However, Arabic is tricky in it’s own right (letters look different depending on whether it’s at a start of a word, the end of a word, etc, and vowels are typically not included), and the typically writing style used with Urdu, Nastaliq is very ornamented, and relies on stacking letters on top of each other in a way that I find very hard to decode. The picture below is not from a religious text, but the headline of a daily newspaper (which posts its articles as pictures, because they cannot replicate this effect using computer fonts).

In contrast, below is a newspaper headline from a daily newspaper in Saudi Arabia, which uses the Naskh style of writing, common for published secular material in the Arab-speaking world.

So that’s a challenge, but obviously not something completely insuperable. However, the other thing that kept bugging me is that even if I put in a lot of effort to learn to read Urdu, there isn’t really that much worth reading that’s easily available to me…

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a great Urdu poetry tradition, and I’ve always wanted to read the works of Ibn-e Safi, a Pakistani who never travelled outside Pakistan, but wrote a 120-book ouvre about a Pakistani spy on secret missions around the world… But it’s very hard to find Urdu literature online, or in Toronto (if I find it online, it’s typically in scanned format, which means I cannot use online dictionaries), and just like with the Indian languages, there isn’t that much modern literature being written (English being more prominent).

I still really want to learn Urdu, as well as proper fluent Hindi for that matter, at some point. But in the meantime, I decided to study… Russian! I know, quite different. But it’s another language which I’ve learnt a bit of, but never gained fluency in.

My first meeting with Russian was taking the trans-Siberian from Norway to Beijing for my first trip to China (and first time leaving Europe) in 2001. I spent a month there, visiting Esperantists. Later, I travelled through Russia on the train one more time, and also spent some time travelling through the ‘stans in Central Asia. I picked up a few words, but never learnt much.

Then in 2004, I had a chance to go to People’s Friendship University of Russia for a one month intensive course in Russian, together with activists from different civil society organizations in Europe, funded by the European Council (the picture below is from the school’s homepage).The school is a pretty interesting place – it’s where a lot of African and Asian leaders were trained in the communist era, and to this day 60% of the students are from Asia and Africa. We had this wonderful old babushka of a teacher, who had dedicated her life to teaching Russian to foreigners, and we learnt a lot. But of course, there’s still a limit to how much you can learn during a month – and worse, I barely ever had a chance to use Russian in the years after (this was in 2003).

So I can read the alphabet, know some of the grammar, and remember some of the words, but that’s about it. Now, the neat thing about Russian, which I’ve been noticing during the last few years, is that there is a huge amount of material available online. Russian literature is well known, but there is not just classical literature, there are tons of novels being published continuously. And most of this is readily available online. As well as Russian movies, and the thing that I love – audiobooks!

So somehow I made a snap decision, and decided to do a 30-day Russian Challenge. Rather than reading a classical novel, I wanted to read something that is very popular in Russia right now. I came across Boris Akunin, who seems really cool, and is apparently one of the best-selling authors currently. He writes detective novels set in Tsarist Russia, and is very web savvy – his novels are available for free download on his website, and he has even created websites for some of the characters in his books.

So I grabbed one of his books, The Winter Queen, or Азазель in Russian, and was able to download the full-text in both English and Russian. I also found the audio book in Russian! So for one month, I will spend one hour each day (technically two pomodori) reading the novel in Russian, using the TranslateIt dictionary to provide mouse-over dictionary look-up. The way I do it, is to have the book open in TextEdit, so I can use the mouse-over dictionary. For every few sentences or paragraph, I read the same section of the book in the English translation, on my Kindle. I find this kind of bi-lingual reading really effective (it would be great if more authors put out bi-lingual editions, but in the meantime, we can hack it like this).

I have no idea if this is the best way to learn a language – choosing a fairly complex book, rather than a pedagogically adapted text, but at this point, I’m much more interested in reading an interesting, authentic text, rather than something that was designed for me.

Update: I wrote the draft for this blog post in November, and did enjoy this “Russian challenge” for about two weeks, making steady progress and having a lot of fun, before I fell out of it due to too many other commitments. I am going to try to take up the thread again now, so I am finally posting this.

Stian

Rural China Education Foundation

This past year, my wife has been spending a lot of time in the area near Guan’ai (one of the two schools mentioned in my report) doing her own independent projects. Sun Huimiao, the old headmaster at Guan’ai, is now working in a school at a nearby town, and she has brought all of the creativity, imagination and passion which she displayed at Guan’ai.

My wife worked with RCEF to document one of the projects Sun carried out with the primary school students. It’s a real inquiry projects, initiated by students’ authentic curiosity, and pursued through discussion, watching videos, looking up online, creating posters, writing, and presenting. An incredibly refreshing sight after all the rows of Chinese students repeating as a choir (example, although this classroom is much nicer than the ones in rural China, the repetition out load is very much the same).

What is even more interesting about teacher Sun’s case is that she is not a classroom teacher. Many of the students in the school stay in the dormitory (their parents might be from villages around, or they might have migrated to the big cities to look for work), and Sun works as a dormitory coordinator. Thus, this entire project was not in the context of a classroom, and was done entirely voluntarily by the students (of course, this also means teacher Sun was not constrained by any curriculum standards).

Have a look at the great video below, of how Sun turns the students fascination with snails into a great inquiry project. (Slightly longer version with more teacher reflection).

Hope to see more of this kind of innovative teaching in Chinese rural schools (and indeed, I know RCEF are documenting other practices, including a wonderful reading circle that a teacher organizes with her students each week).

Stian

PS: When looking for an example of students repeating out loud, I came across this BBC documentary series on Chinese schools which looks well made and worth a look.

PPS: The picture above is from my visit to Guan’ai a few years back, and not from the school depicted in the movie.

I started by noting how we live in a world with an abundance of resources, and then mentioning some of the ways in which we can be informal learners. We can use “site-specific information-centric communities” such as StackOverflow to get quick answers to something, while we are working on a problem (I absolutely agree with David Wiley that this qualifies as learning).

Much of my learning happens in what I call “long-term distributed topic-based communities”. This would be something like the “edublogosphere”, with people who discuss issues and share information over a long time, held together through RSS feeds, crosslinking, Twitter-hashtags, etc. However, as Mike Caulfield pointed out, there is something very powerful about a cohort moving through a set learning path or collection of materials together. Open courses, whether they be small learning groups on P2PU, or big MOOCs, is about offering more people the opportunity to participate in such learning experiences.

I then discussed some of the issues that came up during our course, such as the “dream of amplification”, the various dimensions of open courses, the dimensions of course organizer "authority" and our interesting experience with "threaded chat".

Finally, I discussed ways in which the course data could be analyzed and introduced two metaphors for organizing online courses: stimulus/response and divergence/convergence, and looked at how the latter model could be implemented in an open course based on a multitude of Web 2.0 platforms.

This talk, together with the links above, represent a lot of my current thinking and some of the research I would like to pursue. I would love to receive feedback, pushback and ideas. (PS: The slides are synchronized with a recording of my presentation – you won’t get much out of them if you just view the slides by themselves).

Stian

While in Hong Kong attending CSCL, I was surprised to receive an invitiation by Professor Li Luyi at Northwestern Normal University in Changchun to give a keynote lecture at the upcoming International Conference on Educational Technology and Computer. Since I would be participating in the Beijing post-conference and doctoral summer school at the same time, I initially thought that it would not be possible, but we were able to arrange it in the end.

The conference

I would have loved to see more of Changchun, but it was a short visit. I landed in Changchun late in the evening, gave my keynote the next morning, and attended the conference during the day. I just had time to attend part of the banquet in the evening, before I was whisked back to the airport. I don’t think I have ever flown somewhere for less than 24 hours, but despite the short time, the conference was full of interesting people and experiences.

The morning begun with myself, Dr. Wang Qiyun from the National Institute of Education in Singapore, and a professor from Bangkok giving our keynote presentations. We went back for the hotel for lunch, and then to another campus for the individual conference presentations.

Quality and pressure

China is pushing hard to expand both the “objective” quality of its academic output, and its academic standing in the world. Part of this process is attracting international conferences to China, and encouraging Chinese academics to publish in international journals, or present at international conferences. Often this pressure can be very strong, whether in the form of refusing any MA student to graduate, who doesn’t have a certain number of publications, or offering monetary compensation, sometimes equivalent to several years’ of salary, for a single publication in a prestigious international journal.

Some international journals prey on this pressure, offering easy publication with a steep publishing fee. Given the low price of publishing a poor quality online-only publication, most of the author-fee is considered profit, while the Chinese researcher gets a publication to list on their CV. The difficulty for many universities and department heads to sort out which international journals are reputable might be what has lead to the “cargo cult” around SSCI and SCI rankings – this means everything to Chinese academics, and they are often incredulous when I tell them that Western researchers might not be aware of which specific journals are or are not listed on the SSCI index.

The ICETC conference also showed some of these tensions. The conference had received many hundred submissions, and accepted more than 400 papers, which had all been printed in a gigantic proceedings (luckily, we did not receive a hardcopy each). However, many of the participants were quite happy to pay the few hundred yuan participation fee, and have their paper appear in the proceedings, so they did not show up for the actual conference. In fact, after lunch, when I was asked to chair a session, only four presenters out of 24 on the program showed up to present. Of these, the quality was quite poor, and one had not even been aware that he would need to present his paper.

Internationality

The conference was billed as an international conference, supported by an international organization, and all publications and communications were in English. However, almost all participants were mainland Chinese, with the exceptions of a few visitors from Taiwan and Singapore, and the Thai professor. In my session, the papers were all delivered in English, but every single person in the audience spoke Mandarin fluently, and the question and answer sessions often turned into Chinese (which was much more productive, since the English levels of the participants were often not very good).

However, there was one unexpected “international” aspect of the conference: the local students. Unbeknownst to me, Northwestern Normal University has a large group of international students in education, many of which were present. I met a number of students from Pakistan, India, Cambodia, Columbia and other countries doing their MAs and PhDs at the university, often with Chinese state scholarships. (For example, China offers 50 PhD scholarships to Pakistan each year, which makes up a substantial proportion of all PhD positions for Pakistani students). Some of these students spoke fluent Chinese, while others were studying in English.

There was a large difference in the demeanour of these students to their Chinese counterparts. Many of them had been quite senior in their home countries before coming to China, and had much more “life experience”, and they were not afraid to ask critical questions of the presenters. After my keynote, every single question that I received came from one of these international students, while the Chinese students and professors sat silent (of course, difference in English levels could also have played a role).

I have been aware of the case of international students in China for a long time – when I first came to China in 2001, I had several friends among the large group of African international students at Wuhan University, and already on my way towards China, I met a large group of Nepali medical students at the university in Cheboksari in Russia. However, through all my visits to top schools of education in China, I have not met any international students, so this was an interesting experience. It also points towards an alternative route for “internationalization”, and it would be interesting to look at what effect a significant group of international students can have on the Chinese students, and on the atmosphere in the class.

Conclusion

As I mentioned above, the academic level of the conference was quite low, but I still very much enjoyed it. The organization was great, and I met a number of interesting Chinese and international researchers whom I am sure I will stay in touch with. I know this blog post might seem critical, but I am very appreciate of the strong efforts Chinese universities and individual academics are putting in to bolster the level of research and exchange, and I think even such a “not quite international” conference can be a great starting point for graduate students who have never attended a large conference before. I look forward to seeing ICETC growing and improving, and I am very happy that I had the opportunity to interact with the students and staff at Northwestern Normal University!

Stian

What is a follower?

P2PU courses have always been entirely transparent, even without logging in, a visitor would be able to see not only the course outline and the links to all the freely accessible course resources (often linked from other websites), but also all the interactions and discussions between the course members.

On the new P2PU platform, we decided to formally enable people to “follow” courses. This would function similar to Twitter, where you can follow anyone without needing their permission (different from Facebook, where friending is reciprocal), and receive their updates.

Thus, when we launched our course called “Introduction to Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning” on P2PU this spring, we explicitly offered two different modes of participation. You could apply to be a core member, and be expected to do the readings every week, post on your own blog and participate in the weekly meetings. I have blogged about the participation statistics of the core members earlier.

How did following work in our course?

However, many people might be interested in the course topic, yet not have enough time (or inclination) to commit to being an active member. These people could “follow” the course. People added themselves as followers throughout the course, and currently we have about 50 people signed up. We were very curious about their experience of the course. Our course launched at the same time as the new platform, so it is natural to assume that some of the followers were just trying out new functionality. Others might have used it as an internal bookmark, reminding themselves to go back in the future. Did anyone actually actively follow along and get something meaningful out of the course?

(Part of the problem with evaluating this, is that the website was under rapid development, and a lot of new functionality was added as the course was running. Initially, followers did not receive any e-mail updates. About mid-ways, they began receiving updates that course organizers marked as “important” (typically the bi-weekly updates). In the future, followers will probably have the same choices of e-mail notifications as course participants, which might significantly change how they interact with courses they follow).

Survey of followers

We had hoped to see our course “amplified” through our followers, with retweets and blogs about topics they found interesting. There was, however, very little evidence of this. There was some retweeting and mentioning in blogs, but this was mainly along existing individual social networks. Thus, hearing nothing from the followers, it was hard to guess whether they were getting anything out of the course. So we decided to design a simple survey (see the questions we asked).

We got about 10 answers, which was more than I had hoped for, given that the followers were by definition not very active (some of them might even have left the P2PU platform altogether). Some said they had signed up, but never had time to look, some were planning to go back and review the material later, and some said they had popped in once in a while, and gotten a bit out of it. But one person stood out, professing a lot of enthusiasm, and answering “10″, where we asked students to rate how much they’d learnt from 1-10. I was very intrigued and e-mailed him, to see if I could ask him some more questions. He gracefully agreed to let me do a short e-mail interview, and post it here.

This is interesting not only to get a novel perspective on “following”, which is a rather new feature on the P2PU website, but also because the subject of “lurking” has caused quite a bit of debate in the MOOCosphere (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 for a random selection).

One of the things that especially struck me by his answers was how the concept of “eight weeks” for the course has little meaning to a follower. I do believe that having a cohort (like Mike Caulfield talks about) moving through a set learning trajectory together can be very powerful, but that doesn’t mean that the course materials (the initial ones, and the generated discussion) is worthless once the course is “over”… And one of the things I am thinking about right now, is to how to better present all the great resources that were generated during the course to new visitors – currently you need to dig around a bit to find the gems.

Who are you? Where do you live, what do you do?

My name is Daniel Marcell Góngora Flores, I live in La Paz, Bolivia, I am an Electronics Engineering student at Universidad Mayor de San Andrés.

Currently, I am working on my undergraduate thesis project, a Virtual Control Systems Laboratory based on the Furuta pendulum for experimentation under the Computer Supported Collaborative Learning approach.

How did you first hear about P2PU, how long have you been involved, what has your experience been, have you taken any other courses, etc.

Since I found MIT’s OpenCourseWare, I started looking for open educational resources in order to be a competitive student today and a competitive professional tomorrow.

I remember reading a blog post about a “School of Webcraft” that somehow was related to Mozilla. That was enough for me to look for more information, and that is how I arrived at the P2PU web site.

I first took a course called “Algoritmos y estructuras de datos”(Algorithms and Data Structures). I quited after 4 or 5 weeks. Then, I took a course called “Getting started with Scilab”, I did not quit this time just because I couldn’t find a way to do it. Why I quit? Despite the course organizers effort, I was not really comfortable with the teacher-student method and I didn’t have much time to do the tasks due to work in the first course (there was not a “follower” type of student at that time), in the second one I felt that I was reading another Scilab tutorial, nothing new, no activities to encourage discussion nor active participation.

I was not happy with the courses, but how to organize a course so that the participants become real participants and not only receivers?

How did you hear about the CSCL course

With the arrival of the new P2PU web site, I started browsing the courses almost every week. One day I found a course called “Introduction to the field of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning”. At that time, I didn’t knew anything about CSCL. Nevertheless, it being such an active course, I decided to follow it.

What made you interested?

Once I started reading the course material, I realized that CSCL was about learning through social interaction. Reading about that simple idea was such an eye opening experience to me, because I was used to learning by myself. Thanks to the Open Educational Resources, I was able to fill the spaces and connect the dots in my head without needing a teacher neither a partner. Now, it seems there is another way, a very interesting one.

Why did you decide to follow the course instead of participating

So, participating is the way to go. Being an active participant is how I will learn more. However, there was a problem: my English level. I am still building my English skills, the language barrier was stopping me from participating in this course because I was not able to participate in the chat rooms nor to write weekly blog posts in English, Spanish being my mother tongue. That’s why I became a peripheral learner.

What did you expect when you chose to follow the course – what did you think it meant?

I did not expect to find the topic of my undergraduate thesis project by just following the course, but I did (at least in some sense). Given that this was the first time I “heard” this term, my very first reaction was to look for CSCL in Wikipedia to try to understand what was this about.

How was your experience of following the course? During the eight weeks, what was your involvement – what part of the material or conversation did you look at, how much time did you spend, what was useful or interesting to you?

Being a follower, a peripheral learner, to talk about “the eight weeks” doesn’t make much sense because I am/was free to read the material (papers, wiki entries, blog posts, chat logs, etc.) at my own pace, whenever I wanted to. In fact, I’m still reading the material from week 4.

This is important to me because I am a engineering student, and even if I had read some papers related to education, I don’t have the background necessary in some cases to understand the material.

I could not say exactly how many hours I spend reading the course materials. However, the amount of time I spend reading the material is increasing significantly every week.

That being said, I always find it interesting reading wiki entries because of the references. Also, I found the blog posts and the chat logs very valuable because reading those made me feel part of the group, a group of people hungry for knowledge. I must admit that I’m a little bit jealous, because for me it’s hard to find people willing to learn and share their opinions in my “environment”. I think that this is a direct consequence of the commercialization of education here in Bolivia. A large number of friends of mine, students and professionals, think that what really matters is to have a really big CV filled with “n’importe quoi” instead of looking for opportunities to grow up. Filling the wallet is their final goal.

To me, the only way to improve education in Bolivia is applying collaborative learning and using open educational resources. Specially when the University teachers in particular and the educational institutions in general are not committed with this important role.

Although the actual core conference only lasts for a few days, I began my participation with two days of pre-conferences, attended post-conference events in both Guangzhou and Beijing, and even the doctoral summer school in Beijing that was affiliated with the conference. Thus, my earliest notes are from the pre-conference on machine learning and data analysis on July 4th, and my latest ones from Gerry Stahl'stalk to the international summer school on July 18th.

However, there were of course sessions I did not capture notes for. Taking detailed notes is exhaustive, and it’s difficult to do it the entire day. This is added to mundane issues like finding power outlets, etc. Either way, I hope the notes might be helpful – they certainly are to me. Overview over all notes.

The first pre-conference which I mentioned above was organized by Carolyn Penstein Rosé and her post-doc Gregory Dyke, and discussed tools to analyze computer-mediated communications. We got training in using Tatiana, a tool to analyze synchronous events with time-coded data from multiple media (for example videos, transcripts, chat and a shared whiteboard). In the afternoon, we learnt to use SIDE, which is a GUI for a machine-learning framework. Although nobody can become an expert in machine-learning in one afternoon, it was a great overview of the state of the art of machine learning, giving you a sense of what kinds of problems machine learning might be appropriate for. (For people interested in ML, McLaren, Scheuer & Miksátko, 2010 is a great paper showing how ML can be applied to a specific educational challenge, and the thinking that went in to choosing the right algorithm).

The second pre-conference was about connecting levels of learning, organized by Dan Suthers, Chris Teplovs, Marten de Laat, Jun Oshima and Sam Zeini. I’ve read about these ideas before, in Suthers et al., 2010, and found them interesting, but quite complex. In this workshop, Gerry Stahl gave a great historical/philosophical overview over CSCL as a discipline, and Dan Suthers presented on their theoretical approach. Then, a few datasets had been shared between researchers who provided different analyses of them – very interesting (although not always easy to tie back to the original theoretical framework of the session).

Ed Chi from Google Research opened the conference with an interesting keynote on augmented social cognition, with several neat cases from his work with access to huge data sets. From the conference sessions, I managed to capture two very interesting sessions on technology-enhanced interactions & analysis (1, 2), and one session on MUPEMURE, a “Model of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning with Multiple Representations”.

There were some very interesting presentations about the future of Knowledge Forum in the Guangzhou post-conference, which I did not manage to capture (but check out these slides 1, 2). I did get some notes from two of Gerry Stahl’s presentations, one describing two case study analyses he did, and one on the history and future of CSCL.

I’m looking forward to the International Conference on Learning Sciences next year in Sydney (CSCL and ICLS alternate every other year), where I hop to present a paper on open learning environments. I’m also planning to dig into all the notes I took, and all the connections I made, read more papers, etc.

Stian

During the past eight weeks, Monica Resendes and I facilitated a course called “Introduction to the field of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning” on P2PU. We are both interested in developing a research agenda around open courses, although this first course did not have an explicit research design or research questions. We approached it as a “baseline”, to get an idea of how it is to facilitate courses on P2PU, and also to try out some ideas regarding design and organization.

I can certainly say that I learnt a huge amount from the course, both from the actual content of course (all the course participants were scarily brilliant, lot’s of great insights in the blog posts and discussions!), and from the experience of facilitating the course in itself. Having been so close to the runnings of P2PU from the very beginning, and having worked closely with many course organizers, I was actually surprised at how much I learnt – but I did. Being a course organizer yourself is a whole different experience.

Part of it is the change of focus. Earlier, I thought of technical changes in terms of all the different courses, how much support it would need, how much in demand a feature was etc. But when you are a course organizer, you have laser-focus on your own course, and what it needs. And you’ve spent a lot of time developing the ideas, imagining a vision of how the course will go, etc. (Of course, it becomes interesting when this vision is not the same as the students’ vision of how the course should run, which I will blog about later).

Lessons learnt

Anyway, last week the course ended, and now we are thinking about what we have learnt. We posted five simple questions for all the active participants:

• What was the best thing about this course?
• Did you learn anything that will help you in your job or studies?
• Approximately how much time did you spend on the course each week?
• How should we improve the organization of the course in the future?
• How could the different tools and communication channels work better?

and we’ve got some great answers in this thread, and Martin also replied on his blog.

Participation

Monica and I are planning to do more analysis of the participation patterns etc, and we are currently preparing a survey to send out to “followers”, but I did a quick count of participation statistics for the people who signed up to “participate” in the course.

Of 13 participants (plus Monica and I, who also participated actively in all activities, but whom I have not included in these statistics), there were two whom we never heard from again after they were admitted to the course (one of whom has not done anything else on P2PU either, the single item in their activity feed is being admitted to the course). Apart from those two, a further five students “left us” during the first few weeks (one actually posted a message stating that she was not able to keep up due to other commitments, the others just “faded away”).

That left us with six students who were fairly active, and committed to the very end. Together with the course organizers, the eight of us have become a pretty tight-knit community, and really enjoyed the ride together. We’ve participated in different ways, one was never able to make the Saturday group chats, whereas most of the others did, some have used the forums on P2PU actively, others preferred their own blog, one never blogged, but made every single group meeting, etc. But they were all fairly active almost every week of the course, from the start to the end.

I know this is a very simplified analysis, but it also correlates with what I experienced (although going back to look at the data was useful – some of the people who signed up but never showed up, I had kind of forgotten about, but I had also forgotten about some of the people that were active during week one or two, but then faded out).

I am really grateful that we were able to finish strong (almost everyone made it to an amazing meeting in week 7 with guest speaker Sandy McAuley, and again to the last meeting this weekend, and every single person of those eight has posted a reflection on the five questions we asked them). I really didn’t want this course to slowly fade out. While we are all discussing interesting ways of carrying the course community forwards, including creating a sort of CSCL “book-club”, it’s valuable to have some kind of “closure” for our experience together these eight weeks.

However, I would of course have loved to see more of the about 50% of people who didn’t “complete” the course engage more actively. I myself was absent from the course for almost two weeks due to travel and an eye infection, and experienced how hard it was to “reinsert myself” into the community. At that time, I wrote to several students who had not been active, and encouraged them in a non-judgmental way to “get back on the train”. I received several positive responses to that message, but nobody actually did.

I’ve also written to all the participants who have yet to post reflections, and asked them to do so – even for people who were not active at all, I’d love to hear their thoughts. Or – if someone was reading a lot, but never posted, that’s also very valuable information.

The future?

Any lessons for the future? Well, although I did make it quite explicit what kind of participation I expected of “core participants”, there was no way of linking to this from the sign-up page, when the course was getting started, so I had no guarantee of students having read it.  (I really hope this will be fixed before I run another course). I’m also thinking that perhaps next time, I will make the sign-up question a bit “harder” – not in terms of difficulty, but in terms of engagement. For example, by asking students to read one article, and post some thoughts about it on their blog. That way, they have to do something a lot more active than just clicking “subscribe”, and two sentences about their interest, and I’ll already have their blog URLs.

On the other hand, there were 7 people who applied to the course and did not provide enough information. I asked them to do so, but they never responded. (It’s possible that they did not receive the notification). Perhaps if I had let some of them in, they would have gotten interested, and would have participated more than some of the people who did get in… Given that participation beyond week 1 was such a strong measure of completion, perhaps we should do like undergraduate classes, which let almost anyone sign up for the first two weeks, and then kick people out who are not active enough.

Of course, I could just open enrolment to anyone – and indeed, maybe the active group had settled on being exactly the same. I still think there is a value to having a small group of people who make an explicit commitment to learning together over a certain period of time, but I certainly don’t think it’s the only way to do things.

Stian

This is a good example of how you the way you read an article changes dependent on your existing knowledge – a constructivist epistemology. My history professor in high school used to say that a historian read the first or second history book about a topic to find out “what happened”, and he/she reads more history books to find out “how are people describing what happened.

As I began looking up this tool, which was first developed by SRI, and later taken over by the Learning Sciences Lab at Singapore’s National Institute of Education, I found that a number of articles had been written about it. Reading the first article, I was very interested in the specific design of the tool, but on reading more articles, I already knew that, and could skip those parts (checking if there was anything new), and go to the way they had used it.

The tool itself is quite simple – there is an upper and a lower frame. In the lower frame is an inexhaustible supply of “post-it notes”, which can be written on, drawn upon, etc. By dragging a note up to the upper pane, the note automatically becomes public and shared with everyone else (in the group or in the classroom).

The entire upper pane is shared, so anyone can drag notes around, and even take a note written by someone else down to their personal space (it then disappears from the public view), and for example attach a note, before they drag it back.

DiGiano, Tatar and Kireyev (2006) describe the advantages of physical post-it notes for meeting coordination:

• representationally neutral
• capture diagrams and drawings, as well as text
• different sizes affords different kinds of activities
• informal – better suited to quick sketches than highly finished ideas
• meta-informatic (can annotate other representations, including other post-its)
• rearrangable, position and reposition to convey meaning
• unique – can only be one place at one time
• shareable – many can interact with it

However, there are also problems with physical post-it notes:

GroupScribbles was designed to preserve most of the good features, while alleviating many of the problems.

I was very excited to see a CSCL tool whose design explicitly referenced how we conduct workshops, because I have myself written about this previously, thinking that there were strong similarities and overlaps between these two domains, in Grappling with ideas.

Here I will discuss a few of the “affordances” of GroupScribbles, and post-it notes, more in detail.

Informal

Above, it was listed that post-it notes were informal, and were more suited to quick sketches than to detailed designs. Roschelle et. al (2007) refer to Socrates’ drawing a sketch in the sand, and list the following advantages of informal sketching:

• more expressive of key concepts than a neat, chiseled presentation
• informal sketch better invites participation of student in active reasoning, compare to formal diagram
• act of drawing, gesturing and speaking in close synchrony let’s him focus student’s attention of meaning
• by asking probing questions, learns about student’s state of knowledge, adaptability of instruction

Low tool specificity

As DiGiano, Tatar and Kireyev (2006) points out, in choosing tools to support individual and collective intelligence, there are two different choices. The first is to think carefully about how to design the tool so that it can provide support for explicit group processes. This is what Dan Suthers and others have analyzed as “representational guidance” (see my blog post about this). This is a very powerful idea, that I find very attractive. However, another approach is to use “light-weight tools that support multi-faceted interactions with emergent conventions”.

From what I understand, that’s what David Jonassen argues in his book about mind tools (which I have not read yet). These sticky notes are also an example of this – of course, there are some clear attributes, as seen above, and they clearly favor one kind of notes (sketchy, brief sentences) over another (formalized, long narratives, elaborate illustrations and designs). However, you can write what you want to, place them where you want, you do not need to choose a certain size of post-it for a certain kind of idea, or label explicit links between them etc. You just write what comes to mind, moves them around till a pattern emerges. There is something powerful and liberating to this as well.

Coordination

Roschelle et. al (2007) emphasizes the important role GroupScribbles can play in coordinating collaborative activity. They compare it to existing student response systems (a new category to me), such as clickers, or Classroom Presenter, which also uses tablet PCs, but do not enable the students to take any active role in coordination – it is all centrally coordinated by the teacher. In contrast, GroupScribbles, because of the ability of students to take notes into their private space, move them together in the collective space, etc, allows quite sophisticated social learning scripts, while freeing the teacher from spending too much time coordinating. This can be seen from the scripts listed in Roschelle, and Debarger

Others

Other things that were mentioned were playfulness and fun (without the problem with coordination, as mentioned above). Monica wrote about an article I didn’t read, and mentioned anonymity as a big thing – this is a very interesting concept to think about. Debarger, et al. have also done very interesting work on learning patterns, adaptible teaching, and formative assessment.

Conclusion

A very interesting tool, and some very insightful articles. It was quite interesting reading a number of articles about the same tool, but from very different perspectives – and then reading a blog post by Monica about another article I hadn’t read. I would love to play with it (but it seems to only be for Windows), or at least see it in use (I didn’t find any videos of it).

Stian

Then on to a sleeper train for a 24 hour trip to Hangzhou. They had trains that only needed 18 hours, but the tickets were sold out (and soon, they will probably have high-speed trains that make the distance in much less). It was reasonably uneventful, I read on my Kindle for most of the distance, until a little child was walking on the platform during a stop-over, and fell through the gap between the train and the platform. It was quite dramatic, while the mother was lowered down on the platform to retrieve him through a service entrance.

I got to Hangzhou, and went to the hotel to register. There I was very happy to run into Zhang Yibing, a professor at Nanjing University who spent time in Toronto as a visiting scholar. He invited me along with some colleagues to the famous West Lake for some green tea, and we had very nice discussions about his work on adapting Knowledge Forum to be used in local schools.

Although I have participated in some international conferences in China before (including OpenCourseWare Consortium 2008 in Dalian), and some workshops and meetings, I’d never participated in a full-blown peer-reviewed conference all in Chinese. And this was also a “global” Chinese conference, which meant that many of the presenters were from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and even the US.

Attending any conference is always quite exhausting – a never-ending parade of 15-minute presentations on new topics, often by people who are not very good at public speaking, and are eager to get through all the minute details of their research in the allotted time. Add to that the fact that it was all in Chinese, often in “interesting” dialects, and many times with slides in traditional characters, and I was completely worn out by the end of the two days.

I did take notes on some of the presentations I attended – some of these are quite minimal, because I sometimes began to take notes, and then realized that the contents were not very relevant to my interests, or I was simply too tired to continue.

The quality was quite varying. There were some excellent presentations on the one hand, and some incredibly simplistic ones (using 15 minutes to explain how to use basic internet technologies, for example), and everything in between.

Nancy Law from HKU presented on sustainable technological innovation, with many examples from Hong Kong and around the world. A very important point for those of us who wish to see the good practices and software innovations that come out of our research be widely implemented in schools and school districts. Yang Zongkai introduced the national education plan, which I have mentioned here before. He was one of the people involved in writing it, and in a very good position to explain it (and the process of writing it). He underlined the importance of a whole chapter being devoted to educational technology, however the plan is so detailed, that his speech became a very high-level fly-over.

Gwo-Jen Hwang from National Taiwan University of Science and Technology had a very engaging and humorous keynote about the research and experimentation his lab has done around ubiquitous and mobile learning. Lot’s of great examples, highlighted with video clips. Unfortunately I could not find any of these videos on his website, but he has a long list of publications.

Some of the presentations were highly technical, and did not so much focus on the pedagogical aspects of how their technical innovations could be used, for example Cai Su’s 3D environments, and Sun Maoyuan’s semantic intelligent question answering system.

Probably the most interesting presentation was by Chen Wenli from Singapore’s National Institute of Education, who presented on a tool called GroupScribbles, and what she called “Rapid Knowledge Building”. The tool looks really interesting, and I am planning to read some of the articles about it, and blog more about it (unfortunately, it only seems to run on Windows, so I won’t be able to easily try it out on my Mac).

I am vegetarian, and although they almost always have food I can eat at Chinese restaurants, they still think of meat as “higher status”, and sometimes it can be hard to find vegetable dishes at “fancy” occasions, like weddings or banquets. Imagine my surprise when I asked whether there would be any vegetarian dishes, and was told that there was a special table for vegetarians! I ended up having very nice dinners both days with a group of Taiwanese researchers (not a single mainland person at the table), many of whom were Buddhist. This only strengthens my wish to visit Taiwan sometime soon.

All in all, an interesting event, and a great warm-up for CSCL 2011 in Hong Kong next month.

Stian

Last week, we discussed scaffolding, and read a really interesting article:

• Puntambekar, S. Scaffolding in Complex Learning Environments: What we have gained and what we have missed?

Stian summarized the article, and blogged about it. Nate also blogged about it.

Stian also posted about Cohere from the week before.

We had a very engaging meeting, discussing the article.

We’ve also had some active discussion on the task pages about badges, and the meta-discussion on course components.

We’ve only got two weeks left – it would be really great to go out with a bang, and not with whimper, so I’d really appreciate it if you tried to be active for these last two weeks, and I’d love to see a bunch of blog posts about the different CSCL systems mentioned in Week 7.

This week we will hopefully have a guest presentation by Sandy McAuley, who has worked with Knowledge Forum (did his PhD with Scardamalia), indigenous communities, and lately also been involved in work around MOOCs. We are still waiting to confirm, but hopefully he will be able to join us at our normal meeting time on Saturday.

Stian

PS: Happy Duanwu Festival, which we celebrated by making dumplings with a local family.