In this 19 minutes conference extract she is speaking about students ownership and compare ePortfolios with social networks.

Interesting references are given.

You can access this here : http://youtu.be/ckcSegrwjkA

I unfortunately missed her talk at ePic 2011 in London a few weeks ago and regret it.

They should be seen as complementary each other instead of  rival methods.

References

Hammersley, M. and Atkinson, P. (2007) Ethnography: Principles in practice, Taylor & Francis.

Hammersley and Atkinson speak about a clash between two competing philosophical positions: positivism and naturalism (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007, p. 4).

They consider the major tenets of  ‘positivism’ as the following :

1. experiment results must be quantitavely measurable
2. events are explained in  deductive fashion by appeal to universal laws
3. the foundation of positive-science is observation
4. the method is concerned by the testing of theories and hypotheses (see Descartes, 2001)
5. the facts that the method and observations collect are theory-neutral
6. the final aim is the search for universal laws

On the other hand, ‘naturalism’ is presented as:

1. developed by the what called School of Chicago
2. underpinning ideas coming from the holistic movement of thinking, following Melèse (1972), Wygotsky (2003) or Wiener’s (1952) systemic approach
3. being an approach to understand cultural meanings
4. focusing more on the relation between the sing and the significance and its evolution through time than on facts
5. using a set of qualitatives tools
6. not trying to sum up observation but recording events and observations with a huge sense of the details.

References

Descartes, R. (2001) Discourse on method, optics, geometry, and meteorology, Hackett Publishing.

Gindis, Vladimir S. Ageyev and Miller, Suzanne M. (2003) Vygotsky’s Educational Theory in Cultural Context (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Hammersley, M. and Atkinson, P. (2007) Ethnography: Principles in practice, Taylor & Francis.

Mélèse, Jacques (1972) L’analyse modulaire des systèmes, Paris, Edition des Hommes et Techniques.

Wiener, Norbert (1952) Cybernétique et société, Deux Rives.

Hammersley an Atkison, claim that ethnography comes from nineteenth-century Western anthropology. Ethnography was primarily ‘a descriptive account of a community or culture, usually one located outside the West’ (ibid, p 1).

Mainly ethnography in the twentieth-century means writing about the experiences and observations (data) gathered from living with a group of people (fieldwork) for a long time. Aims in ethnography research studies are to understand other’s people lives.

The features that characterise ethnography are :

1. People’s actions are studied in everyday contexts and not in laboratories
2. Data, which are more often qualitative reports and field-notes, than quantitative figures, are gathered from a range of sources
3. Gathered data are for the most part, unstructured
4. Fieldwork is made of few cases, which facilitates in-depth study but doesn’t give a truthful picture of the whole
5. Analysis involves interpretation of the meaning
6. Studies employ a relatively open-ended approach (Maxwell, 2005)

Hammersley and Atkinson also claim the importance for the researchers to negotiate their position in the community they seek to study. This negotiation is an never-ending process, the researchers taking part to the community evolves and their roles may change and then must be re-negotiated regularly (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007, p. 4)

References

Hammersley, M. and Atkinson, P. (2007) Ethnography: Principles in practice, Taylor & Francis.
Maxwell, J.A. (2005) Qualitative research design: An interactive approach, Sage Publications, Inc.

The common grip among the plethora of definitions and concepts covered by the ethnography field of research is certainly that it involves, above all, observational and qualitatives research methods (Mason, 1996; Denzin, 1997; Fielding, 1993). It seems also clear that ethnography results are mostly presented as a descriptive and accurate writing about what has been observed by one or many researchers, living with the specimen they observe for a rather long period of time (Mason, 1996; Denzin, 1997; Willis and Trondman, 2000; D844, 2011 p. 8; Baszanger and Dodier, 2004).

This writing has to present the reality in the most convincing way (Malinoswki in Denz, 1997). This creates a tension between two schools of thinking: the naturalists who assume that researchers living and observing a population have not influence on it and the constructionists who claim that results and the research itself is influenced by the researchers’ posture or even by the just the fact the observers are observing.

It seems that, in ethnography, a big place is given to descriptive writings of the reality observed, whereas a smaller place is left for quantitative data analysis, statistical decisions and inferences.

In short and as a first definition of “What is ethnography”, I would say:

“This is a form of research that implies researchers to study a field of research in situ and for a long time, to provide, with a set of empirical tools, a written report of their experience and observations, which are as close as possible to what it could have been observed by anyone in the same place and the same time, but also knowing that the collection of data may have been different if the researchers were not there”.

I will have to rethink about this later during the course.

References
Baszanger, I. and Dodier, N. (2002) ‘Relating the part to the whole’, Qualitative research: Theory, method and practice. London: Sage publications.
D844 (2011) ‘D844 Block one – The ethnography tradition’, The Open University.
Denzin, N.K. (1997) Interpretive ethnography: Ethnographic practices for the 21st century, Sage Publications, Inc.
Fielding, N. (1993) ‘Ethnography’,.
Gilbert, G.N. (2001) Researching social life, Sage Publications Ltd.
Mason, J. (2002) Qualitative researching, Sage Publications Ltd.
Willis, P. and Trondman, M. (2000) ‘Manifesto for ethnography’, Ethnography, 1(1), pp. 5-16.

Mahoodle ! Pourquoi il ne faut pas attendre Moodle 2.0 ?

In this report I will explain what is a wiki and how I use it in my ICT course with my students as a participative notebook. I will point out the different outcomes and drawbacks I have noticed after two years of practice. Finally I will provide some recommendations for using wikis with students and give some further readings.

Background

Although the web service Wikipedia is well known by most Internet users, the concept behind wiki remain obscure for most of them. A wiki is a piece of software usually accessible on the web in which users can create, edit and improve text as in a word processor.
Text authors embed links, multi-media such as images, sound or video. Wikis are called social tool because they let other users to interact with published media and edit in the same time or at different time. Documents can then be created within a group of users. Authors or wiki managers can attribute roles to each actor and limit the right to edit or create to certain or all readers/users.
An history is preserved and shows all the editing together with the name of those who made them. From this, it is always possible to rollback and return to a previous version of the wiki documents or to decide to purge the history and then freeze the document in its latest stage.

Current practice

With my first year Gymnasium students (secondary school, students in age 16-17) I give an IT course. This course is given half class (about 16 students) every two weeks. One of the most problems is students’ memorisation of taught concepts between two session. Sometimes, taking account of the holiday and imponderables more than one month can separate two lessons.
Until 2007, I requested students to take notes of what we studied during a lesson. Especially when working on Excel with some complex formula or concepts. More than
once, notes were lost and not taken by students and then assessment always shows poor results.
Since 2008, after each didactic sequence, students are asked to write a small report on a wiki for memory. They also have to write step-by-step instructions to show they have understood how to proceed with tasks and to remember the process in the future. These notes are shared among the groups and each member can come on one other’s wiki and edit it if he finds that corrections have to be done.
The result of this is already a better rate of pass at the final assessment. I have observed that students go by themselves to find information in their wiki’s notes whenever they need to recall some procedure in Excel or in Word. They are more critics on the notes they take and on the notes others have taken.
In the future I would like to observe whether the reflexive task requested after each learning sequences gives students more confidence or doesn’t change long term retention.

Recommendation

To extend or adapt use of wikis in teaching, we must be aware that a wiki is not a tool our students have already use. A phase of learning a about the tools is essential, and exercises using wikipedia, for example, could be positive.
Installation of wiki is relatively complicated. But a simple wiki with basic functions is available in Moodle as activity. This activity module supports groups and grouping to crate group, private, or class wikis.
Without tasks that demand collaboration a wiki is useless. And wikis are to develop interactive and dynamic, multimedia, hyperlinked documents. For any other use of text processing, wikis have to be replaced by fora or blogs which are more common to practitioners.

Issues

The main issue is in the nature of wikis which is not very well understood by users. Wiki is a tools belonging to the Web 2.0 family. It encompasses collaborative, multimedia and hypertext facilities. It resembles to a word processor but has to be use differently.
Page layout editing is most of the time less straightforward than in a word processor, in a blog or in a forum. Editing wikis has some limitations that are minors if other functionalities (group, link, multimedia) are used. .

Further reading

Duffy, Peter D. and Bruns, Axel (2006) The Use of Blogs, Wikis and RSS in Education: A Conversation of Possibilities. In: Online Learning and Teaching Conference 2006, 26 Sep. 2006, Brisbane. Available from http://eprints.qut.edu.au/5398/1/5398.pdf (accessed on 11 January (2010)
Educause (2005), 7 things you should know about… wikis, Educause, Available online http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7004.pdf (accessed on 10 January 20010)
Mader (2006), Using Wiki in Education, Steward Mader ed.
Richardson, W. (2009) Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for
Classrooms Corwin Press; Wikipedia (2010), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki (accessed 11 January 2010)

———— Transcript ————

Hello I am Dominique-Alain JAN, a student in the H808 Open University course called “The elearning professional”.
For the purpose of activity 8-11, I am delivering this podcast about: “elearning professionals and podcasting”.

First, I will just reflect on my own experience of creating this, my first podcast ever. Then I will talk a bit about podcasting as an activity for elearning professionals.

To begin with, I made some recording trials with Quicktime Pro and Audacity but I was rapidly disappointed by the poor quality of my output and I was puzzled by the complexity of editing the work. My first strategy was to re-record my text again and again, every time I made a mistake in reading, trying to improve the speech.

Later I tried another strategy: never stopping the recording and editing the work to correct, delete or copy paste the different parts to create the final podcast. This task was full of learning, but took me ages and the final product was not any better according to my personal standards.

I then decided to go a bit further into podcasting by finding information about how professionals were doing it. I found some information on the Apple Web site about using their GarageBand software solution for creating and delivering podcasts on Macintosh. I also subscribed to Lynda.com for a course on “Creating podcasts with GarageBand 3.0″ which is an outdated version, but concepts in the course are still valid.

I chose to create this podcast with GarageBand and used some of the program’s key features which allow you to include “slides”, “jingles” and “URLs” in the podcast.

So if you are listening to this on iTunes or an iPhone or iPod, you should get more information than just my “funny french accent” talking to you.

Now I come to the point about where, why or when podcasts could be useful. Listening to my previous attempts and to different podcasts over the web, I think that an mp3 file of a few minutes is not very useful and sometimes boring. Except maybe if those are recordings of broadcast radio programmes or interviews, where the context makes us ready to just listen to them.

For education I believe that videocasts or podcasts with embedded media are more useful and will generate more interest and engagement from our students.

This raises the problem of how could we create such material. Looking at a course about screencasting, lighting, microphones, mix-tables and all such professional equipment seem to be indispensable to deliver quality material to students and learner.

As an elearning professional, could we afford that? Even if we could, do we have sufficient talent to do it? Is our voice, our expression or delivery good enough to be listened to for minutes at a time?

Maybe, maybe not. I personally don’t have talent for that, furthermore not in English.

I think that the true talent of an elearning professional is to know about technology, to know about what is feasible and what is not. What does it cost in terms of time, money, people to create engaging learning material.

To create them there are professionals in every art: our skill is to make them work all together.

Thank you for your attention.

—- begin paste  —–

1. You can organise your group in any way you choose; for example, by choosing a coordinator, identifying who has the necessary technical skills or agreeing on a division of labour [...].
2. You should first use the one or two cases you have agreed on, to come to a consensus on a small number (five to ten) of key principles of practice that you believe to be central to effective elearning, and which are illustrated by the case(s).
3. Identify which features of the example cases (screenshots, text, description, etc.) you can use to illustrate the presentation.
4. Agree on the type of presentation you will create. For example, it could be a standalone series of PowerPoint slides; PowerPoint slides with notes outlining the oral part of the presentation; a single slide constructed like a conference poster; a leaflet produced in Word or PDF; or a mini-website [...]
5. Construct the presentation [...].
6. Finally, nominate someone in the group to post the presentation [...].

— end paste —-

We had two weeks to complete the task which represents in OU vocabulary about 30 hours of work. I have the habit, when working in a group, of working as much as leader as a member. I have to say I am a bit disappointed by how things happened in our group.

Working in a group

Back at the beginning someone booted up the group and for me became de facto the group’s leader, but this contribution was not followed by other guidance. Until the end of the project it remained unclear what the group really wanted to do and we did something that made, I think, most of the participants happy (though it is difficult to say due to the lack of feedback from the group members on that activity and on what we achieved).

In e-learning as in many subjects where interdisciplinarity is the keyfactor, working in a group is important. By group I mean team and I differentiate a team from a group by the following claims:

A team has a leader

A group is simply a certain amount of people in the same place (physical or virtual) not necessarily driven by the same goals and objectives. A team has a structure and usually has a leader who steers the team by organising its life, distributing the task, controlling the feasibility and the accomplishment of the different sub-tasks. The leader leads and must have the big picture in mind which he can share with the team’s members but this is not mandatory.

As Henry Mintzberg described in his “The Structuring of Organizations: A Synthesis of the Research”, first published in 1973, leadership can take different forms,  from dictatorship to democracy to adhocracy.

Maybe in our group for this task 6-3 we all believed that adhocracy would save the project and that everyone would work in the same direction, taking the same decisions at the same time, without discussing it. While this may work in a few companies in Northern Europe, it certainly could not work here because we didn’t have enough at stake in that project, and we as group members were not implicated enough in its success (= reward).

A team has clear targets

What differentiates a group from a team is the clear understanding of the target that must be reached and the means mobilised to succeed. The first thing to do is to redefine, in the group, the task, its outcomes, the process, the time and the tools to engage. All team members must have a clear view of what place they will have in the project and all the main points must have been negotiated and accepted. In sociology we call this: defining the boundary-objects (Star, 1989). Here, the activity suggested by the H808 team/tutor is not clear at all, and we should have spent time negotiating a common project. Reading forum posts in different groups it appears to me that we all had different interpretations of the task, both in our group and between the different groups’ members.

A team works together

To make people work together it is not sufficient to show them the goal and shout “go”. A preliminary phase is essential to build the team, to learn each other and trust each other before starting to work together. In a distance environment Salmon Gilly suggests a rather long period of ice-breaking and team-building at the beginning of every new project (Salmon, 2002; 2004).

Here we had no time and moreover no tutor or group leader to create that emulation. I believe, and certain other members of other groups also suggested this, that a contact with any social cues would have rendered this process obvious and quick. A quick conference with Skype, Elluminate or other tools of this kind would put all the participants together at the same time although not physically in the same place. I personally can’t consider working with a group of people without having heard their voices, seen their faces and knowing how they want to participate in a project and what they want to achieve.

For me anonymity is a limitation in group management and team building.

About the tools

Nowadays there are zillions of tools on the Web for teamworking. We worked with Google Document and we didn’t use all its potential. Collaborative tools are not necessary the easiest tool to use and need some work to understand and to delimit all their features. I just take the example of wikis: everyone knows about wikipedia but few know they can modify wikipedia content if they desire and fewer know exactly what is and how to use wikis in general.

During this activity, some other groups used Google Documents to communicate on all the different sub-tasks to be achieved by the team. In my experience it is often  simpler to adapt ourself to a known tool than trying to use new technologies promises. In our group we could have used Prezy, a web 2.0 service for presentation, instead of Google Documents – Presentation, but we preferred a more classic and limited, but relatively know tool.

Using new technologies on a so short amount of time where the target is to produce a final document is certainly too much demanding for a group, but maybe not necessarily  for a team where one person could be dedicated to discover and engage with it, in all other cases I think that the cheap and cheerful solution is certainly the best and only answer.

References

Star S.L. & Griesemer J.R. (1989), “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39″. Social Studies of Science 19 (4) pp 387–420

Start small or K.I.S.S.

First of all, years ago, when I had to start a journal about my learning as a trainer teacher, I decided to start without too many expectations, and privileged regularity over quantity and quality. What was important was to start the process and write on a regular basis. To be focussed on the task more than on technology, Keep It Simple and Stupid (Kiss) and begin with what you are most happy with: pen and paper, emails to yourself, blog, e-porfolio, whatever suits you the best.

With time, you will discover that taking notes and posting them in an electronic form gives more freedom in the organisation of your work and the reuse of your editing.

From the surface to the depth

Writing directly about profound and personal thoughts on such an intimate subject as our transformation through learning is not easy, but this comes in time. Begin to write about facts to help your brain to focus on what happened, on what you learned or what you read, watched or listened to. Let your thoughts and feelings come up without any judgement. Think less and less about generalities and focus step by step on more specific points about the learning. These points should evoke agreement or disagreement, good or bad feelings, new ideas or bring back old personal experiences. Write all you get. Later, or in another post, you may go over and process your material to deepen or edit it. With time, this exercise will become more and more familiar and the path to your thoughts and deep memory will become brighter and quicker.

From privacy to publicity

It is important that this task must remain something you are confident about and trust in. Begin by writing your reflection for yourself and open them up to others with time. Opening your reflexive material, or a part of it, to others gives you the benefit of their comments on your work and the reciprocity to their own intimacy. This sharing can be made only with peers of the same cohort within a wider community. Making part of your thoughts obvious to the world gives you a way to be recognised for who you are. Whichever way, never lose the control of your image. When it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it.

Writing towards objectives

The question of having a living reflexive journal in whatever form it can take, is of course driven by targets. Even if we know, through literature, that reflexive activities give students wider ownership of their learning and foster a deeper learning approach with tangible results in higher marks and better learning, these activities are time consuming. Moreover if such tasks are compulsory and have to be assessed, the style, grammar and structure will have to be reviewed.

As a personal learning tool, a reflexive journal is something that has to be tried for a minimum basis of one course before you can discover its advantages, so persevere, or follow a syllabus where you will be forced to do it, if you need, as I did, such a ‘driver’.