Where: Linz, Austria

When: 07.07.2013 – 21.07.2013

Why: to share your ideas and experiences regarding Web2.0 and social media use in education, learning and teaching; to learn with experts and other participants about how to implement and exploit various technological solutions and strategies for learning and teaching purposes; to find new friends; to get to know new cultures, people and countries; to have fun; to go sightseeing

For whom: For students ((bachelor and master level) in the field of teacher training (any subject matter), educational technology or anybody else, who is interested in Web2.0 in education and training. Only first 6 students will be accepted from Estonia. Even if you are going to graduate this spring you are welcome to participate!

Participants: In addition to Estonians, there will be students from Slovenia, Austria, Latvia, Romania, Croatia (total 36) and a panel of international experts.

Costs: Travel costs; accommodation (double room shared with another student), some meals will be covered.

Working language: English

Website: http://psst.cc/ (currently the website is work in progress and is not yet updated, but you can see last year’s event)

Accommodation: Julius Raab Heim student housing

Contact and registration: Dr. Terje Väljataga (institute of Informatics, Centre for Educational Technology), terjev[at]tlu.ee

If you got interested and need more information about the intensive program, do not hesitate to contact me immediately.

See you in Linz!

Although being in this field for quite some years now there is always something new to learn. Students’ presentations demonstrated the use of various tools and services in formal educational settings. I got a bunch of new tools to try out myself. For instance, BigBlueButton synchronous communication tool turned out to be a rather useful finding for my teaching. As I have a few courses taught entirely online, I’ve been looking for quite some time a nice alternative to Flashmeeting. In addition, Anneli demonstrated some tools for storytelling (ZimmerTwins, Creaza, Mapskip, Storybird). However, having all these fancy tools at our hands, I noticed that we tended to forget about what actually makes up a story and what the necessary characteristics are. Is a video introducing a set of London’s sights forming a story?

Our Latvian team also demonstrated some interesting sites and tools for making music, which I can imagine can be a nice supplement to music lessons. Some examples are:
GuitarPro
Muscitheory
UltimateGuitar
MagicMusicMaker

or some music databases, in which the content is under one of the Creative Commons licenses:
Jamendo
Freesound
Opsound

I found Christian Kogler’s presentation about McGurk effect (a perceptual phenomenon) and interesting one. He also claimed that “we don’t see what we don’t know”, which made me think of a concept “affordances” we have used in our research to analyse the rationale for using particular tools for certain purposes.

Although our colleagues use quite a bit of technology in their classrooms, I nevertheless got the impression that we tend to repeat traditional teaching practices without considering or rethinking whether the roles and responsibilities should change, whether a different culture of learning should be accepted and promoted. And what is exactly this different culture of learning?

It came out that the “Educational technology” program was rather popular this year, from 20 applications only 12 students were accepted for the state-funded positions. The “Teacher of informatics, school ICT manager” program hasn’t been very popular for quite some years now, however, to my surprise we received 10 applications. The number of state-funded positions in this program is unlimited. So, if someone is still interested in this, we will open a new call for applications in August.

I was happy to see that also a slightly older generation has decided to come back to the university and study something new. I have to admit, that they gave me the impression of being more self-confident and aware of their wishes and visions of where they want to go than freshly graduated students.

Welcome to Institute of Informatics, Tallinn University!

As expected most of the participants found it hard to present their ideas and work within 10 minutes, which unfortunately resulted in a situation, where there was any time left for later discussions and questions raised by the workshop organisers. This would have been the most interesting part for me.

For this workshop I carried out together with Sebastian Fiedler a small study in Tallinn University. As I have been teaching in Institute of Informatics for quite some years and trying to bring in innovative practices, but also enhance students’ competencies in the area of self-direction, I started to notice differences in students’ use of their weblogs. It was interesting to see how mainly 3 different use patterns occurred among our master students:

1. Some students use their weblogs only where it is required (some courses in our institute are weblog-based) and make a rather typical use of features a weblog offers, such as, categorisation, tags, study-buddies.

2. Some students use their weblogs (in addition to required courses) also for reflecting on courses and activities, which take place in learning management systems or in some other closed environments. This group of students has extended their weblogs and has started to perceive their weblogs as a central environment for organising their master studies.

3. Some students add work and hobby-related information in addition to their formal studies. For instance, they provide reflection on work-related tasks, present their CV, write about their ideas in the field of technology and education.

It is interesting to note that we have four different master programs in our institute. Two older ones, from 2002 and two recent ones. The recent programs consist of some courses, where digital instruments such as social media is used, but the older programs run mainly in a traditional way. Thus, looking at these four programs hardly any student from older programs uses a weblog, but students from the recent programs have started to make use of their weblogs as a central environment for their studies.

Redesigning courses in a way that gives students more control and freedom, we can witness how a light top-down push has encouraged students to experiment with the self-controlled, digital instrumentation. Practicing personal digital instrumentation they are gradually becoming more competent in supporting and digitally mediating their study practise, but also developing their dispositions in the area of self- direction.

With the use of weblogs and other digital instruments, particular patterns of control and responsibility, ownership, provision, and so forth, emerge, which start to compete with, contrast, and contradict the patterns and practices that are still dominating higher education. This, in turn, can be seen as a driver of adoption of new practices by other teachers.

Recent discussions on self-regulation and technology tend to be about recommender systems for students, which help them to choose a right activity. I have seen many such presentations and I still find it hard to understand in what way and how these systems actually enhance students competencies in the area of self-direction. Perhaps I have to learn more about studies with real users in order to grasp the idea.

One day before the actual conference we are also organising a Doctoral Consortium for PhD students. The intention of this Doctoral Consortium is to promote the development of a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research in addition to supporting and inspiring PhD students during their ongoing research effort. The last option to submit a paper for the Doctoral Consortium is March 22nd, 2012.

Btw, it is definitely the best time of the year to visit Tallinn and enjoy an organised trip to some of the beautiful places in Estonia. Welcome to Estonia!

1. 20-22.06 2011 NBE2011 – The Social Media in the Middle of Nowhere is going to take place in Salla, Lapland, Finland. The conference is organised by University of Lapland, Faculty of Education, Centre for Media Pedagogy. I am a co-author of three papers:

1. Väljataga, T., Põldoja, H. & Laanpere, M. (2011). Open Online Courses: Responding to Design Challenges.
2. Väljataga, T. & Fiedler, S. (2011). Interventions in higher education: re-interpreting the concept of learner control
3. Sillaots, M. Väljataga, T. & Laanpere, M. (2011). Using bookmarks and tags for creating students’ personal learning and knowledge space.

2. 6-8.07 2011 iCALT2011 – Educational Technology Forecast: Cloudy with a Slight Chance of Gain is going to take place in Athens, Georgia, USA. This is the 11th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies. I am involved with the two following papers:

1. Fiedler, S. & Väljataga, T. (2011). Expanding the concept of learner control in higher education: consequences for intervention design. (main conference)
2. Väljataga, T., Tammets, K. & Põldoja, H. (2011). Competence development of pre-service teachers with the support of LeContract. (workshop: Self-Regulated Learning in Responsive Open Learning Environments).

3. 13-16.09 2011 ECER2011 – Urban Education. The European Conference on Educational Research 2011 is going to take place in Berlin, Germany. I am a co-author of two papers, which are going to be presented in the 6th network - Open Learning: Media, Environments and Cultures. The titles of the papers are the following:

1. Väljataga, T. & Põldoja, H. (2011). Enhancing community gravity in open online courses.
2. Väljataga, T. & Fiedler, S. (2011). Personal Learning Contracts for modeling one’s personal learning environment.

Learning Environments and Learning Networks (in Estonian) concentrates on different opportunities to support one’s learning environment with technological solutions. In addition to various potential learning environments this course also focuses on learning networks and their applicability in a learning process. The target group of this course is mainly active teachers and educational technologists who have come back to the university to get a master’s degree, but also to acquire new knowledge and skills regarding educational technology. The course has four contact days, rest of the activities are done online.

New Interactive Environments (in English) focuses on the (re-)design of new interactive environments for collaborative work and study. Particular attention is paid to the analysis, representation, and (re-)instrumentalisation of human activities and activity systems with networked tools and services. The course will be conducted online and uses a variety of assignment and collaboration formats.

Both courses are supported by a set of networked tools and services, in which personal Weblogs are the most important tools.

Next event I am interested in is called Barcelona Conference – Self-regulated Learning in Technology Enhanced Learning Environments: Challenges and Promises, October 1st, 2010. Currently this topic belongs to one of my main interests and has a very close connection to my PhD dissertation. If I could only solve my travel grant problem…

About my observations…
First of all, the PLE2010 conference confirmed the fact that conferences can be organised in a nice way and they can provide a nice atmosphere. I am not good at all at socializing, but I enjoyed this friendly and “academic free” crowd. Big thanks to organisers!

Secondly, as I have done a thorough literature review on the concept of PLE, I was surprised that I didn’t meet people who have written their thoughts about PLE’s in academic papers. Most of the names were unknown for me. Either I haven’t managed to get all the PLE related papers, which is quite probable nowadays or the crowd hoping around in the PLE2010 conference is not much of the academic type who publish their work in journal papers and other conference proceedings. I guess this is one of the signs that discussions and conversations happen somewhere else…

I have to admit that the conference in terms of content didn’t provide any new insights for me personally, but rather gave me a confirmation that we are still struggling with the common understanding of what a PLE is. An attempt to define the concept failed from my point of view.

Henri et al. (2008) claim that PLE is not a fundamentally new concept. Before the era of massive use of technology we live through, learners have always had to organise their own learning and develop some kind of PLE. PLEs were comprised of course notes, conceptual maps, summarises and personal working/learning documents that students exchanged. Now a day, PLEs are much richer in terms of volume of content, exchanged contents and technologies. Face to face peers and friends support, students meetings in cafeteria and tutoring were also part of more traditional PLEs. This sounds very logical, at least to me and aligns very well with Sebastian Fiedler’s PLE definition: a potential (personal learning) environment for a particular learning activity is made of all the resources (artefacts, natural objects, people) that an individual is aware of and has access to at a given point in time and that s/he can turn into instruments to mediate her actions (Fiedler & Pata, 2009). This is still the best definition of a PLE…in my opinion.

Nevertheless, the majority of researchers and educators tend to talk about PLE as only a technological solution, a collection of tools and services still provided by institutions. Trafford (2006) questions such an understanding of a PLE and the concept of environment being too narrow and development focusing on replicating VLE functionality on these machines seems even narrower. He tries to caution against going from general notions about ‘PLEs’ to specific ICT connotations using that term. Isn’t there much more behind the term? I have a feeling that the basic questions like “why” and “what for” are left untouched. What is it this concept tries to solve or change in current educational settings?

Decomposing the terms of the concept and challenging them separately might help us to grasp the concept and understand what might be behind the term. According to various definitions and explanations of the word ‘personal’ it refers to pertaining to a particular person or belonging to a person in some ways. On the one hand the word ‘personal’ has a connotation to an ownership, constituting to a personal property, on the other hand it refers to a personal relationship to something, for example a personal trainer. In a latter case an individual doesn’t own it, but receives special, individual attention. I have a feeling that many educators and researchers tend to understand “personal” from this point of view…I don’t own it, but I can change a few things according to my taste.

‘Learning’ is usually understood as the cognitive process of acquiring skill or knowledge, behaviors, values or preferences. The term learning can be a process consisting of different activities in interaction with the individual’s environment. On the other hand, on a more general level it can be also understood as a product of some sort of activity. It refers to a relatively permanent change in behavior that results from practice and can be measured retrospectively. Learning as an activity defines the nature of the environment. We can also talk about a personal work environment…

An ‘environment’ is understood as (constructed) conditions that surround an individual and provide a setting in which the individual operates. These conditions (may) affect and facilitate the nature of the individual, his/her development and actions. Environment can be seen as our understood and perceived reality, which provides information for behavioral appropriateness (Harrison & Dourish, 1996). An environment can consists of everything (for instance human, material and digital resources) one perceives at a certain point of time in relation to a specific action in mind. On the one hand, intended activities define the environment and its nature, but on the other hand environment structures these activities and interactions. The individual starts to perceive the resources of his environment and potential activities in relation to the (lack of) resources for a particular activity (project) at a given point in time.

An environment becomes a learning environment when one intends to carry out a learning activity (project). A learning environment can be anywhere since we learn constantly. It is rather a matter of drawing boundaries of the environment in accordance with a particular learning project. Learning environments can be also formed by others according to their perception of a potential learning environment, which might not be suitable for others.

Resources in one’s environment can be various tools whether virtual or physical; people, such as friends, colleagues, facilitators, etc. and signs of their activities, artefacts – representations of people’s work, which can be for example books, lecture notes, photos; and time, which is partially defined by a particular project. This kind of interpretation of the resources in accordance with a particular project shows what can be done, what are the functions of the environment and what is missing. Activity derives much of the ability to perceive. A learning environment is a place where people can draw upon resources to make sense out of things and solve problems. The learning project adds meaning and awareness to the resources that are located in the individual’s learning environment. The sense of presence of different things, people and the ongoing awareness of activity and tools available allows us to structure our own activity, but also integrating communication and collaboration. However, from an observer’s perspective monitoring of an individual‘s environment and its interactions is complicated.

The learning project, initiated by a student himself, defines the objectives and expected outcome with the evaluation criteria. The learning environment can be considered a personal learning environment if the individual owns it, if individual exerts control over it. It means the individual’s opportunity to design, gain access to, utilize, modify and attach meaning to it according to his current project. The PLE situates itself around the student and his project. I can perceive my environment with different resources, but I might not use them for mediating my activities. And this changes all the time, depending on the location and time.

According to different projects and activities it may function differently at different times. However, some features of the environment can be used in a routine manner. They can have temporal properties. The environment can be different at different times with different tasks. But an experienced learner might start to repeat certain actions and use certain resources repeatedly. Such an understanding of a PLE requires considerable changes in current teaching and studying practices in order to make this happen…I believe that it is worth to revisit the concepts of self-direction in education in general and learner control and responsibility in particular.

This is my understanding of a PLE.

Hence, coming back to the PLE2010 conference, it was surprising for me to see questions like ‘how do we develop students who are PLE-able?’ I believe that we even can’t ask a question like this. I would say that everybody is PLE able, everybody perceives some sort of environment and its affordances in relation to his task. It is just a matter of one’s experiences and awareness of options that could support and mediate one’s activities within a particular environment. I think that our (educators) role is to show alternatives, various options that emerge now with technology and different ways of approaching learning and teaching…

Or some other examples of questions: ‘Is PLE and PLN a same thing?’ When institutions come in? These questions give away askers understanding of a PLE…I still believe that there is much more behind that concept, not just a technological revolution. I still believe that we have to go back and ask whether we even need this concept and what for…

References:
Fiedler, S., & Pata, K. (2009). Distributed learning environments and social software: In search for a a framework of design. In S. Hatzipanagos & S. Warburton (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies (pp. 145-158). Hershey, PA, USA: IGI Global.

Harrison, S., Dourish, P. (1996). Re-placing space: the roles of place and space in collaborative systems. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work CSCW’96, Boston, MA (pp. 67–76). ACM, New York.

Henri, F., Charlier, B., & Limpens, F. (2008). Understanding PLE as an essential components of the learning process. Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications 2008 (pp. 3766-3770). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.

Trafford, P. (2006). PLEs as environments for personal and personalised learning. Retrieved June 14, 2010, from http://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/site/asuc/oucs/staff/pault/
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