I visited here and realised that the edudemic has begun. Popular educational publishers are now getting the marketing edge by providing books in iBook format for the iPad savvy juniors in schools in Victoria. Now we will definitely need to be ready for a change in the way elearners will expect their reference content when they reach tertiary.

Actually I really like the idea of a one device fits all approach to resources. We’ve tried the USB – files on a stick; we’ve tried cloud – sharing now lets just put everything at their fingertips.

Wondering how the ibooks on demand publishing approach will  enable cost savings for learners. Schools in Victoria are already rising to that challenge – some providing mandatory iPads for year 7 & 8 students with iBooks preloaded.

The often used strategy of submitting assessments may change to publishing work using a whole range of tools, apps available for publishing. This would enable the much needed skill development of content curation in a structured but self-directed way for our adult learners undertaking higher studies and creating artefacts and evidence of learning for their eportfolios.

The need for teachers to provide content in written format would change. eg ibook Writer enables the creation and publshing of teacher generated content. Not just a ‘book’ module in Moodle (non-transferrable) but a published iBook accessible anywhere, anytime by many. (I will now explore the iBook Writer).

…. A new direction and a welcome change for instructional designers – an iBook edudemic ….

This posting piqued my interest and I thank the blogger Connie Malamed of the elearning Coach blog, for some provocative postings.

Thanks Connie for making me think a little deeper about the whole idea of ‘blended elearning’ with this section of your recent posting. So whilst I do wish to reply to Connie with my observations on the entire post, I wanted to focus on the blended elearning approach segment here in my own blog.

New Blended Learning

Blended or hybrid learning came about because one eLearning course is often not the solution to an organization’s or an individual’s learning needs. Until recently, blended referred to a learning experience that included both instructor-led and online self-paced components. But that was a long time ago in Internet Time.

Now that live synchronous instruction frequently occurs online and that opportunities for individualized learning abound, the definition of blended learning is expanding to include any number of strategies, from learning through a community of practice to mobile performance support. For example, someone might attend a workplace webinar on how people learn, then participate in a video-based Google+ hangout with a cognitive psychologist, and join a LinkedIn community of instructional designers to discuss the application of these ideas.

There is an obvious  advantage to this breadth of thinking—it better meets the needs of learners. It enables designers to think in unlimited terms about what makes an effective learning experience and to consider that learning is an ongoing process rather than a discrete one. See Expanding the Instructional Designer’s Role above.

Now it’s your turn. What trends are you observing? Comment below.

Meeting the needs of the learners is one half of the equation – matching the design and delivery style of the tutor is the other.

Today whilst conducting a workshop for teachers new to Moodle, it really became an important issue to focus on the  strengths, strategies and comfort zones of the teachers and then selecting the Moodle design process for their courses to complement that style.

Moodle mentoring will feature frequently in my roles this year and I have been giving the approach to training a great deal of thought and effort. I strongly believe that we need to ‘model’ a blended learning approach and be explicit about how all the pieces fit together for the teacher/learners as they experience the learning for themselves. One program I designed involved a simple blend of f2f workshops, any time discussions and frequent online workshops – giving the teacher/learners 12 hours of concentrated experience in designing blends for their own learers.

MOOC design is also featuring in my work role and I’m collaborating with a small team in designing a ‘managed open online course’ in googlesites that will enable ‘new’ e-learners to master essential e-skills before enrolling in any blended learning opportunities. So the question arises again, How to choose a blend to ‘‘better meet the needs of learners“? What will make effective learning experiences for these learners? How to enthuse and not confuse? How to empower and not disempower? How to support and encourage self-direction?

I’d be happy to hear from you about your suggestions. The first unit to be developed will provide learning opportunities for ‘communicating and networking online’.

What are the learner’s requirements for this essential eskill?

Clark clarifies the layering in life learning – meta elearning, concepts, performance support – he says ‘start making learning visible’ and embracing ‘learning out loud’. Showing the thinking helps us to internalise, synthesise and unpack through our filters. I agree with that and find that by ‘walking through a process’ with a newlearner showing my thinking will help them find the pattern they need.
Quinn says: “Humans are really good at pattern matching learning but not good at rote processing for problem solving” – advice – use augmentation to assist in filling that ‘gap’ – a learning GPS to help reach our destination. (Note: I think that Siri on the new iPhone is structured to do this – to me that sounds a little spooky.) However I do hear the expression ‘there’s an App for that’ more often now, especially now that I chat with many other iPad users. so maybe this is part of the new landscape of learning for the next few years. I know that having an iPad for my computing has helped me change and probably has changed my brain forever. (smiles)

Okay now we are viewing Quinn’s Performer in the centre – a diagram that shows learning activities on a continuum from reflective to active; formal to informal.
Noted the question from an audience member about not following and wanting Quinn to summarise his thinking about learning right now. (Having read Quinn’s blog posts prior to listening to him was helpful to me – my understanding is flowing – this emphasised the need for different ways for different learners to learn.)
Interesting to see Quinn talk about the difference to the learner and what he/she does after the learning moment, using the mobile learning device as an example. Mobile device can ‘locate’ you in your learning space and put things into context so that the learning is ‘captured’. (Note: I notice more and more of my Apps ask me do I wish to show my location – I usually say no. I notice many other Tweets that identify where the tweeter is – is that helpful? Does it make a difference to what i capture?  I don’t know yet?)
Improvements in the design elegance of the web shows the current technical sophistication that we are learning with – from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 intrigues me – this is the future and how do we prepare for that? Personally I am a big advocate of user-generate content. I am in agreement with the comments coming through that we need to help newlearners to learn gradually and feel confidently prepared for how they will ‘learn to learn’ in the future. Adaptation springs to mind as I contemplate the Web 3.0 system-generated content …. plus I need someone to explain what the semantic web really means.
(Note: I am in complete agreement with the audience comment about self-directed learning – as opposed to directed learning.)

Stephen’s comment made me smile:
Stephen Downes
4:44 AM
That’s the tourist analogy – been using that for years – informal learning is like touring a city on your own… formal learning is like being kidnapped and taken some place you don’t want to go.

A thought in my mind is now ‘ensure that I ask my newlearners where do you want to go’?

Whoa, now we straying into the ‘sublime’ as Quinn shares his diagram where the Intelligent Learning Engine is at the centre. Sounds more like Cyborg stuff to me at the moment – but I need to remain open minded – maybe this is the model of ‘brain plug-ins’ that I have long desired.

Aha I heard Quinn use the ‘stealth mentor’ phrase – pausing and reviewing to check – yes, he did, try being the anaylst underneath to find out what happens to the learning and the learner when certain pathways are chosen. Help the learner to instinctively make the appropriate choices.

This brings me to the central issue that I am grappling with right now – ‘change by stealth’. Now I need to change my thinking from being about the Sage on the Side to being the ‘stealth mentor’ and how that might help me provide the right amount of guidance at the right time.

I liked this comment from Mike in the audience:
Mark McGuire
4:51 AM
@Stephen Downes That sounds good. Learning how to understand the morph, coming to terms with something that never takes a fixed form – a shape-shifting world in which our environment is in constant flux, and we are constantly changing through our engagement with it.

This resonated for me as a way of describing what it is that an stealth mentor needs to do and how they can pass that on to the newlearners. What’s your take on ‘stealth mentoring’?

Q.1. Is Moodle 2.0 alive and well at your place?

First thing I needed to do was enrol in the course at M4TAll to do the Advanced Moodle course with my tutor/mentor Ludmila Smirnova – a previous tutor from a couple of years ago. This will provide me with a ‘learning circle’ with whom I can bounce ideas off and brainstorm on course design for my project. We need a great model to inspire us and opportunities for co-designing our own Moodle sandpit. We need clear instructions and relevant activities; we need meaningful discussions with other participants and we need to be able to focus on our ‘project’ as we proceed through the course. My project is based on the need to provide an easy, engaging and fun course in Moodle for a group of teachers who are first time users of LMS. I am confident that Moodle will ‘do it for them’ as it is easy to use, easy to navigate and easy to create.

Q.2. How do you keep currency of competency as a Moodle instructor?

So its buckets and spades out again as I explore the latest trends in how to set up another engaging Moodle course.

I want to also take into consideration the ‘new’ way of co-constructing content so that I don’t fall into the trap of just uploading a whole bunch of resources and expecting the learner to learn from them

What I need to do is make it fail-safe for new Moodlers to:

• understand the model of creating an interactive course where the learners are free to co-construct content as they go
• identify and use the relevant Moodle tools that enable the learners to collaborate, communicate, facilitate and cooperate
• master the art of creating a blended learning course which uses Moodle, Blackboard Collaborate and a bunch of web 2.0 tools.
• get it – to make it relevant for the creation of their own courses.

So that could be the start of my model for the Moodle course.

Q.3. What model do you use for your professional development in training others in Moodle?

Okay, now I have a starting point – I will use this to begin my framing of the Moodle experience for my new Moodlers.

This is the first blog post for my reflections on the course Moodle for Teachers –
Advanced Workshop (M4T-A)

…. later in the week ….

Now I have come up with a framework for the Moodle training for Teachers and it looks like this!

Q.4. Does this make sense to you? How could it be improved?

ConVerge11

ConVerge is a Victorian state based Innovation Showcase and Conference that has been running for 9 years or so to celebrate and acknowledge the work of the new tribes of ‘first followers’. This term was a new one I heard during Nancy White’s session on the ups and downs, or was that upside down.

Here’s my take on that inspiring keynote:

social reporting in sketches

AND

social reporting from another perspective

• disruption and disjunction leads us to more engaging education and innovative access to knowledg
• AHA moments need to be increased to maintain momentum
• unlearning things can help us become competent
• do more with less – the BCF modeol – Better, Cheaper, Faster
• do the RE: thing for refreshing elearning: re-examine current learning practices; reframe your perceptions; re-ignite your passions; re-define your changes
• drop the ‘e’
• ensure portability, accessibility
• build in process not bolt on
• ensure e-learner e-skills competencies
• use a learner centred approach – seek skills needs, device needs, location preferences and provide alternatives eg workshop, induction, online, content, communication and self-directed learning
• biggest threat is relevance – ensure you have that with interactivity
• avoid the COO – chief obstruction officer (busy building bigger firewalls)
• LMS is dead, viva la revolution, move beyond
• avoid the Moodle templates from hell
• remember that social learning is what people do together, not what you make them do
• use google tools for clarity, sanity and objectivity
• the future is in the convergence in the cloud
• success factors: student friendly content; scaffolded teacher support; integrated testing
• simplify and amplify
• navigate to educate

Great to see so many of the early adopters bringing along their first followers – we have a new beginning!

Much of the above may not be new but we are now seeing these things through the lens of others to bring in a new perspective.

VIVA LA REVOLUTION

Note: if you wanna be in with the crowd – gotta have an iPad or iPhone and Tweet – for popular back channelling at live conferences.

I believe we all agree that it is both fashionable and educational to keep up-to-date with trends in social networking using our favourite tools. Then we end up with several places to visit online and leave our digital trail. For a new person to e-learning this can be confusing and distracting. We need a way of including micro-blogging and social networking and reflective practice in a blog – all in the one place. There is a gap between social networking and learning spaces. We need to ‘go where the students are’ – Twitter, Facebook and Blogs.

This week I’ve been exploring how well HootCourse can fill this gap.

My new ‘one place’ (googlesite) is being developed as a portal for an e-skills program and I have embedded the Hootcourse code directly onto the home page. (Note: this site is currently under construction – more news on that soon.)

Participants in the e-skills program will be able to send ‘hoots’ (140 character messages with the #eskillsmooc hashtag automatically built in) directly to both Twitter and Facebook from a panel on the googlesite.

Digging a little deeper into this beta version of http://HootCourse.com I discover that the user can also choose to send a post to their designated blog page using the Essay tool rather than the Tweet tool. Now the potential for this clever HootCourse service is really filling the gap. Participants will be able to send their reflections on their e-skills learning directly to a Bloggger, WordPress or other blog site directly from the e-skills googlesite – a true one stop shop!

This posting was constructed in HootCourse and automatically posted to my blog. No image input tool yet, but enables formatting and linking. The title area of the posting doubles as a status update that goes directly to Facebook.

Still working out how to get it to display in Twitter – but I’m impressed so far!

Oh, and by the way you can set up additional HootCourses which are displayed in your dashboard as well as create RSS feeds directly from the courses.

This little tool is helping me change the way I think about developing massive and mini open online courses!

Giving myself the entire hour to listen, absorb, observe, notate and think whilst Nancy provided one of her ‘outlier’ sessions. This is what I did!

I got my trusty portable white board and propped it beside my desk and as I listened I began to take notes as a ‘social reporter’ giving due attention to the ‘drawing’ style that Nancy herself recommended for the many real time participants in the Blackboard Collaborate virtual room. The picture you see above is the result of my ‘scribing and drawing’ for that hour (oh well sure I was able to pause and check for understanding,  and it might have taken me an hour and a half).

Inspiration point 1:  read again this engaging book by the author of the Tipping Point and Blink.

You’ll note that at the point early in the piece where someone described Nancy as an ‘exceptional outlier’ I was able to just reach to my bookshelf and take down my own copy of ‘Outliers: the story of success by Malcolm Gladwell’.

If you click on the image and read it from left to right you’ll get my perception of this session on ‘change and what it means to you’ through my lens and aided by some creative thinking on the board. You will notice some of the QUOTES and discussion pieces that leapt off the whiteboard and chat space for me. For example this one from  @suifaijonmak – ‘the more I listen to various networkers the more I want to know and share’, and these from @brainysmurf – ‘MOOCs = tremendous self-controlled learning’, and ‘managing the ‘chaos’ is part of the self-control in a MOOC’.

Then there were some right off the whiteboard itself where they had been scribed by participants. For example: ‘change leads to divergent thinking’ and ‘love the silence to ponder the What just happened? or What was said’. Words of wisdom and expressions of passion for change were demonstrated throughout the session and Nancy ‘facilitated’ with ease enabling a ‘whole group collaboration’ on the topic that was meaningful and engaging. This type of ‘brain stretching’ and ‘chaos causing’ with disruptive learning is what helps me to stay focussed.

I aim to be a better SOCIAL REPORTER in my reflections and a better SOCIAL ARTIST in my networking.

You’ll notice I also picked my copy of ‘Digital Habitats’ right off the shelf when I saw a reference to the book co-authored by Nancy, Etienne Wenger and John D.Smith.

Inspiration point 2: re-read Chapter 12 on Learning Agenda to stretch my notion of community and what it is to be a technology steward.

Inspiration point 3: I also took note of the URL provided in the CHAT and will be taking a closer look at Etienne Wenger’s new work by reading the blogs of David Wilcox on Social Reporting. and watching this video.

So by listening to Nancy I end up listening and learning from David around a ‘new to me’ concept of ‘social reporting’ – and unpacking it for how to do that well for my communities.

… and now for a closeup of that whiteboard for Nancy ….

I have been viewing some excellent and thought provoking slidedecks from Stephen Downes over at Slideshare and this one in particular has prompted some of this questioning: connectivist learning. This slide in particular has resonated for me as a way to describe how e-learning has changed my brain and my life.

“We are using one of these … to create one of these”!

I agree absolutely with this and I can now explain the changes I have experienced through the networking part of e-learning and how they have impacted on what I do and what I think. Thank you Stephen.

I can genuinely say that my network connections are wide and deep and provide me with all of the answers and more of the questions I need to ask to help others build their own e-capability. I no longer have to wait for discussions and conversations to happen at a face-to-face meeting, although they still do provide the added benefits of collective and collaborative instant brainstorming. My discussions and conversations are mostly held online in community networks, course forums, social networks, text and chat messages. When I wish to find a solution to an e-learning issue; when I have a question about best practices in project processes; and when I need to keep up-to-date with what’s happening in the e-learning environment for adult learners – I need to go online and use my networks, my connections, my curations and my colleagues to find the answers. My online personal learning network guides my daily practices.

Incredibly I can usually find a link, an article, a tweet or a comment about the issue I am thinking about by just allowing them to filter into my personal web spaces. Invariably – whenever I am there – something, some one thing, will pop up and lead me to a place where the answers exist. I am constantly amazed at how this happens on a daily basis – is this the law of ‘virtual’ attraction? I have learned to trust this instinctive way of connecting and networking – that’s where my brain has changed – plus I have patience to await the return on this investment of my time.
Does any of this make sense to you? What do you do differently now that you have a personal learning network?

The way I learn has changed too – I am much more likely to engage in a Massive open online course than enrol in a short course facilitated online. I have confidence in directing my own learning and enjoy the freedom of choice in selecting the learning path. That is not for everyone of course, but it certainly is for me and many others who embrace the MOOC way of learning. So with this new knowledge I aim to explore other blended MOOC models for developing e-capability for those I e-mentor.

So what has changed in me? How have I reached this plateau? The answer lies in my Networking; Experiences; Immersion and Connections!

What has changed for you?

Scoop It curations on or about eportfolios are plentiful right now; I’ve gathered a few together for your enjoyment.

• Eportfolios curated by Lee Ballantyne: http://www.scoop.it/t/e-portfolios 
• Eportfolios curated by Heath Sawyer: http://www.scoop.it/t/eportfolios 
• Eportfolios world wide curated by Ray Tolley: http://www.scoop.it/t/eportfolios-worldwide 
• Mahara Eportfolios curated by Sigi Jakob: http://www.scoop.it/t/mahara-eportfolio 
• Eportfolio Examples curated by Ray Tolley: http://www.scoop.it/t/eportfolios-examples 
• Preparing to be a self-directed learner curated by Coach Carole: http://www.scoop.it/t/preparing-to-be-a-self-directed-learner

Create a Scoop It! for yourself on any topic at: http://www.scoop.it

Please add a comment with other Scoop It! curations on eportfolios or self-directed learning or join my Scoop Its!

As researchers, we need to fully understand collective learning processes, the factors that affect these, and the emergent nature of collective learning. As practitioners, we have to face the challenges around whether collective learning can be planned, structured, and managed. As learners, we have to understand the inter-relationships between individual and the collective.

My recent experiences with the EpCoP MOOC gave me a headstart in my thinking about collective learning. It is now my belief that collective learning can be planned, structured and managed. We need to have essential ingredients such as a design team willing to working collaboratively, a collective understanding of the purpose of our planning and designing and a common goal as delivery facilitators.

• We need to have a sponsored project that pushes the design and development along at a pace that enables participants to gather their enthusiasm, their committment and their follow through over a reasonable stretch of time.
• We need to employ the technology tools that enable collaboration, communication and creation and that each person is comfortable in each of those domains.
• We need a project management approach to ensure that timelines were met and deliverables and outcomes achieved on time and in budget.
• We need a cohort of learners who are eager to engage in the learning journey about the collective learning topic.
• We need plausible and meaningful measures of activity, success and outcomes and innovative methods of sourcing feedback and testimonials along with a wrap up procedure to provide closure for the experience.
• We need the stamina and ingenuity to see the project through and to ensure that we capture the experience as a reflective practice from launch to closure.

But most of all we need the collective learning of all participants to shape, change, validate, verify, engage and evaluate the total experience quite transparently and openly.

A big thank you to all of our EpCoP MOOC collective!