As we begin the process of designing a learning community in our group, re-reading this passage in Wenger was initially a bit discouraging. It seems there is only so much we can do to design an effective learning community, we have to accept that the community will start to take on a life of its own and determine its own direction. On reflection, I actually found this concept empowering. What we are doing is creating a vehicle for learning, but then handing over the navigation and driving to those who started off as the passengers. It our role as designers to then be responsive and reactive to the needs of the community and to provide the necessary frameworks as needs and wants emerge.

One thing about learning is that you will never know when things you learn become useful later in life. When I was living in Singapore in the mid nineties, my employed paid a web design company (there wasn’t a lot of choice then) to design their site. It was expensive and inadequate. I bought a book ‘html for dummies’ and said I’ll make the site for $1000. And I did! And then I taught Primary school students how to code in html and they made web pages showing all the Australian lollies they were missing in Singapore with scanned images of the wrapper papers.

At the time (oh how naïve) I thought I am never going to use this skill again. In the end it has turned out to be one of the most important skills I have developed.  Wenger is right, eventually, all learning gains significance through the skills we develop and how that transforms as us a person and our ability to participate and negotiate meaning.

This unassuming skill has certainly transformed my life and my identity in many ways I did not expect 13 years ago!

So this means the first stage of designing an effective learning experience is to determine the perspectives from which potential learners will be approaching their learning. This is a challenging thing to do! Can we survey students? But then can we trust their disclosures? Perhaps they will be influenced by other factors and say what they think we want to hear. Perhaps they are not fully aware of their own perspectives, especially at a subconscious level.

In the learning community I examined (php coders), the community may be a diverse group of people but their perspectives that relate to php coding and online learning are all fairly similar. I would suspect most of the group is self-taught to some extent, most of the group is used to finding online support for tech issues and all of the group know the frustration of trying to resolve a programming issue. This results in a fairly cohesive community who achieve fairly specific outcomes as they are all entering the community with similar perspectives and common goals.

There was just soooo much in this reading (as you can see in the three summaries below in which I was actually pretty ruthless and left out heaps of stuff I would have normally included only because otherwise the summary was going to end up as long as the reading). I can see again I am going to have trouble being ‘brief’ in my response to this article.

So instead of just recording all my responses as to how Wenger’s work informs my analysis of my community, I am going to just wait a few days and see which of all the thoughts swirling around floats to the top – what really speaks most to me based not on first thoughts and reactions but instead on considered reflection.

So in the words of Arnie, ‘I’ll be back’.

UPDATE A FEW DAYS LATER

I have decided that there is so much I want to discuss in the Wenger article I am just going to post a series of blogs over a period of time to respond to the questions above.

I found Cornford’s discussion on social learning theories particularly interesting in relation to two specific communities I am currently exploring.

Impact of Social Comparison Theory on the search for an online community.

In my search for an online community to be examined as the subject of our first assignment, I directly experienced many of the phenomenon discussed by Cornford around social comparison theory.

Cornford argues that adults will learn more productively (and with less frustration) if they choose suitable models for comparison. So the choice of model can play a large part in the success (and level of satisfaction or enjoyment) of the learning experience. While the presence of others can act as a stimulus for learning and performance, if the model chosen is too superior in expertise the learner may feel overwhelmed by the gap between their current competence and that of the modeller.

When searching for PHP/MySQL coding communities, I initially came across some so that were so beyond my beginners level that I found the whole experience depressing and de-motivating (as Cornford describes) despite the fact that I have had some small successes in this area. But when it was clearly laid out to me how far I had to travel to reach a high level of competence (it was as though the site was, the gap in knowledge was staggering and oppressive. So my process for every community I investigated for suitability, my first task was to compare my level of expertise with that of the participants on the site until I found a group where I felt there was a cooperative environment with a realistic starting point for beginners, but scope to learn and move to the next level of skills.

Social Penetration Theory in Action

The second community where I could view these ideas in action was the NING community for our e-Learning group. This is a wonderful example of social penetration theory  in action – the movement from superficial levels of learning about each other to more personal, intimate levels. Despite starting as strangers, the group has moved from guarded impersonal posts to much more revealing and self-disclosing exchanges. What has struck me most is how understanding more about a person’s background, experience and perspectives adds greater depth to any commentary they might make. We too as a group have disclosed disclose incrementally, symmetrically and reciprocally as Cornford indicates is the usual progression. The Johari window of disclosure was also an interesting model as each of us participating will have our arena: open part of self (known both to self and others), our façade or hidden part (known to self but not others), our blind spot: (unknown to self, known to others) and the unknown part of ourselves.

Cornford’s discussions on the need for selective self-monitoring were also pertinent and really made me stop and reflect on my own postings on the site. Was I overly guarded at all? I was I writing what I really thought or what I thought I should be writing? How much of what I was posting was affected or driven by the environment and my response to cues from this environment?

I could also spend time discussing the advantages and disadvantages of group learning and the significance of research in social psychology on group dynamics, but I am endeavouring to shorten these posts so perhaps that is a topic for another time.

There was so much in this article that was relevant to our focus of learning communities as a framework that I am going to focus just on the top 5 areas that I found most interesting.

1. ADULTS AND GROUPS

There was much discussion and research presented in this chapter about the concept that adults will learn more effectively through interaction with others and participation in groups. Yet my observation has been that many adults prefer a lecture-style presentation than having to participate in a group activity.

Two recent examples of this. At our f2f class for this subject, a number of students (myself included!) bemoaned the fact that we have a group assignment for this subject. From my perspective, I find group work a pain as you can’t just do it when you want to you have to consider what suits everyone else and you have to rely on other people to complete certain pieces of work. When you do not know the members of the group well that trust is not yet present to feel comfortable about that.

My second example was a recent professional development day I held for teaching staff. My style of session is to talk for a bit – calling for responses, taking questions (so it is not straight lecture style) and on a regular basis usually at the end of a small section, I ask people to move into pairs or groups to debrief and usually to carry out some sort of discussion activity or task in the group that will reinforce and give them an opportunity to discuss what we have just talked about. Students love this. They are just hanging out for the chance to share their thoughts as soon as possible. The only caveat I would make on this is the larger the group, the more structured the group discussion or activity needs to be. In pairs you can say ‘discuss this’ to a group of students but larger groups need more direction to ensure they stay on task (and to ensure they find the group activity valuable – otherwise in the evaluations they will clearly state the group activity was a waste of time).

Now adults on the other hand, have a totally different reaction when you first ask them to move into groups. You can see from the physical cues that they are reluctant; it is so much easier to sit and just listen. Yet these people have the necessary motivation, they chose to be there. The social environment is safe, they all have much in common. What amazes me is that these are people who move students into groups every day as part of good teaching practice! Yet by the end of the day they are moving enthusiastically into groups – perhaps because the group norms have been established to some extent and they are comfortable with their role in the group.

In our learning communities one can view each blog post stream or conversation as a small group, all discussing a particular thought. But let’s look at our learning communities from the perspective of Social Learning Theory.

2. SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY

The concept that we learn to behave by observing others is very relevant for my learning community. I am looking at coding for web development in php and mysql. Looking at my site, you’d think I already know how to code in php, I can make interactive quizzes that will work out your score and give you different responses depending on the answers you chose. But what I did last year was to say, I want to make an interactive quiz, did a google search and worked out I needed to code in php, did another google search and basically looked at what other people had done and cobbled together bits of code from here and there and used the models of other people’s work to work out the format and rules of the code. Normally I would buy a book and systematically learn php from the start so why did I go this way? Because I needed it to happen fast and I knew learning from modeling from others would be much quicker and more effective than individual learning on my part.

I think we see social learning as a way to fast track ourselves, through the combined collaborative efforts of others we are more effective and have less need to ‘re-invent the wheel’.

One really interesting point made though was that although we people can learn about ideas and behaviours how much of what is learnt is actually adopted will vary very widely between individuals taking into account individual preferences and traits. This is why learning communities work. You do not have learn EVERYTHING, instead you just hone in and focus on the areas that you are specifically interested in and that meet your needs. It is demand-pull learning (learning when you specifically need it rather than learning lots of things now in the hope they will be useful later on). This is why online learning communities are valuable – the technology makes it easy to dip into your areas of interest when needed.

3. SOCIAL COMPARISON THEORY

I found this an interesting concept when selecting my learning community. Social Comparison Theory makes the point that we use others to evaluate our skills, values, beliefs, that we learn more productively (and with less frustration) if  choose suitable models for comparison and that the presence of others acts as a stimulus for learning and performance.

But the salient point for me, was that we need to choose APPROPRIATE models. The point is made that adult learners learn better if they are comparing themselves to someone with greater relevance expertise but not too superior in their expertise. As my learning community is a technical one, this was very evident in my search for a community. Some sites I had no idea what they were even talking about and they were evidently for those with a much greater skill level for me. I found these sites depressing, it just pointed out how much I had left to learn! Other sites were too easy and went through what I already knew so were of no use for my purpose. For the learning experience to be meaningful for me, I needed to find a site that matched my baseline level of experience but would then allow me scope to expand on my skills to reach a particular finish point I am aiming for (using databases to track student progress through units).

4. LEARNING THROUGH SELF-DISCLOSURE TO OTHERS

Social penetration theory: describes the movement from superficial levels of learning about each other to more personal, intimate levels

This was particularly interesting when applied to our e-learning community on NING. At first we were all quite hesitant, but as we because more comfortable the information and opinions revealed have moved from the superficial to a much deeper level. It is interesting to see that some people went back and changed their profiles as they felt more comfortable giving information about themselves. What has surprised me is how quickly we have gone from being a bunch of strangers to being interested in each other and knowing quite a lot about each other – perhaps more than we know about the people we work with! In some ways the medium encourages disclosure, plus there has been a concerted effort on the lecturer’s part to create a safe and supportive environment. But it is interesting to see the research in action – in NING we certainly have disclosed incrementally, symmetrically and reciprocally!

5. SELF-MONITORING

This section was also very interesting with respect to our conversations on NING. I suspect that given the demographics of our group we have few people who are not monitoring the appropriateness of what we write. We definitely have a mix of high and low self-monitors and I think we would all like to THINK we are in the middle – selective self-monitors. I felt that at times I was on the low side (just said what I was thinking without assessing the cues from the environment – because I wanted to say it so the impact was of less importance to me). While at other times I might be more careful or make a conscious effort to take a more academic tone rather than write in the style that comes naturally to me. At this point in time I am still ‘finding my voice’ with my blog, I do feel this response to the readings has moved from the more formal to conversational style.

I found this section particularly interesting as it made me stop and assess my own contributions from a different perspective – and that is what learning is all about!

I could write more (especially on the section on group dynamics, perhaps as a separate post) but I am struggling with the whole ‘brevity’ bit of blogging. I do feel though that these required responses for this subject can be treated a bit differently.

1. User-created content (blogs, photostreams, wikibooks, machinima clips)

Prior to this subject, I had little experience with user-created content apart from Wikipedia and YouTube and have had no experience in integrating them as part of an educational process.

2. Social networking (the reason students log on – may represent a way to increase student participation)

I have never been interested in social networking and have only explored myspace so I can understand a little about what students are talking about. After experiencing NING, I have the following thoughts germinating about social networking:

- If you don’t like networking in the real world, will you also not be keen in the virtual world?  Perhaps that is why students, who are really non-stop social networkers in their day to day life are so switched on by it – it is simply another tool for them to do what they are already doing and already love.

- It is addictive, you want to keep up to date and know what is going on.

- I suspect your personality is unlikely to change just because you are online. If you are shy in real life, you will probably be shy online and not contribute much – the reasons for that shyness, doubt about whether what you have to say is worthwhile etc, are still present in the virtual world. If you are an opinionated person with something to say, you’ll be like that in your social network. I have found I have to make a conscious effort not to post too often on NING as I always have something to say – whether anyone else finds it interesting or not -  I usually will have an opinion and am happy to express it. But I want to avoid over-dominating discussions.

- It chews up mass amounts of time. It is one of the most time consuming activities I have ever come across.

- I feel like I am leading a double life. There is the real world, but then there is this whole separate life happening online that those in my real world know nothing about.

- Would I continue in a social network (that was just for social purposes only) by choice? Unlikely. I may seem a social creature but the reality is I am very solitary and a quite independent worker – not into the group collective way of working. Ever since I left the workplace and now work for myself I have loved it – I was worried I’d miss the contact with other employees but that hasn’t been the case at all. Now I know this does not fit the approach needed in the Web 2.0 world. Perhaps this side of my nature will develop as I delve deeper. But for the moment I feel this is not my preferred way to interact socially. I can see potential huge benefits though from an academic or professional point of view – even if it is not my personal preferred means of communicating.

3. Mobile Phones - gateway to digital lives

The only application I have seen of this is a few schools in Sydney where they text announcements to students and/or parents. Now that is pretty cool.

I am looking forward to the day when phones include a projection device, that would be extremely interesting.

4. Virtual worlds

I have had no experience with this – yet!

5. New scholarship and emerging forms of publication

Last year I decided I was no longer going to write and publish anymore hardcopy study skills resources. Instead I created (and continue to create) an online study skills handbook. I felt that it was important to try and tap into students’ affinity with technology. I also love the flexibility of this sort of publishing. I can continually add, update and improve – unlike the static resources I wrote some years ago. Even if I updated those, there would be a huge amount of people out there using the old versions.

6. Massively multiplayer educational gaming

A huge phenomena of this is Mathletics. I cannot believe how this has taken off in school. Students play against other students across the world, answering Maths questions (yes, Maths, and they love it!). Whole schools compete. It is incredibly successful – I’d love to do a study skills version but don’t yet have the budget or the knowledge!

1. Grassroots video

This is one I have been spending a lot of time on lately. On one of my sites I have lots of video clips and I have been constantly exploring different formats and ways of encoding the file to see what gives me the best results. At the moment I am evaluating a number of streaming video services. My biggest issue with video is that there seems to be no standards yet and so there are infinite ways you can put video on the web but no best practice. In fact, I’d love to be able to film some of you tomorrow at the block doing a 20second clip on topics like how you study and learn or how you manage time etc.

2. Collaboration Webs

Until Ning, I had not really had any experience with collaboration webs. I had explored myspace, bebo and facebook simply to understand what they students were talking about (and spending so much time on) but I had not felt the desire to create my own page. Indeed, Ning has definitely confirmed something for me – these sites can chew up huge amounts of time. It would be interesting though to use this type of site for teaching and learning activities – I guess UTS online sort of fits into this category and I have been using this for years.

3. Mobile Broadband

I have been exploring this for the last few months as I am looking for a device that will give me mobile wireless broadband, is small and sturdy and won’t cost the earth that I can take with me when I travel overseas. We went to the big technology centres in Tokyo a few months ago to see what was new in this area. The problem I am finding is that many of the mobile broadband devices that are portable do not have full functionality. I need to be able to edit and upload web pages while I am traveling so I am still looking – if anyone has any advice let me know!

4. Data Mashups

From the title I had no idea what data mashups were.  After reading about it I understood what it was but have definitely had no experience with this technology – in fact was unaware it even existed.

5. Collective Intelligence

I have of course used Wikipedia although I have not contributed. I have also been impressed with Amazon’s clever marketing which examines what I purchase and makes recommendations to me – some of which I do end up purchasing – I always wondered how they did this – assumed they just had a very powerful database. I really wanted to see what humanbraincloud was like but it was getting revamped however the blog was interesting.

6. Social Operating Systems

Definitely no experience with this – no surprise seeing social operating systems are obviously in the very early days of development. The main thought that occurred to me as I was reading this was privacy issues – this will open up a whole new set of concerns for people about the way information about them on the web is collected and collated. It is always surprising when you google yourself to see just how many bits and pieces there are about you on the web, but if these were developed into a cohesive package? And where do we draw the line between our professional and personal identity?

Review the significant trends (p.6) – how do these relate to your experiences of technology in learning contexts?

1.The growing use of Web 2.0 and social networking – combined with collective intelligence and mass amateurization – is gradually but inexorably changing the practice of scholarship.

Gradually is the key word for me. My experience with schools and technology are that they are often very slow to adopt new technologies. As Trent discussed in his post, schools block many of these sites, are concerned about privacy and safety  issues and then of course there is also the issue of moderation – students can at times be inappropriate in what they contribute. I can see the potential in this area but more education and training is needed at a school and individual teacher level before this becomes a well-used learning tool in schools.

2. The way we work, collaborate, and communicate is evolving as boundaries become more fluid and globalization increases.

YES and I love this aspect. If I need a programmer I can go to rentacoder and can find people all over the work to collaborate with. I love that I can outsource so much more easily now than ever before. And of course, when you are doing distance education this is essential to promote discussion in what otherwise can be a very solitary learning experience.

3. Access to – and portability of – content is increasing as smaller, more powerful devices are introduced.

Discussed above but another concern I have with this is as the hardware grows more powerful and more mobile, unfortunately the software sizes seem to keep increasing to so we never get a miniature version of what we have on our desktop instead we get a scaled down version with respect to functionality. I want portable but full functionality.

4. The gap between students’ perception of technology and that of faculty continues to widen.

Without a doubt – yes, yes, yes. I discussed my experiences with this in the first week’s readings but this is certainly one of the major challenges we face.  When I run staff sessions on study skills I always talk about putting study notes on IPod and always get a laugh with the line, ‘now you don’t know how to do that, but the students do’. But I also agree with Nicole – everyone CAN learn about these technologies and we can lessen the gap!

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• Infrastructure (eg. broadband and speeds) and availability and access have improved for the majority of Australians. Computers are faster and cheaper. Internet is not just restricted to computers either, we can use mobiles and other devices as well.

• The web has gone from being perceived as a means to either send a ‘letter’ quickly or a faster way to browse an ‘encyclopedia’ to being an integral part of our lives – we do banking and pay bills, shop online, communicate (even date!), contribute and blog, develop ideas, create and explore our own identities online and relationships with others. For many when their ‘internet’ crashes, their lives grind to a halt! Seely Brown’s prediction of the shift of using technology to support relationships (as opposed to individual experiences) has certainly been validated.
• Students have greatly improved in their ability to make judgments about the information on the Web. I have noticed that even in the last few years, when I ask students what questions they ask when deciding if a site if credible/reliable their answers have a much greater depth and subtlety than they did a few years ago – through their experience they have come up with things I would not have considered but that make perfect sense.

• Some of the ‘big’ sites that have shaped the way we (and particularly the digital generation) experience the web were launched (and became mainstream in their use) during the last 10 years. None of these sites were around when Seely-Brown was discussing these issues in 1999:  Wikipedia (2001), Skype (2003), Myspace (2004), Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005) and Google had only just launched in Nov 1999  (and now google has become a verb – ‘just google it’ – in fact we have a whole new language around Web 2.0 applications).

• There are so many embedded applications that allow people to publish and participate on the web without the need for their own domain name or a working knowledge of HTML coding or even applications like FrontPage and Dreamweaver – this accessibility is again largely in part thanks to Web 2.0 applications.

• The Web as a ‘medium’ is an interesting concept. This is still an issue that we have not resolved. Seely Brown gives the example of Comcast but think about a more recent example like YouTube. 10 months after YouTube was launched in December 2005, it was losing $500 000 a month with no plan of a way to make money. Despite this Google purchased it for 1.64 billion. Why? Maybe because they just didn’t want anyone else to get hold of it and even now they are still not sure what to do with it or how to make money with it. But they are hanging onto it – until someone works out what to do with it. As Seely-Brown says, none of us really know what the medium of the web will evolve into but the entrepreneurs want to make sure they have a slice of the action.

How do I see the issues raised by Seely Brown et al. being adopted?

• I think more and more educators are embracing and adopting the idea of social learning and the learner learning to be a participant in the field as opposed to an observer. One example of these is the way schools attitude to Wikipedia has changed. Originally a large number of schools banned the use of Wikipedia outright for use in assignments, but now most schools will openly accept Wikipedia as a listing in a bibliography although many insist on a secondary check of the information. Teachers are moving more and more away from the teacher driven instruction mode method of teaching to a more student driven experience, striving to make what students learn relevant and as ‘hands-in’ and  ‘real-life’ as possible, harnessing the power of technology when applicable to achieve this.. This makes perfect sense given the digital generation likes to learn through exploration and discovery. But as Trent pointed out, adolescents have little patience to delve to any great depth in a particular media. If they cannot find what they are looking for, they are quick to switch to an alternative media or follow a different lead (media-meshing).       

What might be some of the challenges? How do these relate to your own context of learning in your workplace?

• One of the biggest challenges is that the generation who understands and is immersed in Web 2.0 activities does not have the maturity or experience to work out the best ways to make use of these technologies in an educational sense. Those with the pedagogical background and an educator’s perspective, do not really understand the potential of these technologies as they are not immersed in them and look at them from a fundamentally different perspective. I think things will change dramatically when those who approach technology from a life-long experience that contributes to a deep and fundamental understanding (that may simply not possible for many of the teachers and parents of the current generation become the educators (although will a new set of technologies have emerged then that means the cycle of disconnect just start again?).

• Another challenge is dealing with the generation of ‘multi-processors and teaching them how to manage their use of technology. Parents are continually concerned about students’ use of MSN when studying and most students will admit they are rarely talking about their schoolwork. Again, another example of technology with a huge potential that we have not yet worked out how to tap into effectively.

• As educators this means we need to be continually striving to challenge our own perceptions and notions of learning to find the best ways to take advantage of this new medium. This became obvious to me when I created a study skills site for students to use and although it was very interactive it took a student to point out to me that many students would rather listen to the text blocks than read them (which simply meant me creating optional audio buttons). It is difficult to break our love affair with text based mediums.  But the use of technology to tap into multiple intelligences makes sense – however we still need to consciously think about it – it does not happen automatically. We have to work hard to achieve bricolage. One success for me in this area is that I always suggest to students that they read their study notes into a MP3 player and put them on their IPod and to the students this seems like such an amazing idea – why didn’t they think of it when they are hooked into them 24/7? Because again, they cannot see things from the perspective of an educator. We cannot expect them to do this so it is up to us to immerse ourselves in their world and help them harness its power.