaries, commentaries and outcomes of writing for an audience or construct entirely new interactive learning experiences never before possible. Teachers can broadcast lectures, course notes and interviews with authors and other experts.

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McLoughlin, C. & Lee, M. J. W. Social software and participatory learning: Pedagogical choices with technology affordances in the Web 2.0 era. In ICT: Providing choices for learners and learning. Singapore: Proceedings Ascilite (2007).

p 664

Emerging “Web 2.0” services such as blogs, wikis and social bookmarking applications, as well as social networking sites like MySpace, Friendster and Facebook, are seen as more social and personal, and based on “microcontent”, i.e., digital content in small fragments that may be combined and recombined by individuals to produce new patterns, images and interpretations. This paper investigates the affordances of Web 2.0 and social software and the choices and constraints they offer to tertiary teachers and learners. A discussion of emerging pedagogical models is
presented to demonstrate that we now have access to an enabling suite of tools to support greater learner choice and self-direction.

p 665

The term “social software” may be broadly defined as “software that supports group interaction” (Shirky, 2003, para. 2), although it is arguable that the Internet has always comprised a network of individuals connected through social technologies like e-mail, chat rooms and discussion boards (now referred to as the “1.0” technologies). Current social software tools not only support social interaction, feedback, conversation and networking (Boyd, 2007; Downes, 2005), but are also endowed with a flexibility and modularity that enables collaborative remixability – a transformative process in which the information and media organised and shared by individuals can be recombined and built on to create new forms, concepts, ideas, mashups and services.

Many current social software applications straddle the virtual and real social worlds, as they entail both online and offline interactions and visual/verbal connectivity. For example, Flickr and YouTube facilitate the sharing of photos and videos with both “real world” and “virtual” friends; social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and Friendster allow users to build an online identity by customising their personal profiles with a range of multimedia elements, as well as interacting with existing contacts and establishing new relationships; another social networking site, Stickam, additionally allows users to interact in real-time using their web cams and microphones.

p 666

Table 1: Types of social software (based on Mejias, 2005, p. 3) [I’ve edited this, and it fell out of the table in transit]

• Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs): Second Life, Active Worlds, World of Warcraft, Everquest
• Synchronous Discourse facilitation systems: Instant messaging (IM, e.g. Windows Live Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Instant Messenger, Google Chat, ICQ, Skype); chat
• Asynchronous Discourse facilitation systems: Email; bulletin boards; discussion boards;
• Content & document management systems: Blogs; wikis; Plone
• Learning management systems: Blackboard/WebCT; ANGEL; Moodle; .LRN; Sakai; ATutor; Claroline; Dokeos
• Relationship management systems: MySpace; Friendster; Facebook; Faceparty; Orkut; eHarmony; Bebo
• Social cataloguing (books): LibraryThing; neighborrow; Shelfari
• Other: Flickr

Social software tools such as blogs, wikis, social networking sites, media sharing applications and social bookmarking utilities are also pedagogical tools that stem from their affordances of sharing, communication and information discovery. An affordance is an action that an individual can
potentially perform in their environment by using a particular tool (Affordance, 2007). In other words, an affordance is a “can do” statement that does not have to be predefined by a particular functionality, and refers to any application that enables a user to undertake tasks in their environment, whether known or unknown to him/her. For example, blogging entails typing and editing posts, which are not affordances, but which enable the affordances of idea sharing and interaction. According to Kirschner (2002), educational affordances can be defined as the relationships between the properties of an educational intervention and the characteristics of the learner that enable certain kinds of learning to take place. It is imperative to acknowledge that technologies are intricately related to many other elements of the learning context (such as task design) that can shape the possibilities they offer to learners, how learners perceive those possibilities and the extent to which learning outcomes can be realised.

According to Anderson (2004), “the greatest affordance of the Web for educational use is the profound
and multifaceted increase in communication and interaction capability” (p. 42)…

p 667

By applying the concept of affordances to social software and Web 2.0 applications in general, we can
ask the following questions:

1. How can the affordances of social software tools be conceptualised so that they are linked to process skills and socio-cognitive outcomes?
2. How can the affordances of social software support tertiary teaching and learning, and help us move beyond didactic paradigms that focus on the acquisition of information by students?

Learning occurs in a socio-cultural system in which learners use various tools and multiple forms of interaction to create collective activity, supported by technology affordances. Drawing on extant Web 2.0 research and practice, some examples of the affordances of social software tools are as follows:

• Connectivity and social rapport: Social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and Friendster attract and support networks of people and facilitate connections between them. They are representative of what Gee (2004) calls affinity spaces, where people acquire both social and communicative skills, and at the same time become engaged in the participatory culture of Web 2.0. In these spaces, youth engage in informal learning, and creative, expressive forms of behaviour and identity seeking, while developing a range of digital literacies.
• Collaborative information discovery and sharing: Data sharing is enabled through a range of software applications, and experts and novices alike can make their work available to the rest of the online world, for example through their personal and group blogs. Social bookmarking tools such as del.icio.us, Furl and Digg allow people to build up collections of web resources or bookmarks, classify and organise them through the use of metadata tags, and share both the bookmarks and tags with others. In this way, users with similar interests can learn from one another through subscribing to the bookmarks and tags of others, and actively contribute to the ongoing growth and evolution of the “folksonomy” of web-based content and knowledge.
• Content creation: Web 2.0 emphasises the pre-eminence of content creation over content consumption. Anyone can create, assemble, organise and share content to meet their own needs and those of others. Open source and open content (cf. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007; MERLOT, 2006; Beshears, 2005) initiatives, as well as copyright licensing models like Creative Commons (2007), are helping fuel the growth of user-generated content. Wikis enable teams and individuals to work together to generate new knowledge through an open editing and review structure.
• Knowledge and information aggregation and content modification: The massive uptake of Really Simple Syndication (RSS), as well as related technologies such as podcasting and vodcasting (which involve the syndication and aggregation of audio and video content, respectively), is indicative of a move to collecting material from many sources and using it for personal needs. The content can be remixed and reformulated (the concept of a mashup).

These affordances stimulate the development of a participatory culture in which there is genuine engagement and communication, and in which members feel socially connected with one another. Having said this, one cannot assume that just because social software provides affordances, that is all that is required for effective learning. Careful planning and a thorough understanding of the dynamics of these affordances are mandatory. Moreover, the deployment of ICT tools for learning must be underpinned by an explicit learning paradigm and informed by pedagogies that support learner self-direction and knowledge creation.

p 668

[T]he Web is about linking minds, communities and ideas, while promoting personalisation, collaboration and creativity leading to joint knowledge creation.

p 669: A Venn diagram (oh dear: like mine, but not as pretty… but smarter) “Figure 1: Framework for knowledge creation in Web 2.0 (adapted from Efimova, 2004)”: Individuals, Ideas, Communities and Networks. At the intersection of indiv and ideas: creativity, idea generation; between ideas & communities: awareness, connection. Between communities and indiv: conversations, collaboration. And at the heart of all three: knowledge creation.

Same page:

• Content: Micro units of content that augment thinking and cognition; learner-generated content that accrues from students creating, sharing and revising ideas;
• Curriculum: Not fixed but dynamic, open to negotiation and learner input, consisting of “bite-sized” modules, inter-disciplinary in focus and blending formal and informal learning;
• Communication: Open, peer-to-peer and multi-faceted, using multiple media types to achieve relevance and clarity;
• Process: Situated, reflective, integrated thinking processes; iterative, dynamic and inquiry-based;
• Resources: Multiple informal and formal sources that are media rich and global in reach;
• Scaffolds: Support for students comes from a network of peers, teachers, experts and communities;
• Learning tasks: Authentic, personalised, learner-driven and designed, experiential and enabling
  multiple perspectives.

p 671

Apart from the social and conversational affordances of social software tools, there are further social constructivist principles that apply to Pedagogy 2.0. Learning occurs as a socio-cultural system, within which many learners interact to create a collective activity framed by cultural constraints and practices. Typically, learners receive scaffolding through the help of others (peers, teachers, virtual community sources, technology). Social software can provide the building blocks for an environment that enables multiple forms of support, as it allows people to connect, interact and share ideas in a fluid way. For example, podcasting technology and software tools that allow easy broadcasting of audio files can support community building and enable the dissemination of learner-generated content, which in turn acts as a catalyst and support for authentic, peer-to-peer learning (McLoughlin & Lee, 2007).

A third critical component of effective learning is active participation with others, including peers, instructors, experts and community. Collaboration and cooperation have long been recognised as ingredients of effective pedagogy; wikis and collaborative writing and editing tools such as Writeboard and Google Docs and Spreadsheets are useful extensions to conventional writing approaches. Linked with this principle of collaborative production, there is the additional facility of sharing and publishing the artefacts produced as a result of the learning activity, and inviting feedback from peers (another form of scaffolding). By publishing and presenting their work to a wide audience, learners benefit from the opportunity to appropriate new ideas, and transform their own understanding through reflection (Williams & Jacobs, 2004). Researchers recognise that communication is often shaped by different tools and technologies. For example, Farmer (2004) proposes that blogs offer “new opportunities in the development of social, cognitive and teacher presence online” (p. 279).

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Emerging Technologies for Learning. Coventry, England: British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (2007) (Volume 2)

p28

The challenge of new digital literacies and the ‘hidden curriculum’
Jo Twist with Kay Withers

The way we understand the world, our place in it, and how we have our say about it, has always been through communications media. Throughout the centuries the media which convey messages have changed. Each change has profoundly shaped society’s understanding of itself and one’s place within it. In the 21st century, as the digital age moves into adolescence, our understanding of ‘the media’ is being transformed once more.

[They cite Marshall McLuhan, 1967. He might be interesting to check out again.]

p 35: “networked participatory cultures”