Online Tutoring Week 1 Task A

I'm undertaking the Online Tutoring course to gain experience in online facilitation and reflect on the issues associated with online learning.

Online facilitation is an area we haven't addressed at our University and we would like to offer a course for our academic staff. We don't have many courses that are fully online. Most courses are face to face and some are blended mode. Apart from supporting those academics who do teach fully online courses, offering professional development in online faciliatation may encourage a better approach to designing and teaching blended courses.

Digital Natives versus BA (Google)

Prensky, M. (2001) Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. From On the Horizon (NCB University Press, Vol. 9 No. 5, October 2001.

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Part II: Do They Really Think Differently? From On the Horizon (NCB University Press, Vol 6, December 2001

Brabazon, T. (2008). BA Google: Graduating to information literacy. Chapter 1 from The University of Google: Education in the (Post) Information Age . Ashgate. Available in Google Books

I would love to hear a debate between Prensky and Brabazon. They seem to be at opposite ends of the spectrum in their approach to learning. Prensky wants us to cater to the needs of today's students whose brains, he claims, are physically different as a result of growing up within a digital world. "Digital native" thinking skills include:

• reading visual images as representations of three-dimensional space (representational competence),
  
• multidimensional visual-spatial skills,
  
• mental maps,
  
• “mental paper folding” (i.e. picturing the results of various origami-like folds in your mind without actually doing them),
  
• “inductive discovery” (i.e. making observations, formulating hypotheses and figuring out the rules governing the behavior of a dynamic representation),
  
• “attentional deployment” (such as monitoring multiple locations simultaneously), and
  
• responding faster to expected and unexpected stimuli.

Learning needs of digital natives include:

• interactivity with immediate responses to actions
• multi-tasking
• random-access rather than linear progression
  
• graphics before text
• active learning
  
• connected and instant access
  
• fun, fantasy and quick-payoff world of game-based learning

Prensky acknowledges that somewhere in all of this we also need to put in the refletive and critical thinking aspects of learning but offers no suggestions as to how this will be achieved while we cater for and reinforce all of the learning characteristics that are seemingly opposed to scholarly learning.

Brabazon would surely argue in direct opposition to Prensky that higher education is about scholarly learning: serious, considered, reflective thinking. It's about argument and discussion, research and evaluation of information, critical literacy and negotiation of meaning.

I'm wondering how we can reconcile these two realities, or even if they need to be reconciled?

Activity 2A: Reflection on Digital Fluencies

Brabazon, T. (2008). BA Google: Graduating to information literacy. Chapter 1 from The University of Google: Education in the (Post) Information Age . Ashgate.

This book is available via Google Books.

I found this an inspiring reading but was also stunned by the revelation of how students approach their learning and specifically their writing in higher education today. The use of Google as a serious referencing tool and their unwillingness to engage with scholarly writing at the undergraduate level is a disturbing revelation for me. I am not surprised that students should have a problem in this area, just the extent of how they use the internet as revealed by Brabazon and her students.

I have relied heavily on Google Scholar during some of my recent studies but I am usually looking up refereed papers and readings from the reference lists of scholarly papers. And why do I use Google Scholar? Because the complexity of library databases of every library I've approached absolutely confound and frustrate me!

Looking back at my undergraduate studies in the early 80's I am reminded of the difficulty I too had in adjusting to the scholarly culture of university learning, teaching and research. I struggled to understand how to conduct literature reviews, incorporate references and write good essays without ever having any systematic training in these higher education skills. However I never resorted to using magazine and newspaper articles or other non-scholarly writing to replace scholarly readings for my university assignments. Perhaps if the internet were available to me back then I might have used it as Brabazon's student did, because I too was part of the first generation in my family to attend university and had no prior experience of the requirements of scholarship. It was a deep mystery to me and I had no one to lead me through it. Somehow or other I muddled my way through and graduated with a mediocre degree. I didn't really get it until I did my masters degree.

So I argue that the problem of inadequate information literacy amongst undergraduates has always existed but the availability of the internet search engines has exacerbated the problem and made it more visible. Teaching students the basic skills of scholarly research and writing and digital information literacy should be regarded by universities as an essential foundation in every programme of study. Why would university teachers assume that students have these skills?

I think that Brabazon did a fantastic job of changing her curriculum to build an information scaffold and hit the nail on the head when she said "Research training and sklls are valuable. For students to attain them, they must be embedded in assessment" (p 48). The information literacy courses run by libraries are great but students will learn best if the training is woven into their course assignments where they can develop and apply the skills within authentic activities.

Selecting the Media Palette

Chapter 3 Mason, R and Rennie, F (2008). E-Learning and Social Networking Handbook - Resources for Higher Education. (Routledge).

P. 45 provides a matrix of educational technology options and how they support one-way or two-way learning from basic through to advanced types of media. This is useful for evaluating technology options when designing courses.

P. 49 provides another table with examples of how distributed media can support different types of learning activities.

In selecting technologies the rules to follow are:

1. Technologies cannot fix problems in face-to-face courses. Their purpose is to create new opportunities for sharing and extending learning.
2. Identify the educational goals first (learning outcomes, activities & assessments) and consider the context before selecting a technology otherwise it might be inappropriate for the learners and task.
3. Provide learners with adequate training so that the technology does not become a barrier to learning.
4. Have a clear learning purpose that is related to the course outcomes. I.e. don't waste their time with irrelevant learning activities and inappropriate technologies that don't contribute to the final assessment. (p 48-51)

Social Networking as an Educational Tool

Chapter 1 Mason, R and Rennie, F (2008). E-Learning and Social Networking Handbook - Resources for Higher Education. (Routledge).

User generated content within collaborative and shared community spaces can promote learning by allowing learners to:

• clarify concepts
• establish meaningful links and relationships
• test their mental models
  
• make visible the process of developing their concepts and creating knowledge (p6)

The limitations that might detract from these benefits are:

• lack of expert, authoratative, scholarly input
• lack of critical skills to evaluate the quality of online information.

Siemens connectivist learning theory is relevant here. In a knowledge economy the capacity to find, evaluate and connect sources of information is more important that acquiring and retaining knowledge in a linear manner. In addition the ability to construct knowledge through collaborative online tools such as blogs, wikis, and other digital media is more important than internalising knowledge chosen and communicated by teachers.

Outcome-based learning design will shift the focus from what is being taught (content) to what the student will know or be able to do (process) (p 21).

"Course design is no longer about transmission and consumption; it is about co-creating, sharing, repurposing, and above all, interacting." (p 23).

Authentic Activities and Online Learning

Reeves, T. Herrington, J. & Oliver, R. (2002). Authentic Activities and online learning. In J. Herrington (Eds.) Proceedings of HERDSA. Joondalup: Edith Cowan University.
www.ecu.edu.au/conferences/herdsa/main/papers/ref/pdf/Reeves.pdf

This paper places activities into the centre of learning. They are no longer merely an add on to the course content to provide practice and reinforcement of the learning. They are the course.

The types of learning activities that achieve the course learning outcomes rather than supplement the course content involve complex sustained real-life activity within collaborative groups.

The authors present ten characteristics of authentic activities that can be used as checklist in course designs and give examples of how online technology can be utilised to support these characteristics.

The question is how will we encourage busy academic staff to invest the extra time and effort to design these complex courses when there is so little educational development support available within universities?

New Schemas for Mapping Pedagogies and Technologies

Article by Grainne Conole at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/conole/

Compares Web 2 characteristics with traditional notions of education. Tension between social and subjective with individualistic and objective philosophies and practice.

Suggests a mapping of technology affordances to different learning theories and concludes that Web 2 is aligned to socially constructed and situated learning because of its emphasis on the collective and the network.

Proposes a pedagogical framework for mapping tools in the way that they are used along three dimensions distilled from learning theories:

• individual versus social
• information versus experience
• passive versus active

Also provides a framework for mapping learning characteristics:

• thinking and reflection
• conversation and interaction
• experience and activity
• evidence and demonstration

These are useful ideas for evaluating the uses of educational technologies particularly the role of the closed LMS (learning management system) in an increasingly networked world where students can choose and control their own learning tools.