Month: February 2014

Feasibility of Personal Learning Environments

Usually when I try to convince people to look into PLEs, I get the same general questions/concerns. These are usually along the lines of “how will the separate systems ever communicate with each other?”, or “how will this scale?”, or “how would you do assessment in this model?” These are all very good questions, but potential also ones that are barking up the wrong tree so to say.

I get it that someone might wonder how one learner will use WordPress, another Drupal, another Twitter, another Instagram, etc – and somehow these will magically come together and no one will get lost. People had the same questions about setting up an LMS, a registration system, an email server, and a whole host of other separate programs at Universities in the 1990s. It didn’t seem like those systems would ever work together, but people figured out how and now people barely have to consider things like “how does this integrate with our student tracking system?” In other words, we created the system that we wanted, and the technology came to us as needed. There are many projects out there that are creating the integration needed to create PLEs, so we are part of the way there and getting all the way there fast.

And to be honest, if some websites don’t want to to be open – like, say Facebook continues down a path of containing your information rather than liberating it – then they just won’t get to play in the PLE sandbox of the future. That’s why you don’t see Wikimedia being installed on too many campuses – they didn’t want to play the “systems integration game,” so they were mostly left out.

Questions about scalability and assessment really dig more into course design than tool integration. These are still good topics to consider, because you do want the tools to be there. But, you have to answer these questions with a huge caveat. PLEs are not LMSs, and LMSs tend to push instruction towards certain epistemologies/ontologies that are very different from the basic epistemology/ontology behind PLEs. LMSs are really based on behaviorist/objectivist viewpoints: stimulus and response. You broadcast the correct content and reward the students for correctly spitting it back at you. Occasionally LMS tools can also dip into cognitivism, where learning is an internal process and you can tell learning is happening based on the papers that learners write to prove it.

PLEs are social constructivist/connectivist in nature. Learning is constructed by connecting with other learners and creating new shared knowledge. So when asking about scalability or assessment, you have to make sure that you are not trying to force PLEs into an LMSs mold. Sure, it is possible to create a PLE-based lesson that still ends with a multiple choice standardized test, but what you essentially did is re-arrange the elements of an LMS to look more like a PLE without really embracing the PLE mindset.

So, yes questions about assessment and scalability are important, but only if you are looking at them from a social constructivist/connectivist view point. Examining questions from a behviorist/objectivist or even cognitivist viewpoint will never give you satisfactory answers, because the entire idea does not really support the paradigm you are coming from. Asking “how will this scale when I have to teach 120 students” is objectivist in nature. Asking “how will I grade 120 papers?” is cognitivist in nature. Asking “how does this support connections between all of the groups that will be created when we bring 120 students together?” is a social constructivist question, and a good one to ask of any PLE system that you try to set up.

WebRTC and Personal Learning Environments

If you haven’t heard of WebRTC, the low down is that it “is an API definition being drafted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to enable browser-to-browser applications for voice calling, video chat, and P2P file sharing without plugins.” But it not just an idea – Ted Curran points out many working uses of WebRTC that you can just plug into your website and set up all of the above in a snap.

Now imagine connecting these ideas to the Personal Learning Environment. The idea of of a PLE can now expand just beyond content and publishing tools. Someday you might not even need to care whether you decide to use Skype, Google Hangouts, or any other big company tool de jour. You would set-up your own F2F communication interface on your website and then start interacting with others in whatever tool they use (or their web site). Certainly this is not a new idea, just one that needs more awareness.

Between WebRTC, APIs, RSS, Domain of One’s Own, and host of other tools, we are getting closer to the idea of the browser being the LMS or Learning Environment of the future (although I may be the only one that calls it that – and I just do it to help admin types understand). This may seem like a moot point to some that are happy with Blackboard and other large companies, but for those that get theory, it will be a tectonic shift from being chained to focusing on what the tools can do (because the tools are so inflexible) to truly being able to focus on the learner and/or learning experience. Instructors – how much time do you spend explaining how to use technology tools vs the amount of time you spend focusing on what students are learning? If you are like most I work with, you spend most of your time explaining again and again how and where to upload assignments, mainly due to confusing systems. Imagine what it will be like when students create their own learning environment that interfaces with yours with ease and you can worry more about actual learning?

2014: The Make or Break Year for MOOCs and Big Data?

So I know in the past that I have tried everything from serious predictions of the immediate future to crazy futurist predictions of the next decade to mocking the whole idea of predicting the future (how long can gaming be 1-2 years from emerging anyways?). I debated whether I should do anything for 2014, especially since there were several good predictions out there already.

Being a bit pf a pragmatist myself, I think the future of online learning is a bit less predictable than it has been in the past. Online learning is certainly on the radars of a lot more people than it was a few years ago, but many of those people are not happy at all with what they are seeing in MOOCs. I would point out that many of the problems that people are seeing with MOOCs deals more with administrative mismanagement of implementation and funding than with the actual idea. If you are really dropping $150,000-300,000 per class to develop a MOOC, then you missed the whole point of the idea in the first place.

For me, I am not really convinced that MOOCs are going to bounce back OR die completely. What I really think is that, as a field, Ed Tech is in uncharted waters here and we really don’t know where we are heading next. So it is hard to say what will happen. I think 2014-2015 will be make or break years for open learning (and big data for that matter). Will we emerge from the valley of disillusionment? I don’t think we really have any clue to know for sure or not. Will MOOCs fade off into the Google Wave sunset, with a promise that the good core ideas will survive… but then they really don’t? I don’t know if we know that for certain, either.

I do think we have a good break with all of this dissatisfaction to jump into the conversation and say “yes, this whole idea of business ideas and MOOCs is horrible, but here are the things about open learning that are good (and have been good since ancient times)”. But let’s face it, too many people sat on their rears trying to play nice with the new xMOOCs for the last few years, and if that happens again we’ll all continue to get lumped in the same category with capitalist ventures that are declared failures by their own creators.

For me, I am still going to be championing the less popular ideas that need more attention, like Heutagogy, Sociocultural theory, Learning and Teaching as Communicative Actions, taking control of your Digital Identity, and rethinking learning design to be truly online and not just digitized classrooms. My main prediction for 2014 is that these ideas will continue to be ignored while other fancier, shinier ideas get championed by the cool Ed Tech kids :)