Formal and Informal divide

My year started with me making a guest post on Steve Wheeler's award winning blog which can be accessed at "Wisdom of Clouds". By the end of January, there had been a huge number of visits to the post on Steve's and my blog. This spurred a healthy debate which I analyse in another post -Cloudy with a chance of change!. The debate also highlighted this formal and informal divide once again.

 Maybe Graham Atwell misunderstood my stance on PLEs and to clear that I tweeted this on the 24rth of January:

I am not against the concept of #PLEs, in fact they are gr8 for lifelong learning: commented on @GrahamAttwell blog-post http://bit.ly/4quEEW

 

 my only concern is about when people come to universities do they already have a #PLE, does our VLE/LMS/CMS encourage creation of PLEs? 11:43 PM Jan 24th  

 

are PLEs easily integrated within formal education? 11:44 PM Jan 24th from TweetDeck   

why do we want to separate formal and informal learning? when we all know learning knows no boundary 11:44 PM Jan 24th  

 As it happens on twitter, this started a discussion between a few of us who were up that late and joined in:

nlafferty: @manmalik they maybe don't have a #PLE when they come at the moment but another year or two or three and I think they will

me: @nlafferty all the more a reason for our VLEs to change and become more "open" as @sputuk would add :)

 nlafferty:@manmalik I agree they should be more open, do you think current VLEs are really learning environments or admin/management environment envt?

 me: @nlafferty I think they R gd as LMS/CMS & thr is potential 4 these 2 provide formal learning but not informal-not obvious atleast #ple #cle

 jamesclay:@manmalik once you integrate informal learning, it becomes formal learning. You can't plan or design informal learning.

 jamesclay:@manmalik once integrated they are no longer PLEs. You can add institutional systems to your PLE, but not the other way.

 me:@jamesclay re planning informal...I think U can collect stats on wht R the most commonly used informal ways students learn & integr8 some

 creativetallis: @jamesclay @manmalik No, but you can help to create conditions in which it thrives

 me:@jamesclay I do like wht U said abt both informal & PLEs...however there R ways 2 include & benefit from some informal approaches

 nlafferty: @manmalik LMS/CMS can deliver learning content & some tools can support formal learning - I'm interested in what students think of VLEs tho'

 nlafferty: @manmalik I'm using VLE as teacher & student - as a student I would say my learning is happening in my PLE. Agree with @jamesclay comments

 me:@nlafferty a PLE is gr8 for life-long learning, I take it you are a one :)

 nlafferty: @manmalik Yep, at least like to think of myself as one, partly why think important for students not just to use VLE but to develop their PLE

 nlafferty: @manmalik Maybe #CLE will speed up, interesting that OU have opted for google apps

 me:@nlafferty exactly my point, students need to develop a #ple they do not always have one, a #CLE introduces will perhaps speed this up :)

 me:@jamesclay re: adding instl syst 2 #ple & not the other way: I think if u have a #CLE U cn add PLE 2 an institutional #CLE too, nt with #VLE

 jamesclay: @creativetallis @manmalik exactly

 jamesclay:@manmalik as soon as you include it it becomes formal. Create environments for informal, but you can't make informal happen.

I am looking for some answers.

1. Is mixing a PLE with the institutional system a one way process ("You can add institutional systems to your PLE, but not the other way")?  Or is this just a technical limitation of PLEs and existing Institutional systems (LMS/CMS/VLEs)?
2. Is it true that educational institutions can just facilitate/create environments for informal learning and not make it happen?
3. Is there a grey area between the formal and informal that needs attention of the academics? Especially with online learning environments and tools.

Some more interesting read on this I found through @C4lpt http://goodpractice.com/blog/planning-to-implement-informal-learning/

 

Posted via web from manishmalik's posterous

Examopedia for all students

'myExamopedia' is a wikipedia style, collaborative exam revision site for students anywhere in the world.

The success of Examopedia in my own practice is evident from the Google search for the term "Examopedia". See below, a wonderwheel on the term, links to University of Portsmouth, where I work. It also links to "Exam Revision" related search results, basically showing that it has made its place in the Google Search results. These are the main ones.

I know you are not convinced by its success yet! Now thats perfectly normal. Take look at the report written by Engineering Subject Centre's Associate Phil Barker or read his blog post on Examopedia. For this work I was awarded 1 of 4 National Teaching Awards by the HEA's Engineering subject Centre. This work has also been reported in several JISC projects and report.

Some student voices and usage stats to my site are also avilable for you to see.

Now, if you are convinced and want to use it for your students or if you are a student want to use it with your friends before your exam the visit the free to all Examopedia site.

Figure: Examopedia - Conceptual diagram.

 Exam revision is isolating and stressful, blurred boundaries through the use of web 2.0 technologies (like wiki etc) is shown to have helped. Many student prepare using past exam papers, Examopedia helps form a community around this informal activity students engage with. Its also provided opportunity for academics to gauge student confidence prior to exams on different topics and deliver relevant 'Just-in-time' teaching and encourage deep learning via guidance and feedback given on the site.

To keep you up-to-date with any further developments and future innovations follow @myexamopedia on twitter.

Lastly, if you liked the site or have a suggesstion, please drop a line or two here :).

Thanks for you time.

Cloud Learning Environment - What it is? (shorter version)

What is a CLE or Cloud Learning Environment? - The cloud can be seen as one big autonomous system not owned by any educational institution/organisation.
Let the Academics or Learners be the users, of some cloud based services, where both share the same privileges like control, choice, sharing of content etc on these services. This control is different from that in a PLE, a VLE or a PTE. If needed, the academic and the learner can have same rights to the shared content. For example, each "Google Site", can be owned by an academic or a Learner and both users be given the same rights/control by one another (depending on who creates first). Likewise Google Docs can be owned and shared between learners themselves or learners and academics under their own control.
This clearly has potential to enable and facilitate both formal and informal learning for the learners in an institution. Both the academic and the learner are free to use the tools the way they wanted and with anyone they wanted. This would not have been possible if the tools used were chosen / managed by either the academics (PTE) or the learners (PLE) or for that matter the institution (VLE). Google Apps was not designed just for institutions or for individuals, it was designed for collaboration both within and across institutions (CLE).
CLEs also make it very easy to generate content and share it with the rest of the world in a DERPable (Discoverable, Editable, Repurposable and Portable) manner, in the spirit of the UKOER programme.

Lastly, students at my institution love the Google Apps interface, which makes it very easy to get them to engage with their work using online tools. This can be seen from the crazy usage statistics of Google Sites where I now host my Examopedia.

Examopedia re-birth on Google Sites - an Exam revision site that lives on the cloud

Examopedia - A collaborative exam revision site that fosters student's informal ways of preparing for exams using past exam papers and helps them improve their solutions to past papers through critical feedback from the academic and peers. This site now lives in the Cloud which makes it an example of a cloud learning environment or CLE.

Exam revision is isolating and stressful, blurred boundaries through the use of web 2.0 technologies (like wiki etc) is shown to have helped. Many student prepare using past exam papers, Examopedia helps form a community around this informal activity students engage with. Its also provided opportunity for academics to gauge student confidence prior to exams on different topics and deliver relevant 'Just-in-time' teaching and encourage deep learning via guidance and feedback given on the site.



The Past
For the past three years I have been using Twiki for my Examopedia service that I run for my students. I have blogged about it earlier. Students particularly did not like the wiki interface and its WYSIWYG editor, although better than most, is not perfect.

This work of mine is quite close to my heart as it has won me the National Teaching Award from the Engineering Subject centre of the HEA as well as University Learning and Teaching Fellowship. Here is a link to a case study by Phil Barker written for the EngSC. Phil has also blogged about the service and has done a wonderful job of explaining the full potential of Examopedia as a service to students and as an OER.

The Present
This blog post is a reflection about moving from an institutional system (using Twiki) to a Cloud Based service - Google Sites. You can visit the new home of Examopedia that is on Google Sites on port.ac.uk domian. (This domain will die eventually and I will have to move it to another port based domain on the cloud).

It is for the first time in three years that I was able to create and share, the wiki pages involved in creating this year's Examopedia, with all students in my class. This meant that all students were invited to view the site via a link in their mail box sent by Google Sites during sharing the site with the students. It is the first time in three years that I could easily give access to all students as collaborators/editors. In the past students were required to create accounts on my Twiki site and only then could they edit the wiki pages. Now the account exists as they all have a google email address.

With Google Apps access to all students and Google mail accounts for all students, this worked like a trick. Better still, I was able to add Google Analytics to capture the site usage and site behaviour. An amazing 3000+ page views in just 14 days of its operation - most of which from portsmouth (class size = 58+80=138 students).

The Future
I have said several times that I wanted to use Google Wave for the Examopedia but decided against that at this stage as Google Wave was accessible by a handful when I created and shared Google Sites with my students.

I think when and if Google Wave becomes part of the Google Apps deal for universities I may try it out as a platform for Examopedia. I think I will straighaway loose out on the analytics part if I did that. Besides I am observing a colleague Dr. Boris Gremont's tutorial wave, who kindly added me to this wave that does what Examopedia does for exam revision but on Google wave.

What do students make of examopedia?
 It will not be wrong if I was to say that it is very successful in what it does and achieve. I surveyed a few students so far and the results are very positive. Its is not for everyone though, especially those who are very independent learners and like to revise all topics individually and practice exam questions individually. But even such student visit the site and read contributions from other students and my feedback/guidance to gain confidence.Forums are not the same as wikis and students can see the difference as in Examopedia students can conly contribute a solution. Communication between collaborators is muted on examopedia, but can go on in the forums if needed. All the contributions to a specific question are at one place as opposed to a forum which usually have a long thread of contributions and arguments too. Reading through these contributions can be confusing and time consuming.

One criticism I had this year was the amount of questions that were on Examopedia. Students said they wanted more questions to revise the entire syllabus. Clearly, they liked the revision service and wanted more of it. Another critiscim was that some of the answers were confusing. I usually provide guidance and feedback on conflicting and confusing answers. This view may have developed prior to me giving feedback but I need to investigate more. There were some access issues initially and for some time as the students first time used Google Sites and the fact that we had 2 domains (@myport and @port) did not help at all. That is why I said above that the @port domain will die eventually and we will have one domain.