Personal Learning Environment

Bolivia-Death-Road

The idea of a social object is that it is something to communicate about with possibly a place to communicate attached.

Every Wednesday The Age travel blogger, Ben Groundwater, writes a brief travel article on a topic of his choice. He has written such articles as: ‘eight truley frightening experiences’, ‘where to get food poisoning’, ‘reasons to visit New Europe’ and ‘when backpackers won’t leave’. His blog is a very good example of a SO.

He writes these articles completely subjectively, making no apologies for his opinions. Then, at the end of each article, he poses a question/s for readers to comment on. For example, at the end of ‘reasons to visit New Europe’, he asks: have you been to the ‘new Europe’? What were your highlights? Readers post their responses (in a comment box at the bottom of the article), and as comments build up, it is clear that a (disjointed) ‘conversation’ is taking place – readers also respond to other readers questions/comments (there are 54 comments so far for this article). Ben also responds to a few reader comments.

India - the one place you have to visit

I used a number of   his articles when teaching tourism to year 10 students last year. I had the students create a tour itinerary for an Indian town/city of their choice ( I am a big fan of India!!). Before starting, we read Ben’s article on the one place you have to visit. Students had to incorporate some of his ideas in their itinerary.

By using the SO in class have I transformed it into a LO?

Even after reading Ted’s description, I am still a little unsure about the definition of learning objects. Are they just digital resources that can be reused? Or do they have  to have specific outcomes/goals? Can LOs be classified as Virtual Learning Environments of are they too specific? Perhaps, as David Davies states, I should just pick my own definition that meets my needs.

Ted has suggested that ‘the idea of LOs was that it was a sequence of online learning about a particular topic or well defined part of subject content. The sequence typically was made up of some information on the topic presented in text or multimedia form, followed by an activity for the learner that reinforced the learning or concept and then sequence might have a follow up assessment of the learning and maybe some sort of feedback to the learner on how they went in the assessment’.

I have italicised what I believe to be the key terms: information, activity, assessment and feedback. So, if a resource only has information and an activity, does it still constitute a LO? If I create an assessment from the information is it now a LO?

I found a site that has a list of reusable learning object repositories. It is an extensive list. I have had a look at a few of them and found some good and some not so good examples of LOs. I did a quick search for a LO on Human Population Growth. The first one covers  the relevant steps of an LO outlined above, however most of the links to external sites are no longer valid. The second is more up-to-date and uses a great interactive ‘game‘. Basically, students use the game to work through the handouts and answer questions. Can this be classified as an LO?

I can definitely see the usefulness of Learning Objects, but there appears to be a lot of ‘filtering’ that needs to happen in order to find relevant LOs (and ones that actually work!).

In the words of the Virtual Scholastic, there are accessible resources out there, produced by people with subject expertise and a genuine intention to share information with the world. Take advantage!

I am making my way through this article by P. Dillenbourg entitled ‘Virtual Learning Environments’. Thought I might post bits of the article which I find particularly interesting. This is a good introduction to VLEs which highlights the importance of social interaction (both synchronous and asynchronous):

‘A book can hardly be described as a learning environment. But, reading a book in a seminar, discussing with other students, writing a summary for the tutor, … do constitute a learning environment. Similarly, a set of Web pages does not constitute a virtual learning environment unless there is social interaction about or around the information. This includes synchronous (e.g. chat, MUDs…) versus asynchronous (e.g. electronic mail, forums,) communication, one-to-one versus one-to-many or many-to-many, text-based versus audio and video, … (see section 2.3). This includes also indirect communication such as sharing objects.’

If I judged this Edublogs page by the definition above, it could not be classified as a VLE. It IS a personal learning environment (PLE) as it supports my own learning but not necessarily the learning of other people. However, as Ted explains, it is very difficult to define VLEs and PLEs.

Perhaps as I reflect more on the article I will come up with my own definition of these terms. Any thoughts on this?

I have never used podcasts before this week. I do have iTunes so I searched for podcasts relevant to my subject areas and I was amazed at the number of podcasts. There are many that I could easily use in the class. For example, I taught a unit on Tourism in year 10 Geography. One of the key areas we looked at was the many negative impacts tourism has on people and the environment. It was quite difficult finding up-to-date case studies. However, I found a number of podcasts that I could have used which discuss the impact of tourism on people and the environment.

I can see the benefits of using other peoples podcasts, but not too sure about creating my own for students. I managed to create a podcast which I have embedded on the right hand side of this page. Alternatively, you can follow this link to the Podomatic page of the podcast. I have not gone past the basics with podcasts yet so perhaps as I learn more, I will feel more comfortable with creating and using podcasts (still haven’t figured out how to create a podcast feed. Any help would be much appreciated!)

According to Shawn Wheeler, ‘students learn best when we tell them what they are going to learn, tell them the information and then tell them what they have learned.’ He argues that this is difficult to achieve in a 50 minute class, hence the benefits of podcasting. If its important for the class to hear information, then it makes sense that it is important for them to hear it again. This is where podcasts come in. Wheeler is definitely keen on this idea of students being able to hear important information again. There are many benefits of podcasting, these include:

# For lectures

# To facilitate self-paced learning

# For interviews with external resources

# To offer advanced and or highly motivated learners extra content

# For distance learning

# To allow guest speakers to present once to many classes

# To feature guest speakers from remote locations

# For helping students with reading and/or other disabilities

# To offer a richer learning environment

# For multi-lingual education

# To communicate with your community

Many students will benefit from having access to podcasts of lessons. These are students that have difficulty paying attention, students with reading and writing issues and students that have missed classes. Also, I can see how getting students to create their own podcasts could have a really positive impact on their learning.

The difficulty is that it would appear to create a lot more work for the teacher, having to create a lesson and then ‘teach’ it before the actual class. Although, you could record your lesson while teaching it and then make it available to students after class. Then there is the issue of background noise and other factors that may disrupt the recording.

I can really see the benefits for upper secondary students. For example, students who miss a VCE class often struggle to catch up so having lessons as podcasts that they can listen to would save time (and energy).

Anyone have any good ideas about how to use podcasts in schools?

Last year I taught year 12 Geography. One of the major topics was the importance of water to Australia, with a particular focus on the Murray-Darling Basin. Issues surrounding water use are very contentious and consistently in the news. I used to trawl through different news websites looking for the best and most relevant information, often without finding any.

Google News is a good site to use as it gathers articles from many Australian and international papers. A quick search of Murray-Darling Basin offered countless articles, from a range of sources (ABC Online, The Australian, Shepparton News, etc.). I added this as a favourite topic and then subscribed to it so it feeds directly on to this blog.

There are many benefits of this. It not only saves me a lot of time, but it also allows me to get information from sources I would normally not use (i.e. Shepparton News). There are, of course, many benefits for the students as well. Having most of their information on the one site and being able to scan through headlines for relevancy are just two important benefits.

I think RSS like this could really work in a classroom. Has anyone used feeds with their students? How well does it work?

The last week has been spent getting RSS feeds up and running on my blog. I have never used feeds before so I am grateful for Ted’s instructions. In hindsight, I would not have chosen Edublogs due to the fact they make it very difficult to organise feeds on your page. I am glad that I am not alone in finding this difficult. It seems as though Edublogs wants people to upgrade (for a fee of course) in order to be able to use the full range of services. From Ted’s short video, it is clear that using blogger or wordpress is easier as there is a ‘feeds/RSS’ widget that can simply be dragged to the sidebar and a link location pasted in. I have gone through Google Reader which is working so far though the reader settings options are limited. I also changed my theme, like others in the subject, in order to have three columns to make the blog easier to navigate.

I have been wondering about the implications of using RSS in the classroom. I skimmed through D’Souza’s article on ‘RSS Ideas for Educators’ but nothing really stood out. Perhaps someone could share their knowledge/understanding of the article. Thanks to Gillian, I was able to read RSS for Educators. A few parts of this presentation were particularly interesting.

According to the presentation, RSS is all about participation, networking and community. I agree with this up to a point, but doesn’t it depend on how you define these terms? For instance, I looked at a few definitions of community to see if the use of RSS matches. Here is one: a social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage. An online community does not appear to match up to this definition. In saying that, students in the same class do share many of the aspects mentioned in the definition. Perhaps we need a whole new definition of community which includes cyber/online environments. I haven’t worked this out yet, but I am interested in what the implications are of using technologies, such as RSS, in the classroom.

At the moment I just can’t link the use of RSS with the term community…yet. Aren’t we losing the cultural and heritage aspects of community? Does anyone have any thoughts on the social implications of using blogs, wikis, nings, etc. in the classroom?

I realise I have not looked into the practical implication of the aforementioned technologies yet. Perhaps when I do my views will shift. I am interested in being able to create a feed for what is in the daily news about a particular topic. I think this could be particularly useful and I will give this a try soon.

This is my trial edublog for creating a personal learning environment. I am sure that as this subject progresses, I will hopefully be able to utlilise this blog to create an engaging, user-friendly and ‘flexible’ learning environment.