Learning theory

COMBLE meeting in Poland

Mariis2 Comments

Tomorrow my ELL colleague, Heilyn Camacho and I will be going to Poland to meet our partners from the COMBLE project. As part of the COMBLE project Heilyn and I are responsible for developing, implementing and testing a course that aims at educating future trainers in blended learning, and we will be giving a stat on our work and ideas:

We’ve chosen Problem Based Learning (PBL) as the overall pedagogical strategy for the course, and this is by no means a coincidence. When Aalborg University was founded in 1974 it was based on ideas of learning-by-doing and experiential learning that has evolved into a  strategy called Problem Oriented Project Pedagogy (POPP), which can be seen as a particular branch of PBL. The strategy is fundamentally based on group work, and it will be especially interesting to watch how this strategy works in a pure online course. This is also one of the main reasons for using SL in the course, because we hope SL will give the participants a strong sense of presence and co-presence in the learning environment that also consists of Moodle and different web 2.0 technologies.

The course is set to kick-off mid April and Heilyn and I will be working on setting up the Moodle environment and finding relevant places/people to visit in SL. It has not yet been decided where the main teaching and learning activites in SL will take place, but our Polish partners own an island, which we might use.

This course is the second case in my PhD, and in contrast to the MIL course I will not be the only teacher, since we’ve planned that some of my ELL colleagues, incl. Heilyn will teach in-world. This will give me an opportunity to get some feedback and different perspectives on teaching in-world, which I think will be very valuable for my PhD work, so I’m really looking forward to running this course :-)

/Mariis

Kolb’s Experiential Learning revisited

Mariis4 Comments

I’ve been a supporter, yet a critical one, of David A. Kolb‘s theory of Experiential Learning for many years, and almost like a recursive cycle I seem to return to Kolb’s ideas, whenever I’m looking for a theoretical framework to illustrate pedagogical activities. As I’ve recently started to process and reflect upon the many different teaching and learning activities in the MIL course (my 2. MIL research cycle), I’ve found it interesting to revisit Kolb’s ideas to study their “applicability” with my current project.

Teaching and learning environment
In order to better understand the different activities it’s necessary to get an overview of the teaching and learning environment, which is depicted below.

el-1

Home – given that MIL is a distance education with only four 2 1/2 day f2f-seminar pr. year the majority of the teaching and learning activities took place in the participants’ homes/workplaces.  All synchronous teacher initiated activities took place in the evenings/afternoons on weekends.

f2f seminar – the MIL course started on November 1st and ended on December 15th 2008. Mid November we had a f2f seminar, where the students were introduced to the general theme of the module (ICT and Didactic Design). I had 3 hours to lecture on “Remediation and redidactization in SL” combined with a hands-on workshop on some basic features of SL.

SL – was used for all the synchronous activities, both teacher and learner initiated.

FC (FirstClass) – was used for general information (incl. literature and other resources)/communication regarding the course, and more importantly as setting for the students’ asynchronous discussions/reflections. See this post for reflections on the quantitative outcome of the course.

Web 2.0 – various tools/technologies  supported the information provided in FC. Interestingly, and quite unusual for MIL students in other courses, the blogshpere and video and presentation repositories (like YouTube and Slideshare) were intensely explored in order to find additional information to support the students’ own findings and reflections.

A different perspective on Kolb’s model
Together with colleague Roger Fry, David A. Kolb started exploring the potentials of experiential learning in the 1970’ies, and Kolb further developed their ideas in his 1984 book “Experiential Learning: Experience as Source of Learning and development”. Besides exploring foundations (Dewey, Lewin and Piaget in particular) for experiential learning Kolb presented a model of 4 particular elements, which together constitute an optimal learning process. The elements are:

  • Active experimentation
  • Concrete experience
  • Reflective observation
  • Abstract conceptualization

The model is widely known (and depicted) as a learning cycle and Kolb also used its elements to identify 4 learning styles, each corresponding to the spectrum between 2 elements – e.g. The Diverger, who supposedly prefers to learn through concrete experience and reflective observation. In this post I don’t want to address the otherwise relevant epistemological question of a) the probability of (universal) learning styles (incl. the number issue) or b) the question of how the learning process best can be understood (cycle, spiral, steps, continuum etc.).  Instead I want to return to the 4 core elements and use them to illustrate and discuss activities in different contexts of the MIL course’s teaching and learning environment.

el-2

Active experimentation and concrete experiences were mainly conducted synchronously at the f2f hands-on workshop and in SL. There was a total of 25 teacher initiated in-world activities that included:

  • Get-off-to-a-good-start – meetings where I as the main teacher instructed the newcomers in using different features and took them on tours to designated educational locations.
  • Building Class – 3 1 ½ hrs. sessions where guest teachers, Dr. Asp & Heidi Ballinger, showed the students the in-world building craft and assisted the students in their own building experiments.
  • Didactic Design Discussions – four 2 hrs. sessions, where I lectured on mandatory topics based on the course literature, but also on topics raised by the students in their asynchronous discussions. Due to the use of simultane voice and text communication, these sessions engaged the students more actively, when compared to traditional f2f lectures.
  • Visits – typically 1-2 hrs. sessions where the students and I visited both Danish and International colleagues involved in either in-world education and/or business.
  • Your Tour – 2 1 ½ hrs. sessions where 2 students showed the rest of us two locations of choice (one location of professional interest build by others, one location of professional interest build by the student’s employer).
  • X-Mas celebration – the last in-world meeting with focus on social activity. The students had asynchronously rewritten a well known Christmas song, so that it fit the class’ experiences from the course.
  • Friday Bar – a phenomenon well known from Danish on-campus life. In-world located as part of MIL’s Holodeck classroom. None of the students showed up for these events.

Reflective observation and abstract conceptualization were mainly conducted asynchronously in SL, FC and by the use of different web 2.0 technologies. In-world note cards and pictures were stored and utilized to support the students’ reflections that were expressed in the FC discussions. These reflections were also supported by course literature, and additional information found on the Internet.

The above distinction between synchronous and asynchronous activities is particular to this specific course design, should not be regarded too rigidly and could have been designed otherwise. If Kolb’s model is taken literally reflection happens at a certain stage in the process, whereas other theorists (incl. Kolb’s own inspiration Dewey. 1933) argue for reflection as an ongoing activity and especially Schön. 1983 has contributed with his concepts reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action.  The MIL students were clearly able to reflect-in-action, which became evident in many of the synchronous activities, especially in the didactic design discussions and during the visits. Another interesting comment could be made regarding the abstract conceptualization, which usually is associated with the ability to understand, evaluate and conclude on general principles derived from the previous experiences. The MIL students did this outside SL (mainly in written and graphic formats), but it could possibly have been done in-world as either processes (e.g. teach each other xx) and/or as products (e.g. build a model of xx). This is something I need to consider when planning the next MIL research cycle (Fall 2009) .

The 4 different activities also correspond to 4 different types of knowing/knowledge, which I’ll try to exemplify with empirical data in future studies.

el-4

Teaching-Learning relations in the environment
Staying within the framework of Kolb the 4 activities were dominant in the MIL course, and in reviewing these the role/influence of the teacher may be illustrated as below.

el-3

In general MIL students are tech-savvy, used to learning on their own and in their study groups, but SL proved to be an atypical experience, and my impression (also based on the 1. MIL research cycle) was that the students needed much more instruction/facilitation than usual.  Several reasons such as SL’s infamous steep learning curve, the course design, the length of the course period and the rather abstract nature of the subject matter may have contributed to this, but it’s certainly something I need to investigate further. It’s not necessarily a bad thing that the students needed more teacher guidance that usual, but coming from an education that has learner-independence as a goal (as part of a life-long learning perspective) it does bring about some reflections.

Anyways, in reviewing the “applicability” of Kolb’s ideas to my PhD project this preliminary inquiry shows some potential  that need further exploration …

/Mariis

References

Kolb, D. A. (1984): Experiential Learning: Experience as Source of Learning and Development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice Hall

Dewey, J. (1933): How We Think, New York: Heath.

Schön, D. A. (1983): The Reflective Practitioner. How professionals think in action, London: Temple Smith.

Designing for Learning in SL – RL seminar

Mariis2 Comments

Monday October 13th I attended a RL seminar at Roskilde University arranged by the Danish research project Sense-making strategies and user-driven innovations in virtual worlds: A critical analysis of virtual market dynamics, cultural and social innovation and knowledge construction. Focus was on design for learning in virtual worlds – especially in SL. Here are some of my personal highlights …

Hunsinger, Jensen, Holmberg, Lester, Doyle & Beaubois

(C) Lis Faurholt

Sisse Siggaard Jensen gave a short presentation of the research project, and what I find most interesting is that the project will be empirically driven and based on collaboration between universities, institutions and private companies, hereby providing an opportunity for researches and practitioners to benefit from each other. Read more about the project here. I’m not part of the research project, but do collaborate with several of the people involved, and since the research on virtual worlds still is rather limited in Denmark, I think it’s pertinent that we join forces – so many thanks to the team for making this event public :-)

John Lester opened with a keynote on SL. Before joining Linden Lab in 2005, Lester worked with creating online communities for both patients and medical staff at the Department of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and at Harvard Medical School. Lester’s background within Neurology gives him a really interesting take on learning, which in his term is bound by biology. As far as I understand Lester, this means that we as humans used to navigate real life actually may find many strengths and advantages in 3D virtual worlds as a sort of default predisposition. Some of the characteristics of humans such as recognizing patterns, navigating in 3D, communicating with other people, creating communities and using tools do seem very applicable or transferable (not without problems though ;-) From a learning theoretical point of view this really is interesting, and I would love to hear Lester talk more specifically on this!

A keyword for Lester when talking about SL was sharing – SL is all about shared experience, and shared places. Elaborating on this, Lester identified several examples of shared places based on different modes of reality:

  • Shared places based on reality – e.g. replicas of RL places
  • Shared places based on intangible reality – e.g. molecular structures
  • Shared places based on soon-to-be reality – e.g. prospects
  • Shared places based on imaginative reality – e.g. art performances

Returning to biology Lester pointed out that our brains appriciate or even demand places and faces, that we crave emotional bandwidth, and that education in SL therefore should be seen at the intersection between people and places reminding us that there are humans behind most avatars.

Lester also provided some updated stats on SL:

30.000 CPU’s (regions)
2.000 square kilometers
540.000 residents spending an average of 56 h/m
Average age of SL resident: 35 yrs.
Gender neutral
65% of residents outside North America

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Lester twice now, and I have to say that he really incorporates the SL community feel – no wonder he is such a popular Linden :-)

Next up was Denise Doyle from University of Wolverhampton. Doyle has been involved in The Immersed in Learning Project since the beginning in 2007. Creating the Kriti Island has been part of this project in order to have a place for collaboration both nationally and internationally. Kriti Island has also hosted a very successful artist lead project on Reality Jam – an interactive exhibition contemplating creative practices. Doyle has a special research interest in interactive narratives and is using SL as a place for experimenting with different theoretical concepts and as a teaching and learning tool in undergraduate programmes in Digital Media.

Jeremy Hunsinger, from the Centre for Digital Discurses and Culture, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, whom you may know from the weekly SLEd Lessons in Second Life, did a talk on Interaction and Interactivity in SL pinpointing the many boring, non interactive builds in-world and addressing some of the technical problems students may encounter when entering SL. Hunsinger reminded us what a dreadful experience SL can be if it is cluttered by technical problems and if you only explore the world on your own. I agree that SL is best experienced together with others. SL is about collaboration and community first and foremost. So many places in SL are still just pointless replica of RL with no interactivity other that clicking on notecards or being redirected to out-of-world websites. I do feel that realistic rebuild can be appropriate, but respectful remediation just shouldn’t be the prevailing principle for in-world learning design – where is the innovation in that?

With his avatar rezzed back in 2005 Terry Beaubois certainly is one of the more experienced and persistent residents, and it was really illuminating to learn more about Beaubois’ work and research. As Director of Creative Research Lab (CRLab), Montana State University Beaubois has a vision of bringing together academic staff and students from different disciplines both RL and in-world. Being a RL professor of Architecture Beaubois intuitively started out by creating a spectacular place for his students in-world, when it suddenly dawned on him that he actually was depriving them of perhaps some of the most valuable lessons in doing so, and so he tore down the build and let the students do the work. Sharing control and responsibility with his students seemed to be an important part of Beaubois’ pedagogical philosophy and I really enjoyed meeting a teacher who focused so much on the students and their needs. In some projects Beaubois and colleague Larry Johnson have brought together students from disciplines such as art, architecture, and film, and he proudly showed us this little film created as a result of this collaboration:

Final speaker of the day was Kim Holmberg from the Department of Information Studies at Åbo Akademi in Finland. Holmberg is an expert in social media and Library 2.0 and was the first university lecturer to use SL in education. Holmberg reported from a study he did together with colleague Isto Huvila, where they used SL as an alternative learning platform in distance education. Holmberg and Huvila found that SL cannot replace face-to-face, but as an alternative platform SL proved to be more “fun”, and they wish to study this particular aspect further. Holmberg was very interested in the avatar phenomena and how this kind of representation influences the learning processes. Holmberg also focused on the fact that we persist (especially as newbies) on bringing RL behavior into SL even though it doesn’t make much sense – e.g. when we sit down or face the one speaking. In this aspect, I think Holmberg’s talk supplemented Lester’s initial ideas of biological and cultural predispositions very well.

Summarizing the many interesting talks and discussions isn’t easy, but I was personally confirmed in some of my own findings and I was reminded of the complexity of design for learning (in general!).
SL – as a 3D learning platform – has a huge potential, but there still are many critical aspects to consider. The entrance and beginning phase as a newbie in SL can be filled with technical problems that need to be addressed both in- and out-world. Offering a possibility for humans, represented as avatars, to meet synchronously across time zones and geographical place, SL gives us a unique chance to explore communication, interaction, embodiment and many other natural and cultural phenomena. So far, in my personal opinion, much educational design in SL does not take advantage of the new possibilities to design learning environments NpIRL, but I do think this is only natural. When entering a new environment we bring our cultural and biological predispositions/experiences primarily in order to survive, to find “common ground” both literally and figuratively speaking. Only when the new environment has become habitual, I think we’ll be able to cross the intersections between the many modes and possibilities of reality. Since research in learning in virtual worlds like SL is still in its infancy, I’m quite confident that the future will bring exciting, mind-blowing examples of design for learning in 3D – and the great speakers clearly showed us how to continue this endeavor …

/Mariis

The Body in Online Learning (1)

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In my post on lessons learned from the CCK08 course last week I posed the question where the Body is in Connectivism, and one of the CCK08 facilitators, Steven Downes, commented and so did my PhD-supervisor, Janni Nielsen. This has inspired me to do some preliminary reflections on the Body in online learning in general. Since embodiment is a core concept in my PhD, this is something I’ll return to again and again, but I do have to start at some point …

I think Downes, Nielsen and I agree that technology can provide a perception of embodiment, and as I commented to Downes, that’s why I dare claim “that 3D representation e.g. in SL, offers a unique opportunity (especially in distance education) for users to feel part of an authentic or real context even if it is mediated through technology.”

Nielsen confronts my “to feel part of .. even if ..” phrase, which may seem illogical if you really believe that technology can provide a sense of embodiment. I guess this stems from my talks about SL. It’s my impression that 3D technology still is rather exotic to most people (even 2D!), and I think I might lose credibility if I started a talk by stating that this is real! Perhaps I underestimate my audience, but I do feel that if you’re not familiar with online behavior and haven’t been immersed in a 3D setting it may seem surreal … And I know that some people who actually are familiar with e.g. online learning do not feel the way I do.

I am very much inspired by phenomenology, and in preparation for my PhD application last summer, I revisited some of the great thinkers within that field, some of them being Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hubert L. Dreyfus. According to Ajana (2005) perception in Merleau-Ponty’s terms is:

(…) a ‘system’ of meanings by which the phenomenological process of recognizing and ‘sensing’ objects takes place, and it is through the medium of the body that we get to ‘experience’ and ‘perceive’ the world: ‘Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 203).

This may be what Downes refers to, when he states that “we’re pattern recognition devices” though I’m not sure Downes would label himself as a phenomenologist.

Anyway, Dreyfus inspires me, because he is also influenced by Merleau-Ponty, but I have to say that we read and interpret Merleau-Ponty in different ways, and that forces me to reflect on my own position. In 2001 Dreyfus published the book “On the Internet”, and if I had to point to one single reason why I wanted to do a PhD on 3D-mediated teaching and learning potential this is it!

Dreyfus goes against the hype on the potentials of the Internet, and I do think that that can be quite appropriate, but I just do not agree with the majority of Dreyfus’ points and his argumentation. In the introduction Dreyfus writes:

(…) in what follows, I hope to show that, if our body goes, so does relevance, skill, reality and meaning. If that is the trade-off, the prospect of living our lives in and through the Web may not be as attractive after all. (Dreyfus, 2001:7 – my italics)

A short comment to this could be that our bodies do not go (anywhere!) when we engage in internet activities – like the heart in the organism we’re bodily grounded in the world regardless of how it presents itself to us. Furthermore I’m pretty sure that millions of Internet users find meaning and learn skills no matter how they perceive reality. But my intention in this post is not to review and comment on Dreyfus’ entire book, where he of course elaborates this and many other points.

First of all, I’m in the beginning of my research and I still lack insight and sufficient academic competencies to do so in a reputable manner, and I certainly do not want to seem disrespectful. That specific comment just triggered my research and for that I do feel appreciative to Dreyfus.

Second, other researchers have already presented arguments against the Dreyfus claims, and in this post I want to point the reader’s attention to Ray Land.

One of Dreyfus’ claims is that risk-taking is a necessary prerequisite for learning at a higher level and that especially due to the anonymous nature of online learning the learner and the teacher do not really take any risks. Land (2004) addresses this issue;

What is puzzling about Dreyfus’ analysis is how it seems to take no cognizance of the many risks to identity, confidence, emotional security and esteem that are encountered on a daily basis by participants within online learning environments.

I think both my MIL students and some of the participants in the CCK08 will recognize Land’s description, I know I do – even here as I write on my “own” blog. An interesting angle to this could be to explore Dreyfus (and Dreyfus. 1986) renowned taxonomy of learning. I do appreciate the methodic/analytical benefits of looking at the learning process this way, but I’m really not convinced that learning occurs linearly …

These will be my first public thoughts on the body in online learning – I will return…

/Mariis

If this caught your attention I really recommend that you read Dreyfus and the other below mentioned references :-)

References:
Ajana, B. (2005): Disembodiment and Cyberspace: A Phenomenological Approach.

Dreyfus, H.L. (2001): On the Internet.

Land, R. (2004): Issues of Embodiment and Risk in Online Learning.

Related references:
Virtual Identity and the Cyberspace

CCK08 – Lessons Learned (2)

Mariis8 Comments

This post is about the Massively Online Open Course on Connectivism and Connective knowledge (CCK08) facilitated by Stephen Downes and George Siemens. This week I couldn’t attend any of the SL cohort meetings, so I decided to participate in the weekly Ustream ® session for the first time. This meant that I had to face a couple of learning challenges.

1) I’ve never used Ustream, so I had to figure out how to in a technical manner, but fortunately it turned out to be quite intuitive and user-friendly, and the sound quality was pretty good.

2) I also had to get accustomed to this particular synchronous way (speak combined with text chat) of communicating. I’ve been using video conferencing for a couple of years now, but different systems and mainly as facilitator. There were between 47-54 participants while I was logged in. Speakers were Siemens and Downes, and Dave Cormier moderated the discussion – also by asking some of the questions posed by the participants in the chat. Ustream’s video option wasn’t used, which didn’t bother me since I actually find small pictures of people’s heads constantly shifting very distracting. Compared to my text chat experience last week, I found this session easier to follow. I think Cormier did a really good job, it’s not an easy task to moderate :-)

3) It was the first time in the CCK08 I meet participants outside my more familiar SL cohort, and I was a bit concerned that I might feel somewhat disconnected, but I didn’t. This time the context was unfamiliar, but I recognized the voices of both Siemens and Downes, and I’ve had the opportunity to study more of this week’s course materials and I also have some previous experience with this week’s topic (Networks). In the chat I suddenly recognized Jenny :-), who commented on my CCK post last week, but otherwise the usernames represented complete strangers. There was at least one more Dane, Ivrig (Eager), but I have absolutely no idea who that might be? Anyway, I did end up feeling connected, but not in the same sense as last week. I think Jenny’s thoughts on the difference between Network and Community as expressed by Wenger could apply here:

In the words of Etienne Wenger, ‘every community is a network, but not every network is a community’. In a community ‘there is a level of identification that goes beyond degrees of connectedness.’

There’s no doubt that I identify more with the SL cohort than the rest of the CCK participants, but I have a feeling that as the weeks pass by I’ll get more and more acquainted with the non-SL participants and ideally they too can become a valuable community of learning practice. Some of us did ask for Siemens’ and Downes’ take on the distinction between networks and community, but we will focus on that later on in the course, so more on this topic will follow ..

On a completely different topic, there is a question that keeps coming back to me regarding the epistemology of Connectivism. I’m not sure it will make much sense to others, since I find it hard to articulate, but I’ll give a shot – if nothing else documenting is a way of keeping it alive!

I don’t mean to suggest that I have found an epistemological truth in other theories, I don’t even think such a truth exists – the genesis of knowledge is far too complex, but I am however very inspired by my second PhD supervisor, Janni Nielsen’s thoughts on this. According to Nielsen we perceive and generate knowledge via 3 different domains;

  1. Senso-motoric
  2. Emotions
  3. Symbols

No hierarchy intended by the numbers, but 1 and 2 also constitute the domains for tacit knowledge, and when studying Connectivism I find it hard to recognize these domains. I do appreciate Siemens’ distinction between Neural/Biological, Conceptual and External Social and I do think there are some similarities between these types of networks (Siemens)/domains (Downes) and the above mentioned. But … where is the Body in Connectivism, is it just a Cartesian container for the Brain (the Neural) or how is the Biological to be understood –and how do we understand these questions in relation to technology and especially the Web. Would it be plausible in relation to Connectivism to state that technology can provide a perception of embodiment ..

Hmmm !? :-( … learning really can be challenging. Embodiment is a core concept in my PhD project, so I do have to figure out what to think of these questions. Luckily I have 2 ½ years left to do so.

/Mariis