E-learning: More Than Meets the Eye

I am entering the last half of the last week of my course all about e-learning.  This was one of the few required courses I was blase about because of the content.  I work in a corporate environment and while we use online technologies, an actual online class is not what I do.  However, I am happy this course was required, have learned quite a bit, and could see myself facilitating online courses as a second job (I was told by someone he could see me doing that).  One of the most significant things I have learned is there is the same amount if not more preparation required for facilitating an online course as compared with a traditional face-to-face classroom or even a hybrid environment.  In a true e-classroom, there is no face to face interaction unless participants take advantage of collaboration through Skype or other applications for video chat.  This means instruction, activities, and assignments need to engage and motivate learners on their own.  This can be extremely difficult!  In my own experience, there have been courses that are more difficult to involve myself with whether it be the content (if it's required and I don't really have an interest, it can be hard for me to get motivated to complete my work) or the methods used (even with interesting content, discussion that is not developed to encourage research and support doesn't support engagement).  E-learning requires significant motivation for self-study and exploration and if there is not proper support from a facilitator, almost any learner can lose motivation to continue their learning.  Some major learning I have taken from my courses with this program are the different applications out there to aid in learning.  One of these is Piktochart.com.  Here is an example of my work that just so happens to be about the topic of this post:

21st-century learning vs. 20th-century thinking

The members of this PLN are all students at an online university where we are currently pursuing Master's degrees in Adult Education and Training and, at the moment, taking a class in technology for adult learners (although much of the material we're studying applies to learners of all ages) -- thus, the impetus for starting this blog.

Although I consider myself fairly informed about new technologies (indeed, some of the readings have seemed quaint to me, even though they're only a few years old), I have to say that several of the assignments have opened my eyes to new methods, ideas, theories and yes, technologies, that I had not been aware of until just now. So much of the literature refers to "emergent" technologies, as well as the emergent properties of learning networks, and I feel something emergent in myself regarding my new-found knowledge.

And then, I get hit full in the face with the reality that, well into our second decade of this century, those of us thinking about how learning should and will occur in the 21st-century remain in a slender minority of thinkers.

This occurred to me when I was participating in this week's class discussion, one largely focused on webcast and podcast presentation technologies. A couple of responses from fellow students to the instructor's questions about the potential downside of those technologies had me wondering how prepared we are, as a society, to embrace how technology will not just demand a change in methods but in the theories and practice of pedagogy.

For instance, a student (in all earnestness) responded that a potential problem with webcasting lectures might be a bad feed or poor connection, disenfranchising the student(s) from the content of a lecture due to forces beyond their control; apparently, that student (the one who made the response, not the one experiencing the "bad feed" -- you know the vicissitudes of the Inter-tubes and all that) was not aware that a webcast can be archived and posted such that it can be viewed at any time. In fact, that student's argument (as I read it) was that a webcasted lecture could only be live, a one-time affair, and that students were at the mercy of a schedule, much like my Psychology 101 instructor who threatened with, "Class starts at 9 am and the doors would be locked from the inside at 9:05 am."

I confess that I was a bit dazed by the response, wondering if that student was oblivious to the fact that, with the Internet and the technology of online learning, instructors not only post the webcast so it can be linked at any time but, if they're good at what they do, they augment their presentations with additional elements (such as interactive capabilities where learners can attempt to emulate portions of the material or access supplemental materials that "plug in" with what is being taught, other video or graphic examples to use, etc.). Given the nature of the response, it was apparent that the commenter didn't understand that the direction of 21st-century education is the freedom of students to make decisions about the what, where and when of their learning. A one-time only, live webcast is counterintuitive to that direction and counterproductive to 21st-century educational goals.

That was one example; I won't spend much energy on another student's response of, "Well, the power could go out and then what are you going to do?" There's little reason to speak (aside from what that student said) on the academic laziness and intellectual paucity of that response.

I recognize that I didn't enroll into a particularly rigorous program (no GRE or GMAT was required), a fact that became abundantly clear when a past team member submitted some work that my HS Language Arts teacher wife said would not receive a passing grade in a Freshman (HS) composition class -- that has happened several times in this program, in fact. Early on, it was apparent to me that I was only going to get out of this program what I put into it (and I write that while attempting to place a tremulous hand on my 30-day Articulate free trial).

My point is not the level of intellect that has enrolled in this program (the we in this PLN share) but in asking, how ready are we to embrace the inevitable change that technology will bring to how education is done? Based on my experience and conversations  with other students and other people, most of us are still stuck in a 20th-century paradigm of education (that has a foundation on a 19th-century paradigm, the so-called "factory" method) and are unable to conceive that 21st-century learners will need and demand (based on the technology) a shift in how instruction is delivered.

Please share, educators!

I'm a little frustrated, right now.

My wife forwarded me an announcement for a web presentation through ASTD, titled, "Using gamification and serious games in learning," and I was hoping to watch it. I don't have time to watch it at the moment but I thought that, if I archived it or better yet, embedded the video here, I could watch it at my convenience, when I finally found the time. The added benefit? All of you would get to watch it as well.

Bupkis. No repost on YouTube or anywhere else (if I couldn't embed it, I'd at least link it), no, I have to register at the ASTD site, jump through hoops, agree to allow my spam folder get heavier due to the ASTD "sponsor" getting my email address and then sending me loads of crap, advertisements for doo-dads and programs I have no money for.

Holding information proprietary is decidedly not a 21st-century or Web 2.0 approach (I'm not talking about widget designs, OK?) and the best way to move us forward is to disseminate information in the most efficient, expedient way possible.

Share it!

Web 2.0 for this week

My Learning Team (and PLN cohorts) are charged this week with creating a presentation of Web 2.0 technologies for the ostensible purpose of introducing them to adult learners as well as providing a demonstration or even a brief training for those learners on the use of one of the 3-5 online technologies we choose for our project. I've suggested that we take advantage of 30-day free trials for either Articulate or Captivate for this project; the challenge is to learn either in a short amount of time (before next Monday, as usual) but I am bored, bored, bored with PowerPoint.

In the run up to this assignment, we checked out 50 links or so of so-called Web 2.0 technologies (not all the sites were, strictly speaking, Web 2.0 as it's defined) and, although I knew a few of the sites, the exercise of clicking links was enlightening. Really, I was surprised at how much is out there and how many tools there are to move education well outside of 20th-century conventions.

I'm not going to go into any of those sites with this post (so, you're probably wondering, "What's the point of reading this, then?") but it has occurred to me that I would like to use this space to discuss, one or a few at a time, those sites, reviewing them and journaling my own experience using them. I'm inviting my PLN pals to join in the fun -- at a later date, of course.

Until then, we're apparently on the verge of speeding on to Web 3.0, apparently for the sake of making me feel like a dinosaur. For no good reason, then, I feel compelled to share this as an excuse for why I'm asking my Learning Team to take up the gauntlet of using a presentation application other than PowerPoint:



Sunday morning Skype session

It's past noon and our group is Skyping (as I type this), to determine which direction our PLN will take... we're feeling very 21st century! In addition, the group (Karla and Mikki) are watching my screen as I demonstrate some of the functions, gadgets and widgets available in Blogger -- pretty much participating in the activities that define a PLN (Professional Learning Network). At the end of our Skype session (the first sentence of this post was typed while providing an example of how to use Blogger, labels for posts in this case), we agreed that we were grateful to have been given this assignment since this is a tool each of us can use beyond this assignment, this class and even this program (Adult Education and Training), a place where we can share new knowledge, ask questions, share our experience with the technologies we're using, air our frustrations... isn't that what a PLN is about?

Without putting too fine a point on this (and avoiding the temptation to turn this post into a paper on Connectivism or shared VLEs), I just want to say that, with the exception that this blog arose from an assignment to this learning team (the existing PLN on this blog), everything has evolved organically, through mutual agreement, one of the defining characteristics of a PLN.

Having said that, I want to point to a massive resource that will add to my understanding of what a PLN is and can be (mostly because I haven't had the time to really work on my Diigo presence):
PLN blogs on Edutopia.

That should do it, for now. In the meantime, I'm hoping to see this PLN's blogroll grow... and, while that happens, having this place attract the attention of other professionals like us who would like to participate!

Cheap and easy infographic

The assignment this week was to create a graphic organizer or infographic -- I opted for the latter, doing so because I had recently discovered Piktochart and fell in love with what it allowed me to do.

Piktochart is an online program for creating spiffy looking infographics, with a free and paid versions of the application (the free version has a very limited selection of templates and capability). Before addressing the plusses and deltas of the program, I'll share what it allowed me to do for last week's project:

 

 

From this perspective, you see that they slap their logo on to the end of the infographic, as easy fix with any graphics manipulation program (just slice it off). That's not really a delta, just a minor annoyance. Some deltas are that (at least in the free version) the image library is awfully slim, some of the graphic elements are difficult to manipulate (I gave up trying to use the line tool) and there is no "flip" function for graphics or text. The final delta is that the paid version is really pricey for what you get, especially considering that one could achieve the same results with Illustrator or Photoshop.



 

The plusses are that the templates are obviously designed by professional graphics designers and, if you own Illustrator or Photoshop (or subscribe to the equally-as-pricey Adobe Creative Cloud), good luck getting the same results, you're more creative than me. And while I find the paid version a bit overpriced, subscription is monthly so there's no being locked into something that will only be used a few times. Finally, while the workspace could definitely use some tweaking (there are other issues than the ones I mentioned above), it is intuitive, with a relatively flat learning curve.

 

Having said that, it's worth a shot if you're stuck trying to put together a decent graphic organizer.