americanfinn’s blog

A little more on my experience with Twitter, more than two weeks on . . . I initially approached Twitter with some trepidation as I’d read several articles and blogs whose theme was Twitter’s massive time-wasting capacity. I can see the point. But as with all such applications, it’s always possible to shut the thing off and get out into the fresh air.

The above comment applies, of course, if you use Twitter only on your laptop or desktop. I’ve hesitated to try Twitter on my phone, as I think that step represents a new level of engagement with the application, a greater integration/intrusion (pick the term you think most appropriate) into everyday life.  I’ve also been concerned about the financial cost of using Twitter on my phone. Ralf, thanks to your tweet today about Twe2 I may now try going mobile after all.

Have I learned anything about Twitter as a learning tool or learning environment? Here are a few rough-draft observations:

1. I’ve been very conservative when it comes to the number of streams I follow. Besides the initial streams I mentioned in my earlier post about Twitter, I’ve added Ralf’s and Anja’s streams because they began to follow me! I haven’t sought out new streams, because I didn’t want to be overwhelmed with tweets. I now question that strategy. I think the best way (for me, at least) to explore Twitter is to immerse myself in it, and see what happens. It’s a messy way to approach this application, perhaps, but too much self-limitation doesn’t allow contact with all of Twitter’s features.

2. I’ve learned interesting things from the streams I have followed. As a fan of Japanese cuisine, I’ve enjoyed learning new Japanese words. Most don’t have anything to do with food, but of course the broader cultural context is important as well. I’ve learned a few new French idioms and verbs, though I don’t know how useful they will be. I’m only able to read French; my spoken French is beyond abominable. Warren Ellis’s stream provides something amusing almost every day, and he’s interesting to watch as a cult figure. How he uses Twitter (mixture of personal, banal, self-ironic, professional) is instructive. Yesterday I experienced the “real-time” use of Twitter when I received Jan Chipchase’s tweet about a strong earthquake that was taking place in Tokyo, where he lives.  From Ralf’s and Anja’s tweets I’ve learned about interesting links to educational material, Hamburg weather, and useful Twitter information (i.e., Twe2). Oblique_Chirps remains suitably oracular, and occasionally provocative.

3. My own stream has been an mixture of banal, personal, stream-of-consciousness, and now-browsing. I find myself uncertain about the “right mix” (if there is such a thing) of the personal and professional in a stream. What my tweets provide is a small window into the many different directions my mind moves in the course of a day. If I had a more definite connection to a particular community (defined however you will), perhaps my tweets would become more focused. But I doubt it.

4. What I want most out of Twitter is to be part of a cloud or clouds of people who share my interests, professional and personal. My impression is that such participation is necessary (but perhaps not sufficient) for making Twitter useful for learning and teaching. The beginnings of a so-called “collective mind” become possible then.

I know that becoming linked in this way requires two different things to happen. First, I must seek out those people with whom I share such interests, and begin to follow them. Second, I must get those people to follow me, and perhaps even to find new people interested in following me.

5. There are many potential uses for Twitter in educational contexts. Exploration of Twitter’s potential in this area is in its infancy.

6. I intend to use Twitter in three specific settings in the coming year. The first is a public lecture on religion in Finnish society I’m giving on 8 April; I’ll start a stream dedicated to the lecture, and see if I get any takers. The second is a foundational course on art and cultural theory I’m slated to teach this coming fall at the Humanistinen ammattikorkeakoulu here in Turku. There I’ll see how I can make Twitter part of the course (in lectures and outside the classroom).  The third context is through the Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations at the University of Cambridge. I supervise two dissertations there, and will ask my supervisees to use Twitter if and when they have specific questions or difficulties in their research and writing. I’m interested to see if Twitter makes greater communication possible. The 140-character limit could hinder the application’s usefulness in this setting; we’ll see.

I enjoyed working with Ina and Henrik on our presentation. Ina has a high level of expertise with online collaborative tools as well as online video and audio editing resources that I do not have. She suggested possible online tools (Doodle, Audacity) we could use to put together our project, and provided much of the energy behind the construction of our presentation. Ina and I met on Skype once to talk about the project, and the rest of our group conversations took place via e-mail. I appreciated the energy and enthusiasm she brought to the project; as I’ve said in another context, she was really the engine that drove our group’s work.

I was tasked with recording the text that Henrik had written (and to which I had contributed through editing for English usage and one or two small additions). It was felt that it would be best to have a native speaker record the text, and that made sense to me. I went with a relatively low-tech approach. Ina helpfully suggested possible online audio recording and editing sites, and they looked like they could be useful if one had the time to learn how they worked. As I didn’t have that kind of time (more on this below), I suggested that I simply record the text as an mp3 file, and then send it to Ina.

This approach worked well. I have an mp3 player (8GB iRiver Clix2) that records voice in mp3 format, so I just went with that as it seemed the easiest way to handle the recording. I made two recordings. In the first I thought I spoke a little too quickly, and so slowed down in the second, and asked Ina to use the one she thought best (the second recording was used in the presentation).

Alongside this task, I located online materials on microlearning, and made notes on what I read. It was from these notes that I spoke at the beginning our presentation to the class. Microlearning was a new concept to me, and after reading more about it I’d like to be able to study it further.

I also caught a glimpse of online video and audio editing tools that I want to learn to use.

What could have worked better

I think that our group faced a unique challenge: to include the participation of a member who lived in another country and another time zone. The Skype conversation Ina and I had about the project showed that it’s not difficult to bring people together to talk online. The main difficulty (at least for me) was in finding the time to get together to talk about and plan the project. I work to help support my family in three different jobs which, put together, amount more or less to full-time employment.

The challenge I faced (and did not meet, I have to say) was to find enough time, mental space, and energy to devote to the project. At first I thought that it was simply an issue of time management. Of course, on one level it is. But my reading on microlearning and connectivism leads me to think that my situation, in which I am seeking to learn in the context of other responsibilities related to employment and family, is not unique. In fact, it may be becoming a standard/normal learning situation for many people today. The demand to learn, to acquire new skills, knowledge, and competencies, is increasingly common in workplaces today. The fluidity of working life today as well, where the guarantee of one single life-long career has all but disappeared, also increases the pressure to learn in order to be employable. That’s my situation here in Finland: there is no possibility for me to get permanent employment in the field in which I was trained (and in which I have a doctorate). So I’ve gone back to school to gain skills and knowledge I hope will make me employable here.

I wonder, then, how (besides basic time management) I can transform a learning experience that for me has felt fragmented into small clusters of learning I grab onto as they fly by, into a more satisfactory experience of ubiquitous learning.

There was one technical difficulty I should mention as well. Sometime in December (I am not certain when), my Taideteollinen korkeakoulu e-mail account stopped receiving messages. Thus I didn’t receive messages that Ina was sending me about our project. In the future, I’ll make sure that group members have at least two e-mail addresses at which to reach me in case something happens with one e-mail system.

I went into last week’s session curious about how the technology would actually function (or not). I’m typically skeptical about the wide-ranging claims made for educational technology, and expected that there would be difficulties and breakdowns during the session. I also was interested to see how Adobe Connect works, as it was a new resource to me.

My expectations about the technology were fulfilled! But I was also quite happy to experience the sense of play that accompanied the difficulties with the technology. That is, I never felt like there was a very uptight expectation that everything was going to work perfectly, and a refreshing willingness to laugh and be patient when things didn’t work as planned.When Adobe Connect worked, I thought it worked well and was useful. Always Have a Plan B:  that was another valuable lesson from last week’s session.

About the content, as you saw from the last few minutes of Anja’s presentation I have a delicious account and was familiar with its basic features. There’s lots more to do with it, however, and the presentation prodded me to do further work with both delicious and Twine.

I was intrigued to hear of the possibilities for the development of the Faculty’s hardware resources for pedagogy. I was struck how there actually seemed to be some funds available for new hardware; in my experience elsewhere, it’s been tough to convince the people with the money that such investment was necessary. But that was a few years ago; perhaps things have changed since.

Well, folks, here’s what I’ve been up to so far in my Day With Twitter:  I’ve been following a few streams, an eclectic bunch:  Oblique_Chirps, openculture, ParleFrancais, learnkanji, janchipchase (a cultural anthropologist employed by Nokia Design), and warrenellis (graphic novelist, among other things).

To follow my streams I initially set up TweetDeck on my machine, but I found it a little too clunky and unwieldy. So I went instead with the Firefox plug-in TwitterFox, which sits unobtrusively in the corner of my screen. I also found another plug-in that allows me to post urls directly to Twitter.

So . . . the first question I’ve encountered is probably one that everyone who starts with Twitter asks at first:  what do I say? I feel that I’ve been in part narrating my Twitter experience, so some of my tweets have been about that. I also have been doing some of the banal stream-of-life (but hopefully not stream-of-consciousness) tweeting that some find so annoying. I actually find a little bit of that kind of broadcasting useful — if they somehow signal milestones in one’s day, guideposts for mapping the outlines of my day.

I’ve also tweeted questions or musings I’ve had. Like the latest one: “thinking about the thinness of the cloud I currently inhabit.” If I consider Twitter as a way to plug in to the cloud of people who might conceivably share some of my interests and be interested themselves in my questions and observations, then I have to conclude that as of right now I’m a long way away from that. I’m simply not connected enough. But that’s to be expected; I’ve only been doing this in earnest for half a day.

If I were to pursue this further (and I plan to do that), then I’d find ways of getting more followers, and beginning to create my own cloud. For instance, tonight I was editing the English of an article on the religious landscape of the Republic of Macedonia. There was a reference to the Bektashi community there — but I wasn’t sure about the proper English form of the group’s name. If I were in the right cloud, I could tweet my question and maybe get a helpful response. I’ve read about this happening, at least . . .

As far as learning anything today via Twitter, I did learn one hangul, but not actually via Twitter but via a Twitter-like service called Popling that had been flagged on someone else’s tweet!

I’ve always wanted to try Eno and Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies cards but never have gotten around to buying them. So having them tweeted at me has been an amusing first exposure to them. I’d like to keep following the tweet and see where it leads.

That’s it for the moment . . . bottom line: I am as of yet a very unconnected node and so am not benefitting from the potential educational power of Twitter. But this is only the beginning . . .

I’ve posted a tweet linking to a page on Twitter as a learning tool, here’s the link here as well:  http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2009/01/twitter-as-personal-learning-and-work.html

I wonder about the most accurate category for Web 2.o applications such as Twitter. My questions come from my experience in a course on Second Life I’m also taking. Many educational institutions appear to view SL as simply one of a range of pedagogical tools one can apply in a “classical” classroom setting. In other words, nothing has changed about the context or environment in which learning takes place:  we simply have new (maybe better) tools.

Sure, in one sense SL and Twitter can be used as a tool. But behind that use lurks the larger issue of the ways in which maybe they are changing the learning environment itself.

As part of my experiment in living in the cloud, I’ve started to follow the Twitter version of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies cards. If you don’t know them, here’s something on the whole idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies

Hi folks, After a long absence, here I am again, working on adding more posts . . .

For my “live with your learning theory for a day” assignment, I’m living on Twitter for a day, starting today! It’s all related to Connectivism.

If you’d like to follow me, look for

impulsivenerd

Thanks!

Grant

By googling ”e-learning definition” I found a large number of defintions and discussions of defintions. The three I’ve chosen are are:

1. (Electronic-LEARNING) An umbrella term for providing computer instruction (courseware) online over the public Internet, private distance learning networks or inhouse via an intranet.

ZDNet Dictionary (http://dictionary.zdnet.com/definition/E-learning.html, accessed 4.11.2008)

2. By ‘e-learning’, we mean courses where

a) the teaching and learning process involves the use of ICT [information and communication technology].

b) there is an element of physical separation between teacher and student.

PLS Ramboll Management, Studies in the Context of the E-learning Initiative: Virtual Models of European Universities (Lot 1), February 2004, p.6.

(http://www.elearningeuropa.info/extras/pdf/virtual_models.pdf, accessed 4.11.2008)

3. “the use of information and

communications technology (ICT) to enhance and/or support learning in tertiary

education. While keeping a presiding interest in more advanced applications, elearning

refers to both wholly online provision and campus-based or other

distance-education provision supplemented with ICT in some way”. (p. 19)

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, E-learning in Tertiary Education, Where do we stand?, (2005), quoted in Petra Boezerooij, E-Learning Strategies of Higher Education Institutions, PhD dissertation, University of Twente (2006), p. 19.

(http://www.utwente.nl/cheps/documenten/thesisboezerooy.pdf, accessed 4.11.2008)

Of these three definitions, I think the ZDNet definition is the weakest. Perhaps the e-dictionary format required a very brief definition, but in this case at least I think that the definition’s brevity is a liability. It simply doesn’t provide enough description to be helpful.

The second and third definitions seem to me fairly similar to each other. At the same time, I liked the OECD definition the most because it mentions both enhancement and support of learning.

I understand the connection between distance learning and e-learning. When I first encountered e-learning in the 1990s it was presented as a solution to the problem or possibility of distance-education. However, since then it seems to me that either the distance-education dimension of e-learning has diminished, or the definition of e-learning has expanded to include ”enhancement and support of learning,” to use the OECD definition’s language. As I read materials for another course in the ePedagogy Design program, it is beginning to be clear to me that the enhancement of learning will be as important for the future of e-learning as the distance-education dimension. This is the area of e-learning that interests me the most: what are the possibilities the technologies we know now, and which will be developed in the future, offer us to deepen learning, wherever it happens?

Sources

Boezerooij, Petra. E-Learning Strategies of Higher Education Institutions. PhD dissertation, University of Twente, 2006. http://www.utwente.nl/cheps/documenten/thesisboezerooy.pdf. Accessed 4.11.2008.

PLS Ramboll Management. Studies in the Context of the E-learning Initiative: Virtual Models of European Universities (Lot 1), February 2004. http://www.elearningeuropa.info/extras/pdf/virtual_models.pdf. Accessed 4.11.2008.

ZDNet. ZDNet Dictionary. n.d. http://dictionary.zdnet.com/definition/E-learning.html. Accessed 4.11.2008.

Hi from Turku, where the autumn darkness has started to descend in earnest . . .

My first brushes with e-learning came in the form of conversations in the mid-90s about the possibility of distance learning. This was at a medium-size Protestant seminary in the American Midwest. The consensus we reached was that the investment of faculty time necessary to do an excellent job at distance learning was unrealistic given the already heavy workload the faculty carried. We knew about Blackboard, and that was about it.

When I was a faculty member at the University of Joensuu (Finland), some instructors (i.e., lecturers mostly, but perhaps some professors as well) were heavily involved in preparing material and marking essays and examinations for theology courses offered by the Open University.  These were offered in English, and it has always been something of a mystery to me why I was never approached about contributing to them.

After that, my next encounter with e-learning was when I wrote material to be used in the on-line version of the MA in Jewish-Christian Relations offered through the Center for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations (CJCR) in Cambridge, England, and Anglia Ruskin University.  As I was only an author of study materials, I didn’t actually tutor any of the history paper with which my text was associated. I did, however, teach the very same material to the residential students of the MA program during the CJCR summer school held in June 2007 and June 2008.  The CJCR has long had a distance-learning program, and is renowned for the quality of their program.

I’m also a distance-learning dissertation supervisor for the CJCR. This work has involved mostly use of e-mail, although conferences over Skype remain a possibility.

Most recently, I have been writing an on-line course on history of early Christian thought for Cambridge University’s Institute of Continuing Education. When the course goes live in September 2009 I’ll be tutoring the course.

All of this is to say that I’ve had several brushes with e-learning, but I haven’t been completely immersed in it. My experience in this seminar, in Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss’s course, and in Owen Kelly’s Second Life course, represent for me a turn to a deeper experience of e-learning. So far I’ve been pleased with the relatively painless way the technology (Skype, Second Life, blogs, streaming video, Google Calendar, Google Docs) have functioned together to make a workable learning experience.

About what makes a good or bad seminar, for me it boils down to the possibility of participation by all members of the seminar. Good moderation makes that participation possible, it seems to me.

Greetings to everyone in the seminar, from Turku! I’m writing this during the course of the first seminar meeting. I’m hearing Ralf describe the blog-creation process as I write. It was nice meeting everyone today!