Digital me, digital you

Increasingly many of us are spending more of our time online, creating, repurposing and sharing content, searching and consuming content and communicating with others. All of these activities leave behind a trail, a digital footprint, a record of where we have been and what we have done. More significantly, in psychological terms, we are developing our personal digital presences, and modifying our digital profiles. These are some of the essential elements that constitute an individual's digital identity - who we are in a variety of contexts in digital environments - how we present ourselves and manage our impressions in our digital lives. A useful model that can be applied as a framework to aid our understanding of the interaction between individuals, tools and technologies, other people and the wider learning ecosystem, is the model developed by Engestrom and his colleagues (building on the work of Leont'ev, Rubinstein and other social constructivist theorists) which we now know as Activity Theory. My version of the model, which I have used to describe the essential elements and actions that help to build a digital identity are shown in the image above, overlaid against the original model.

I thought it useful to apply some statements by leading theorists to a few of the pathways/relationships within the model. For example, Marshall McLuhan made specific reference to the relationship between people and technology when he declared 'we shape our tools, and thereafter, our tools shape us.' The symbolic Interactionist theorist Charles Cooley saw the impact of community upon the behaviour of individuals when he wrote 'We see ourselves reflected in the eyes of others'. Clearly, digital identity is a complex proposition to talk about. The relationships between the elements in the Activity model are not as clear cut as the diagram might make us believe. The slideshow below, which was presented today at a research seminar at the University of Reading might shed some more light on the question of how we formulate, maintain and modify our digital identities, but there is much research still to do before we can better understand who we really are when we venture online.

Presentation of self in digital life from Steve Wheeler

Digital me, digital you by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Turning over a new leaf

When the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development invited me to speak at their annual HRD event at London's Olympia I was delighted. I wasn't so keen when they asked me to supply my slides many weeks in advance. The organisers wanted them so they could produce delegate packs that included paper versions of my slide show. I could understand their eagerness, but I hesitated. I don't normally send my slides too far in advance of a presentation for three reasons - firstly I don't think it's a good use of resources to produce paper based slides and secondly, it's not good pedagogical practice because looking down at a paper rendition of slides you are about to see can be distracting for delegates when they should be engaging with the front-of-house presentation. It's even more confusing if the slides don't match the presentation.

Which brings me to my third point - my slide decks change almost by the day. Learning technology is a fast moving topic. It changes by rapidly, and there are always new things that can be added. So I sent a provisional set of slides to the organisers about 2 weeks before the event, with the warning to them that these would not be the final production. I duly arrived on the day with a drastically updated set, as I had anticipated I would. Even in the middle of my presentation (during a brief break in the workshop) I was still tinkering, adding an extra few slides which I had seen on Jane Hart's blog that morning that were very relevant to my presentation (such as the chart above). She talks about the five key ways knowledge workers like to learn today. You can see the slide set below, with Jane's research report included in the middle, and I would also encourage you go to her blog to read the full report.

Learning Futures: Introducing eLearning into your Company from Steve Wheeler

The message I definitely had to include from Jane's work based research study is that when implementing elearning into any company, one of the most important things to avoid is simply 'shovelling across content' from traditional classroom based learning into a digital medium. Electronic page-turning, she argues, just isn't enough, and of course, she is right. And yet the practice still persists, either because managers consider it to be cost effective, or they don't know that there are better, more effective ways to present digital learning. Page turning approaches may be cheap, but they are actually false economy, because they simply turn employees off. The result is that employees fail to learn what the company has paid for them to learn. This kind of thinking was voiced during the session. Someone mentioned that they thought elearning would be attractive to many companies because it would 'save money'. The ensuing discussion quickly demolished this notion - it is rare indeed that a company actually save money by implementing elearning, and surpringly, cost saving should not be a consideration when elearning is being implemented. More important reasons for implementing elearning are that it provides learning opportunities for employees who would otherwise not have a chance to learn, and it offers flexibility of pace and style.  As Jane Hart argues in her report, one of the things most knowledge workers desire is to be able to learn flexibly, whilst remaining within the flow of their work, and preferably without leaving the work space to do so.

We had a good time during the session at Olympia. I guess though that some of the delegates were a little confused that the slides they had in their pack were not identical to the ones they saw on the screen. They were engaged in their own version of page turning, and perhaps some of them benefited, because I saw them scribbling notes on the slide images. Yet there are much better ways of presenting learning than simply sequencing content in a linear manner. I am sure that most were more engaged with the discussion we enjoyed during the session than they were with the linear content provided as slide handouts. The same principle applies to elearning. I think it's about time organisations and managers began to wake up and realise that digital learning is different to traditional learning. It's about time they all turned over a new leaf.

Image courtesy of Jane Hart


Turning over a new leaf by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Freedom to imagine

Sir Ken Robinson has a lot to say about creativity and learning. The two are, or should be, inextricably linked. One of his remarks is that  imagination needs to emerge as creativity, as a natural process. He goes on to argue that traditional school systems constrain or even negate this process. He argues that this is largely due to the mechanistic, industrialised approach schools have taken for many years. Other constraints are the logistical problems such as lack of time or space for play, exploration and discovery that are familiar in many schools. All children have great imaginative power, but gradually this ability to imagine can be eroded as they are processed through formal education systems. In short, Robinson believes school is killing creativity. But this may all be about to change. The teacher led nature of traditional education is being challenged, not only ideologically, but also as a result of the pervasiveness of new technologies. 

One question that is often asked within this discourse, is whether technology can actually improve education by providing learners with opportunities to be creative. 

For me, the answer is yes, in certain circumstances. 

Give a child a games console and he will play a game on it. He will have great fun, but will he learn anything significant? Will he be creative? It depends of course on what the game is, whether it is linked to authentic learning, and what specialised support is on offer from trained educators. It also depends on whether he feels he is in an environment where he can take risks, and express himself freely. The same applies to any technology withing any formal learning context. In informal contexts, children are very expressive and creative through their technology. 

For formalised learning, students require scaffolding, but the scaffolding does not necessarily have to take the form of a 'knowledgeable other person' as Vygotsky suggested. Today, technology, particularly technology that is personal and portable, can provide similar forms of scaffolding for learning. Increasingly, teachers are adopting roles as support for learning, and as facilitators of learning spaces. For creativity to be maximised, learners need to be free to imagine, discover, explore and play in spaces where they are psychologically safe. If they make mistakes, they will be able to learn from these, rather than being punished for 'getting it wrong'. 

Give a child a camera and she will be creative.... especially if she knows what she is aiming at.

Photo by Steve Wheeler

Freedom to imagine by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

A hard act to Swallow

The case of Santiago Swallow is intriguing. Swallow was born in Mexico, took up residence in the USA, and rapidly rose to prominence as a respected and influential guru in the world of social media. Now 42, Swallow is a veteran of the TED and SXSW conference circuit, and regularly tweets out his wisdom and insight to more than 76,000 Twitter followers. His recent nuggets have included: 'The first cloud computer was us' and 'to write is to live endlessly'.  Swallow's eagerly awaited book - entitled Imaginary Identities in the Age of the Internet - has been predicted to have such impact potential that it will define an entire generation. Indeed, Swallow has been hailed by some commentators as 'one of the greatest thinkers of the Millennial Generation'.

So just who is Santiago Swallow?

The answer, surprisingly for his many followers, is that Santiago Swallow doesn't actually exist - he is in fact a fictional character. Swallow is the alter ego of Kevin Ashton, a British technology pioneer who is famous for coining the phrase 'the Internet of Things.' If you search on Wikipedia for Santiago Swallow right now, you will be redirected to Ashton's page. The whole Swallow charade was concocted as a social experiment, a way of exploring how many people online create their own legends, often by buying Twitter followers, creating false email accounts and generally masquerading as someone else.  It was easy to create the legend of Santiago Swallow, Ashton says in his blogpost 'How to Become Internet Famous for $68'. He first created a new gmail account, and then a Twitter account.The next stage was to acquire 90,000 Twitter followers for a small sum of about £33. A Wikipedia page was created, and the final step was to construct a Swallow website with its own domain name for another £12. Others soon noticed Swallow's presence and started to follow, assuming that he was indeed who he said he was. This fascinating social online experiment has revealed how easy it is to fake an identity, or in this case, simply create a new one from nothing but a germ of an idea.

Reputation can be bought it seems. But is one's reputation dependent upon online presence only? How many more people would have been fooled by the Santiago Swallow personality if Ashton had not himself exposed the ruse? How long could the experiment have continued if Ashton had stayed silent? How many of us still take content and personalities at face value when we encounter them online? These and many other questions about online identity, reputation, provenance and trust are still to be answered. My own rudimentaty manipulation of identity with my @timbuckteeth account and more recently the activation of my @stevewheeler sleeper account have given me some clues about the above questions. I have written about this in two posts, Double Agent and Double or Quits, where I explain some of my own thinking about online presence and digital identity. I would be very interested to hear from others about their views on these and other online identity experiments. What are the implications for us personally, socially and culturally?

Image source: Wikimedia Commons


A hard act to Swallow by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Learning futures

I have enjoyed my short stay here in Doha, Qatar, where I was an invited speaker at the Technology in Higher Education Conference. Doha is a futuristic, high rise city that didn't exist ten years ago. There is major construction work wherever you look, and the technological infrastructure is impressive.

The conference event (#the2013) was organised by the Qatar Foundation in alliance with a number of overseas universities, based within the Education City network.

Along with other invited speakers, we have been on a 'sand duning' expedition (some of the images of this exhilarating and somewhat terrifying activity are captured in the slideshow below), a visit to the Museum of Islamic Art, and several dinners in wonderfully colourful surroundings.

My presentation was entitled 'Learning Futures: Emerging technologies, pedagogies and contexts', where I explored some of the potential of new technologies to disrupt our current educational practices. During my presentation there was an earthquake in Iran, which we felt in the Gulf area, and although it didn't affect us directly in the conference centre, it did affect several downtown areas, where buildings were evacuated as a precaution. It has certainly been an eventful visit to Qatar.

Learning Futures: Emerging technologies, pedagogies, and contexts from Steve Wheeler

Photos by Steve Wheeler


Learning futures by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Making a play for it

"As astronauts and space travelers children puzzle over the future; as dinosaurs and princesses they unearth the past. As weather reporters and restaurant workers they make sense of reality; as monsters and gremlins they make sense of the unreal." 

So says Gretchen Owocki, a US early childhood educator, presumably after many years of observing young children at play. It's a powerful quote that puts play into perspective as one of the most important components of growing up and learning. Children have boundless imagination, and it is witnessed in many ways, but none more openly than when they are at play. Children use their imagination to make sense of the world around them, but their creativity is seen in imaginative acts such as making things, or make believe. A stick can become a Prince's sword or a Wizard's staff, and a cardboard box be magically transformed into a submarine or a castle.

Sir Ken Robinson, undoubtedly one of the most outspoken educational thinkers of the modern age, argues that imagination needs to emerge as creativity, but traditional school systems thwart this process: "All children start their school careers with sparkling imaginations, fertile minds, and a willingness to take risks with what they think," he says. "Most students never get to explore the full range of their abilities and interests ... Education is the system that's supposed to develop our natural abilities and enable us to make our way in the world. Instead, it is stifling the individual talents and abilities of too many students and killing their motivation to learn." (Source: The Guardian).

How can technology change this and improve the school experience? Games played personal devices such as tablet computers and handheld consoles can and do promote creativity. They immerse the learner in the business of learning, without necessarily betraying the fact that the child is actually learning something. It is learning by stealth. Playing games often involves a temporary suspension of reality, and can also engage learners in speculative, hypothetical thinking about the world. Perhaps most importantly, playing games enables children to understand that through failure they can try and try again, and a realisation that perseverance and persistence being important ingredients in eventual success.

Play is important for learning for all ages. But it is especially important for children. It's what they do naturally, so it is also important that play can continue to be a major part of the school experience. It should be a sustainable and ever present feature in all subjects, across the curriculum. Any school or teacher who fails to include this element is robbing children of their right to experiment, ask the 'what if?' questions, and outwork their imagination in creative acts.

NB: Many more powerful quotes on 'play' can be found on this website

Photo by Steve Wheeler


Making a play for it by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The future of reading

In versions of the 2012 Horizon Report, eBooks were considered by many of the expert panel to be on the 1 year horizon for full adoption into education. It seems they may be right. We may soon be loaning books digitally, following a UK government review into the e-lending capabilities of public libraries. The Sieghart Review recommends that digital versions of books should be loaned to users without charge, and also that loaners should be able to borrow their books using online ordering facilities.

According to The Bookseller (online review of the book publishing industry), some pilot schemes are already on their way in UK libraries, and will be in place by summer. These schemes will be used to ascertain the level of demand from the public, before any large scale implementation is put into place. Are the British general public ready for such an advance in public lending? Mark Taylor, who is the head of CILIP (The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) believes that for e-lending to be successful, librarians and their staff need to be able to support and develop skills for the general public. Get this right, Taylor argues, and we will witness a revolution in the reading behaviour of the general public as they discover a range of materials they previously had no access to. Public libraries will become the means to reconnect an entire generation of digitally able readers into a whole new world of learning.

Photo by GoXunuReviews


The future of reading by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Active learning spaces

Recently I wrote about collaborative learning spaces, and argued that we are entering unfamiliar territory. The boundaries of informal and formal spaces have blurred significantly, as have the boundaries between the real and the virtual. It appears that it no longer matters where learning occurs, as long as it is meaningful. Some might argue that learning that is situated is the most powerful. It is also important that learning is made to be active and engaging. If any of these components is missing, then clearly learning has not been optimised. When children learn, they do so through interaction with others, through observation and practice, discovery and experimentation and by doing and making. All of these aspects of learning are active. When they enter into formal education, they enter into an artificial environment where learning is managed, directed and organised for them. It is not hard to see how such an artificial transition from active to passive can stifle creativity and demotivate learners.

As a response to the problems of learning in homogenised, regimented environments such as classrooms and  lecture halls, Technology Enhanced Active Learning (TEAL) came into being. It is one of several approaches to moving away from tedious and passive learning environments where students are expected to listen, take notes and remember what is being said and presented. TEAL spaces feature several characteristics, including flexible learning spaces where furniture can be moved into many alternative configurations, technology enriched contexts (wireless and untethered, web enabled and personal technologies) and a shift from teacher led lessons to student centred learning, where the learner can take control, and the teacher facilitates. One argument is that simply having access to personalised technologies creates conducive conditions in which active learning can occur. However, the role of the teacher is also paramount in the success of TEAL approaches. Without strategic input from teachers at critical junctures during a lesson, and without some clear goal or set of objectives, students can lose focus, become distracted and go off task.

The idea that students should be able to move freely around the learning space whilst remaining connected is a powerful one. The possibilities of learning through collaboration with other students, and the potential to manage their own pace of learning are also very powerful. Students who can connect to online resources, social spaces and content also have freedom not only to search and discover, but also to create, revise, repurpose and share their own content. A number of psychological and social learning theories can be applied to explain the transformative potential of this approach. These include the Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky) which describes how individual learners can extend the amount they learn when they are connected to other more knowledgeable individuals. The theory of scaffolding (Bruner) also applies where students can gain support for their learning from their peers, their tutors and also through their tools. Social modelling (Bandura) and social comparison (Festinger) may also come into play where learners see the success of other learners and modify their own approaches to optimise the best and most active aspects of their own learning.    

Photo by JISC Infonet


Active learning spaces by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Let your robots do the marking?

A short article appearing in the Independent newspaper on April 6th highlights the tensions brewing because of the use of marking software. Anant Agarwal, president of EdX, (Harvard and MIT's non-profit making arm that runs MOOCs), says that the software will be a boon to learning online in the future, because it will allow students to rewrite and resubmit their essays time and again, to improve their grades. He also argues that instant feedback is what today's students crave. What he doesn't say is that it's an essential part of the management of MOOCs, especially if they are regularly enrolling upwards of 100,000 students for each course. How else are they going to assess and mark all those students' work?

This entire approach is reminiscent of the Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) programs of the 1980s, where students worked their way through a linear course of study, interspersed with quizzes and questions to test what they could remember, and a remedial loop to send them back to 'relearn' if they didn't make the grade. The computer marking of that time was simplistic and mainly used for multiple choice questions. All well and good for the 80s, but is it appropriate for today? And even more importantly, are computer software programs actually capable of marking free form essays?

Many academics believe not, and some have even set up an online petition against the use of marking software, claiming that it computers cannot 'read' student essays, are unable to measure the essentials of human communication. They fail, say the protest group, to cope with detecting accuracy, reasoning and critical thinking, adequacy of evidence, ethical issues and stances, convincing arguments, clarity and veracity. So far, around 2000 academics have signed the petition. What do you think?


Photo by Steve Wheeler


Let your robots do the marking? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Share and share alike

I won't forget the first time one of my articles was translated into another language. It was only the abstract, but it was translated into Spanish, French and German, for inclusion in an edition of the international peer reviewed journal Educational Media International. I don't know who they got to do it, or how long it took, and I can't say with confidence that it was translated completely accurately. I don't know, but I assume it was, because EMI is a professional journal. Just the fact that I was published, and in four different languages, was enough for me. EMI would probably have had to pay several people to translate my article, along with all the other articles that appear in the journal. But now that is all changing.

Since I took the decision to offer all my blogposts and slideshows for free under a Creative Commons License, allowing anyone to freely copy and also repurpose my work, some interesting things have happened. Firstly, I haven't lost any of my work. It still belongs to me, and anyone who decides to use it attributes it to my name. Secondly, my work is being amplified. It is spreading farther afield than I could ever have dreamt it would. It is appearing in other people's work, and it is also being translated into other languages. This slideshow, along with several others, has been translated into Spanish, and now just about the entire Latin American world is awake to my work. How cool is that? And I didn't have to spend a single penny to get it translated. I didn't even have to ask anyone to do it. People simply take it on themselves to translate, and I'm sure they do a very good job. This slideshow was translated by Thomas Ramirez Zumaran, and it has already attracted around 8,000 views in addition to my original slideshow (currently over 58,000 views) on my slide deck collection on Slideshare.

 

El Futuro del Aprendizaje from Thomas Ramirez

Now people are taking on the task of translating my blog posts too. The image at the top of this post shows one that was recently translated into French by Frédéric Domon. Here's the opening paragraph of 'Is all learning social?'

Presque tous les jours, je me laisse entraîner dans des discussions autour des fondamentaux de l'apprentissage, de la nature de la connaissance et des processus d’éducation. Cela va de pair avec le métier de professeur à l’Université et je m'attends à me retrouver dans cette situation très souvent. Lorsque je ne parle pas d'apprentissage, j’y réfléchis, je lis, fais des recherches ou écris à ce sujet. 

Pretty cool eh? Here's the entire blog post in French, including original hyperlinks. Again, I didn't need to ask, and neither did the translator need to ask my permission. It was self evident in the licence I applied from Creative Commons. My blogs and slideshows are now appearing in other languages. I'm very happy that they are, because now language is no longer a barrier to understanding. My ideas are out there for all to read, share and discuss, and that is my reward for offering my work for free under a Creative Commons licence. I think it's about time others woke up to this and did the same. Is your content being translated into other languages, and what are your views on this? My views are already well known: Let's share our content freely and allow repurposing under CC, so that everyone can share and share alike.

Rewired, not fade away by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.