Fixing a hole

This is it. The course ended, I still have one blog to write, and I just don't seem to find enough time to write it... A little slot here and another there...

Used under Creative Commons Licence CC0.

Source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/red-apple-fruit-with-hole-161615/

At the beginning of ONL, three months ago, I hoped—no, I anticipated—that this journey would be magical. And it was. And quite a ride it was too. Finding sufficient time for all the course activities was a challenging juggling act between professional and family life. How rapidly time flew.

Right from the beginning, I realised that there were gaping holes in my knowledge on things online. I had read about digital literacy, digital natives, and creative commons without sacrificing much thought to understanding what the terms really meant. The apprehensions I had about being online and sharing information with the cyberpublic were shared by many of my coursemates, as was evident from the numerous course blogs and blog comments I read.  Obviously this course was going to help me fix those holes. Reading up on digital literacy began dispelling my unfounded fears, the first of many holes fixed. Sara Mörtsell's webinar (2017) and the video resources by David White opened my eyes to what digital literacies entail, the skills and knowledge required to navigate and reside 'safely' online, how we can use the Creative Commons Licence to share information online... Our PBL group work deepened this knowledge. My mind began wandering, exploring the possibilities of 'civilised' use of the seemingly endless resources on the Internet. This was just the prelude to what was to come.

Teresa MacKinnon's webinar on open education along with the resources on sharing and openness was the next logical step, naturally. Her tale of how she became an 'open practitioner' was intriguing and exciting. This was my first real glimpse to what sharing and openness online could be. It wasn't just about sharing things or files containing information, music or videos as I narrow-mindedly thought, it was about sharing knowledge, expertise, experience, networks...! I now heard of slideshare.net for the first time. I was now fixing a large crack in my preconception of what sharing was. The sharing I had dabbled in with my university colleagues was anything but... By this time I had what I thought was a healthy awareness of the what, why and how of online presence and the digital footprint left. I'm not very literate digitally yet, but I've come  long way from when I began this course.

Alec Couros's webinar on openness and collaborative learning blew my mind. Seeing what can be achieved through open collaboration on the Internet even with total strangers was unbelievable. Lots of people are good, and they want to do good things because they are good, which shows in the achievements when people collaborate. The group work we engaged in made distinctions between cooperation and collaboration, words I thought were practically synonyms in the context of learning and teaching. Realising the difference between the two changed the way we worked in our group from cooperating (dividing the workload, working individually on our own little piece, and finally putting the lot together) to collaborating (dividing and working on the our own piece as before, but now commenting on each others work making it evolve before putting the lot together). This topic made the biggest impression on me.

The webinar on design for online and blended learning by Martha Cleveland-Innes and Stefan Stenblom along with the other resources made me understand that when building an online course one needs to pay a great deal of attention to how encourage interaction and engagement between participants and between participants and teachers that lead to collaboration, perhaps even more than for a 'normal' course. Looking at course design through the lens of social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence brought structure to course design both normal and online. It explained why ONL was implemented the way it was. I realised that I had unknowingly followed a lot of the advice in the resources on this topic when designing my normal courses, which created the illusion in my mind that our group work would be a breeze. However, at least for me, it turned out that this was in many ways the most difficult group assignment; so many abstract concepts to be worked into a concrete presentation, how differently and perhaps vaguely we understood what we wanted to do as a group, so little time to work... Nonetheless, the resulting presentation was our best, I thought. A result of great collaboration and different points of view.

The last webinar brought on a feeling of loss, of longing, of gratefulness for having been able to participate. It also left a feeling of hope and gain: gain in the sense that I now have a community of great people, particularly my PBL group mates, to whom I can turn to when in need just like they can turn to me when in need. I now have a personal learning network, whose importance is immeasurable, as stressed many times during this course.

So, where do I go from here? Presently I don't have teaching obligations, at least not the kind where I have full responsibility for what is taught and how, so I cannot apply directly what I have learned. I can try and influence my colleagues to go online, and there is pressure from the system for them to do so. I can also try to convince my peers to engage in openness, but I know I have a long and winding road ahead of me on that score. However, I can take a few concrete steps myself. I can openly share the teaching material I have created, and I can encourage my colleagues to participate in the next ONL. And, perhaps, time permitting I could volunteer as a co-facilitator.

References

Sara Mörtsell, Webinar on digital literacies. 21 February 2017. https://connect.sunet.se/p3sh16fn392/?proto=true

David White. Visitors and residents (part 1).10 March 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watchv=sPOG3iThmRI&feature=youtu.be

David White. Visitors and residents: Credibility (part 2). 10 March 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO569eknM6U&feature=youtu.be

Teresa MacKinnon. Open education. 9 March 2017. https://connect.sunet.se/p4w69agso07/

Alec Couros. Collaborative learning. 22 March 2017. https://opennetworkedlearning.wordpress.com/onl171-course-activities/topic-3-learning-in-communities-networked-collaborative-learning/

Martha Cleveland-Innes and Stefan Stenblom. Design for online and blended learning. 4 April 2017.
slides: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_GGSq3gROWfOG10elZVUHpaY0E/view

Because...

Photo credit: Paul Brennan. Used under Creative Commons licence CC0.
Source: https://pixabay.com/p-2089836/?no_redirect

Because you want your students to have an educational experience..., you need social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence.

Because you want social presence..., you get your students to know each other; you get to know your students; they get to know you; you engage with them; you create a safe environment for your students to try, experiment, fail, succeed...

Because you want cognitive presence..., you want your students to actively engage in activities that cause new knowledge to be built upon existing knowledge, you want them to attach meaning to their learning...

Because you want teaching presence..., you carefully think out the content of your course, separate the core from the nice-to-know; you carefully plan every activity, classwork, group work, homework, assignments...; you dream out different scenarios on how you give feedback to both your active and easy students and to the less active and less easy ones too; you take pains to ensure that what you assess and how is aligned with what the students learn during the course; you... oh, you do a lot of things, so many and so much that when you do it all you wonder how you managed to do all of it.

You've done a lot of this, implemented a lot of these concepts—flipped class, constructive alignment, the lot—into your courses over the years in your traditional face-to-face class knowingly after having read the literature, say an edition of the the so-called must-read by Biggs and Tang, or unknowingly through trial and error or a moment of epiphany.

Because you succeeded in creating an educational experience for your students, and possibly for yourself too in the process, it blew your mind...

Because you worked your butt off and still you didn't quite achieve what you wanted to even though what exactly it is you wanted evaded you, it made you cry...

Because your institution is now short on funds, because you have less time than ever, because students don't attend your class sufficiently, because it's the latest trend, because..., you must implement your course online as a MOOC, or as a blended course... it turns you on.

You took an online course to get ideas on how to construct your own online course, and in the bargain you learnt a lot more, things you didn't ever dream about: about the benefits of being open in particular. You learnt about lots of existing free-to-use online tools, and you got to acquaint yourself with few. You even got yourself a new community; you didn't see that one coming! Not on an online course.

You now know that you must create a lot of the things you did in your live, face-to-face-in-the-same-space course, which naturally poses a challenge, but you can also give your students the freedom and the flexibility to work when it suits them best. You need to keep them engaged and motivated so that this freedom doesn't translate into students being washed away by the currents of busy life out of your course. (Vaughan et al)

Your online course has given you a taste of what online learning can be...because you took the plunge into this magical mystery tour. And your brain is buzzing with ideas...


References

Biggs, J. and Tang, C. Teaching for quality learning at university. Fourth edition. Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press. 2011.

Vaughan, N. D., Cleveland-Innes, M., & Garrison, D. R. (2013). Teaching in blended learning environments: Creating and sustaining communities of inquiry. Edmonton: AU Press.

Come together!

We've mulled over and chewed well the words cooperation and collaboration (Panitz, 1999) with the objective to extract every gram of 'nutrition' from them. What do they mean exactly in this context? How do they differ from each other? Has my earlier work with students and colleagues been cooperative or collaborative? Reflecting my cooperative or collaborative activities against those presented by Alec Couros (2017) in the ONL171 webinar, I see that I've practically been a lone wolf in the educational trends wilderness. I honestly thought I was being cooperative or collaborative and encouraging students to be so too, but the extent of this group activity of mine—by mine I mean activities undertaken both by me as well as my students—was so, so limited and restricted!

Working on this topic brought back memories from my school days, perhaps around the time when I was in the 5th or 6th grade, in a small school in Goa, India. Our school principal decided that all the classes from grade 5 or so up would work full-time for a month or so on one common project to create an exhibition that would be open for a couple of days to our parents and perhaps the general public. The theme of the project was the nature and wildlife of North America. Our school syllabus, naturally, focused primarily on India, and North America was but a footnote in it. My memory of the experience of doing this project is that we had a ball of a time, the bigger kids and us smaller ones working together, spending hours in the school library devouring the pages of the encyclopedias and other books to gather information about the different landscapes, the rivers and lakes and the fish in them, and then reproducing our collective knowledge as a large cardboard and papier-mâché 'aquarium' depicting a cross-section of the different lake- and riverbeds full of different types of aquatic life among other exhibits. We all made and painted fish, plants, you-name-it using paper, coloured cellophane, wire, and textiles, and some of the bigger boys put electrical lights and added sounds to our aquarium. The exhibition we created was grand, our aquarium so colourful and informative, and we were all so proud of our work. We all learned far more about the geography, climate, and flora and fauna of North America than was described on the pages of our textbooks. And better still, we remembered a lot more of what we learned and for far longer. This, as I far as I can recollect, was my first collaborative experience, and it certainly was a successful endeavour.

Perhaps this positive experience of mine was a factor that has driven me to experiment with getting students to work in groups in different ways: a course to motivate freshmen to study the mandatory circuit analysis courses where they a built a device to connect to their home stereo system and figured out the design formulae from their basic circuit analysis knowledge, a PBL version of the mandatory circuit analysis courses for freshmen (Costa et al, 2007), an advanced course on circuit simulation... The resulting group work was usually more cooperative—with students often dividing and distributing the workload—than collaborative, but there were teams that were highly collaborative too. I am able to distinguish the difference only now, having learned about the difference over the last few weeks, but we did ensure that all students worked with all the details in all the topics and developed all the necessary skills. The students in all the courses enjoyed working together, and in the PBL courses they said they felt they learned more and better the study matter as a result of collaboration. This positive experience manifested itself as slightly better grades than their peers who didn't participate in the PBL course (Costa et al, 2007). I, too, as did my co-author colleagues, enjoyed collaborating as a team on the PBL course—so much less stress due to the shared burden and responsibilities—and we have cooperated closely on other courses.

(Photo credit: Franck Reporter, via gettyimages. Image source: http://www.gettyimages.fi/detail/photo/campfire-of-friends-in-circle-on-the-fire-royalty-free-image/505597633)

Working in groups has its advantages. One can verbalise concepts and explain ideas to others and so reinforce newly learned knowledge, thus improving knowledge retention. Group work allows for diverse viewpoints, which in turn expands the individual's own knowledge horizon, and all ensuing discussions enhance thinking. Collaborating in a group also enhances motivation due to the increased interdependence of the members. All of this can happen if allowed to. However, working in a group requires a degree of discipline and focus on the part of the individuals so as not to get distracted from the task at hand. So, working on one's own is also necessary. My colleagues at Aalto University gathered evidence to back the befits of student collaboration in a trial they carried out (Lehtovuori et al, 2013).

As educators, we are well aware of all of this. When students work in groups, they form personal learning networks (PNLs). All that applies to students applies to their teachers too; that's us. We too benefit from working in a group: getting or testing new ideas, help in the use of technology, time saved due to resources shared, or just getting peer support. Our PNL members can comprise colleagues from within the same four walls of our institution but also from any part of the Earth, as we have experienced during ONL171; technology makes this possible. The rewards of PNLs far too big to to opt out. So, come together, right now...

Don't let the distance stop you,
Hook up to our man in Roma,
Laptop or mobile will do,
Google plus Adobe Connect,
Time and place irrelevant,
Don' 'ave to be an expert it's so easy to use.
Come together, right now, benefit!

(To be sung to the tune of a certain Lennon and McCartney collaboration)


References
Couros, Alec. PNLs, learning networks, and design participatory environments. ONL171 webinar, 22 March 2017. https://play.education.lu.se/media/ONL171+webinar+March+22%2C+2017+-Couros/1_88mn7026
ONL171 Topic 3 page: https://opennetworkedlearning.wordpress.com/onl171-course-activities/topic-3-learning-in-communities-networked-collaborative-learning/


Costa, L.R.J, Honkala, M. & Lehtovuori A. "Applying the problem-based learning approach to teach elementary circuit analysis," IEEE Transactions on Education, Volume: 50, Issue: 1, Feb. 2007. DOI: 10.1109/TE.2006.886455

Lehtovuori, A., Honkala, M., Kettunen, H., & Leppävirta, J. Interactive Engagement Methods in Teaching Electrical Engineering Basic Courses. 2013 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON), Berlin, Germany. March 2013. DOI: 10.1109/EduCon.2013.6530089

Panitz T. (1999). Collaborative versus cooperative learning—A comparison of the two concepts which will help us understand the underlying nature of interactive learning. Retrieved on 26.3.2017 from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED448443.

Be open and share: that is something!

As children we were told countless number of times to share our things with others: toys, snacks, food, drink,... We were told about the joy of giving: how we feel nice when we give a birthday present to our friend and see their face light up. We have quotes promoting sharing as well: "happiness shared is happiness multiplied" (one version of many). We know so, perhaps unconsciously, and now we have science backing this (Smith and Davidson, 2014; see also Smith, 2014): sharing makes you happy. We were also taught about receiving: how to politely thank the giver so as not to hurt their feelings, how not to look a gift horse in the mouth. However, we were also taught about ownership and possession, and there is evidence that wanting to own and possess may be an innate human trait (Bower, 2011).

Sharing isn't the number one trait that comes to mind when talking about education and academia. At least, not for me. Sure, I sat together with colleagues and discussed my ideas on research and teaching (general stuff on approaches and philosophy as well as specific assignments) with them and commented on their ideas on innumerous occasions. I have used ready course material made by previous teachers and later modified them to suit me better. This sharing has occurred in small closed circles. Of course, I have, as have many others, put the material up on the university network that can be accessed by students and staff, but this too is a closed network. If someone asked me permission to use the material, I never refused them. In fact, in the back of my mind, I thought that having put the material on the semi-open network I had given it for anyone to use. I'm sure this is true of many of my colleagues. I heard of Creative Commons, but I never bothered to delve to find out more. Now, having done so, I know how wrong I was.

Thinking about how I shared my material, I realise it was never a conscious decision that I was going to do so. I primarily wanted that the course material was available to the students, that it was logically presented, it was understandable, and that there were no factual errors. Knowing that the material was to be posted on the university network for the students to access, I put in a lot of time and effort to ensure that the material was up to the mark. For the material for one course that I built from scratch, I asked my immediate colleagues to first help me outline the course outcomes and contents and then, when I had made my slides, I asked them to comment on them. That was as open as collaboration on developing course material got.

Through deeper introspection on the issue of sharing study material, I am inclined to conclude that despite all the effort I had this niggling fear that the quality of the content might not be up to par. There was also the issue of copyright law: was I perhaps breaking the law? However, there was also this little capitalist within me who was worried that someone might exploit my work without permission, and we can't have that now, can we? These appear to be fears common to most academic teaching staff (Maloney et al). Additionally, I wasn't aware of where I could upload my material for the world to use, had I consciously wanted to do so. Again I am not alone on this point either (Anyangwe).

Now that we know, let us overcome these little self-imposed barriers to sharing and benefit from that something when we share... and the world will benefit too.

References

Anyangwe, E. Why don't more academics use open educational resources? Higher eductaion network blog. October 2011. Retrieved on 8.4.2017 from https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2011/oct/05/open-educational-resources-academics

Bower, Bruce. Kids own up to ownership. ScienceNews May 2011. Available to members at https://www.sciencenews.org/article/kids-own-ownership. For a commentary, see Clabough, Raven. "Scientific evidence proves capitalist ideas may be innate," The New American. June 2011. https://www.thenewamerican.com/economy/commentary/item/4023-scientific-evidence-proves-capitalist-ideas-may-be-innate.

Maloney, S., Moss, A., Keating, J., Kotsanas, G.,and Morgan, P. Sharing teaching and learning resources: perceptions of a university's faculty members. Medical Education. July 2013. DOI:
10.1111/medu.12225.

Smith, Christian and Davidson, Hilary. The paradox of generosity. Oxford University Press, 2014.

Smith, Jordan Michael. "Want to be happy? Stop being so cheap." New Republic, September 2014. Retrieved on 31.3.2017 from  https://newrepublic.com/article/119477/science-generosity-why-giving-makes-you-happy.

The octopus's garden of digital literacy

The term digital literacy per se is brand new to me. As an engineer, researcher and teacher, the computer and the Internet have been an integral part of my professional life, and in the last decade also of my personal life. The computer was the tool to use to do the number crunching, to make presentations, write articles, make lecture slides and other teaching material, access the Internet to obtain information, read and send emails, read new from newsgroups, and occasionally "put" or get files via FTP. I wasn't one for writing opinions or jokes that were shared in various newsgroups, but I did read them. Yet I never bumped into the term digital literacy.

Although this digital technology has developed and become user-friendly, not much has changed in how I use it professionally. So, on the visitor–resident axis (David White, 2014), I'd place myself quite far down the visitor axis. Yes, without a doubt, professionally I've been a digital visitor all these years. I have left no social trace of myself on the Internet. Wait a minute; do conference and journal articles, technical reports, theses, or code snippets that are published online count as social trace? Aren't they—if I stretch the meaning of the word somewhat—blogs of sorts, but without the possibility of getting comments from readers on the same website as the published work resides? One does get comments and feedback on the formal papers one publishes, with a larger delay than with an online blog.

I got myself a Facebook account some years ago through which I've been in touch mainly with childhood friends who are now scattered around the world. Here I've been more of a resident. Until now, I haven't give much thought to how I use the Internet, except that I'm concerned about my privacy online; someone (read Big Data) tracks what I do and might (actually, they will) exploit this information, or some malicious person or group might steal my identity online wreaking havoc in my real, physical life. Other than bombarding people with advertisements and placing them in a filter bubbles (Sara Mörtsell, 2017), I presume even Big Data isn't quite sure what they're going to do with all that information, but I'm sure they'll think of lots of things in time. I'm not the only one with these concerns (Eva Henje Blom, 2017). Should I be afraid? Perhaps, but not to the point of avoiding the Internet. That would be like avoiding eating chocolate because of the harm it might cause to my health.

This, I guess, is where ONL comes in. In these past two weeks I've learnt a lot: I've acquainted myself with what digital literacy is (I've just scratched the surface). It turns out to be a garden of different skills, mindsets, attitudes, and knowledge (Europass: digital competences). I've begun thinking about what I do online as a private individual and in a professional context. And this is a start. This is just the beginning of my journey down digital boulevard. Working and collaborating online in my PBL group (group 8) has been eye-opening in many ways and, more importantly, fun. I've learnt to use new software that, by myself, I'd probably never had got to know, let alone use.

I'm excited. I'm less afraid of leaving a digital social footprint, and I think I'm better aware of the distinction between the data gathered by Big Data and digital social footprint. I want to explore this digital garden, use it to my advantage, and judiciously avoid the digital nettle.


References

David White (2014). Visitors and residents (part 1). Video clip. Accessesed on 6.3.2017.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPOG3iThmRI&feature=youtu.be

Sara Mörtsell (2017). Digital litercies. Webinar.

Eva Henje Blom (2017). My first blog - not convinced...  https://henjeblom.wordpress.com/2017/02/19/my-first-blog-not-convinced/

Europass: digital competences.  http://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/resources/digital-competences

The start of a mystery tour

I've always wanted to be an electrical engineer since I was a little boy, and, to make a long story short, I graduated as one. Teaching was a profession I didn't want to get into, and as a university student I made up my mind that I would never be a teacher. However, life thought otherwise. Towards the end of my studies I joined the university as a summer trainee, and before I knew it, I was giving exercise classes to freshmen and second-year students of electrical engineering, and then learning about teaching and how one learns. Soon I was teaching my own courses adapting and applying the new ideas I'd picked up. I've built lots of little electronic gadgets as a hobby, a lot of them, funnily enough, to demonstrate electrical phenomena in the classroom.

My interest in teaching grew immensely. I learned about PBL, I was very excited about the approach, and so together with a couple of colleagues, I designed two PBL courses covering basic circuit analysis. The mathematics required in the subject posed quite a challenge in the course design. Building and developing the course was hard, often frustrating, but all in all it was fun. The course itself turned out to be very thrilling. We did this for several years and we even published the results of a little study we made on our experiment [1]. This resource-consuming experiment ended when we ran out of funding and human-power. All the effort I put in and the tricks I tried to get students to learn have been in the classroom—keeping things as simple as possible, little gadgets and circuit simulations to arouse interest, group discussions, and so on—where we've all been present in the same physical space.

My opinion on remote learning over the Internet is prejudiced, perhaps because of the burden of having to acquaint myself with new software, or perhaps because communication via a screen is so limited and hence difficult, or may be simply because it's so different from classroom teaching. I've used Skype to teach a friend on the other side of the world, and I don't know how well I've managed to communicate, but I'm sure that not as well as if we'd shared the same physical space. This experience was not as satisfying as in the classroom.

So, where am I going with this write-up? I have often been out of my comfort zone before when teaching or studying, but I feel that I've never been as far out as I am now: this is the first time I'm writing a blog, the first time I'm attending an online course, the first time that all the tools I'm using are new. I'm apprehensive about publishing a public blog reflecting my learning experience. After my unnecessary initial anxiousness about getting the technology to work, my first impression of the webinar on Tuesday the 13th, was, "Wow! So many people from all over the world connected, and this works!" A few minutes into the webinar, I noticed I was distracted by the continuous stream of comments on the chat and soon after by the slides—shown at a slow pace, thank goodness. Where should I focus my attention, on the instructors and what they are saying in the video, on the slides, or on the comments in the chat? I didn't even notice that a question was directed to me there. (My colleague brought this to my notice shortly, and I then quickly responded.) I clearly have a lot to learn. I'm simultaneously apprehensive and excited, just as one is at the beginning of a journey to a strange new land. What comforts me is the enthusiasm of the participants in this course, who in all probability are novices just like me on this journey, which hints that I may be at the start of a magical mystery tour. I hope it is.

Reference

1. Costa, L.R.J, Honkala, M. & Lehtovuori A. "Applying the problem-based learning approach to teach elementary circuit analysis," IEEE Transactions on Education, Volume: 50, Issue: 1, Feb. 2007. DOI: 10.1109/TE.2006.886455