Gemma Urgell and Ricard Espelt are the thinking minds behind #talkingabout, a tapestry of experiences, stories and projects with the Web 2.0 as a background.
They attended the PLE Conference and took some time to interview and tape some footage of Jordi Adell and I on the crossroads of Personal Learning Environments and institutions.
The video is in Catalan, one of Jordi and I’s mother tongues:
Scarcity of explicit knowledge (books) led us to gather it into libraries.
Cost of access to books led us to gather them into universities and schools.
Cost of access to wise men led us too to gather them into universities and schools.
The digital made scarcity of knowledge no more an issue, and costs of access to experts dropped to nearly zero.
Why institutional Virtual Campuses or why institutional Learning Management Systems?
It still is difficult to tell good knowledge from bad (low information literacy levels around).
Thus, we have a need for a curation of knowledge, for guides, to validate all the knowledge that has been fixed in digital artifacts.
Not everyone can or wants to use the latest technology.
Many people still have low digital literacy levels.
Indeed, there are privacy, security and/or data ownership issues.
And we have to ease monitoring, assessment and evaluation tasks (we are not hee taking about the need to monitor, assess or evaluate — let’s assume for a moment that many people still want to do that).
So, PLEs or institutional virtual campuses?
We need to cope with both needs: the benefits (freedom) of digital technologies and some long-lasting (and maybe needed) trends.
We should be able to find a middle-ground solution between centrifugal and centripetal forces.
We have to keep intimacy, while allow third parties’ ideas in our conversation.
We want to keep noise out, while keeping a window open to the outside.
We should be free to either use an institutional tool, a third party’s, or one’s own, and nevertheless guarantee that conversation is the same for everyone.
We should be able to keep our own learning space while participating in a collective one.
And we should be able to keep a closed record of what a group did for later assessment or simply storage.
In Introducing the Hybrid Institutional-Personal Learning Environment (HIPLE) I dealt with the different profiles, behaviours and needs that concur in online education (or online enhanced education). I also asked for a way to be able to give a satisfactory answer to all the problems that arouse with that concurrence while being able to swim and keep one’s clothes dry at the same time (as we say in Catalan).
Let us put it into practice with a totally applied example using Twitter.
The typical situation
The context is an online course on e-Government. There is a character (ONcampus) which is a student that, for unspecified reasons, just wants to access the virtual campus to study and that everything that happens on the campus remains unknown for the outer world. There is a second character (ictlogist) that is also a student and uses several Web 2.0 tools for learning (call it a Personal Learning Environment or PLE), amongst them Twitter, and just does not want to use two nanoblogging tools, one on-campus and another one off-campus. A third character (OFFcampus) is a professional working on eGovernment and, as such, uses Twitter to interact with other people on the field.
What you usually would have is two conversations:
Inside the campus, a closed conversation that neither benefits from “outside” conversations nor contributes to them. Including the student remaining unknown to other people on the field.
Outside campus, an open but not-permeating-the-campus conversation and that forces some people to attend two conversations on the same field mostly with different people but similar purposes.
The HIPLE to the rescue
Imagine a nanobloging tool (e.g. StatusNet) installed inside the virtual campus classroom. Everything that happens in there is invisible to the outside world. But everything you tag with #uoc_egov (the “official” hashtag for the course) is published on Twitter.
In fact, everything you publish on Twitter with the #uoc_egov hashtag is imported onto the nanobloggin tool installed in the virtual campus, so everyone can see it. Thus allowing people to participate in the closed classroom from outside of the campus.
In fact, messages from other people alien to the closed classroom can also be seen inside the classroom, provided that (a) they add the #uoc_egov hashtag and (b) we have not added a filter to the closed nanoblogging tool that not only filters by hashtag but also by user (in this case, students could participate from their Twitter accounts but the classroom would only be participated by enrolled students).
Students can opt to participate only in the classroom and be invisible to off-campus users.
Students can opt to participate from outside the classroom and with their own tools. In the limit, they will only participate from their own PLEs and not from the virtual campus.
Off-campus students engage in real conversations with “real” professionals and experts in the field. Exposure is likely to be good.
Faculty and managers can, if thus desired, use the closed environment to “contain” what is to be monitored or assessed, and without the need to wander around “chasing” spontaneous and ubiquitous contributions from their students.
The increase of open APIs shouldn’t make these kind of developments very difficult. Of course there are thousands of applications and one will always have to choose which ones to “bridge”. But (a) there are not many really popular applications and, in fact, (b) that is what standards are for.
Two concurring projects in the last weeks make me revisit that topic:
My participation in the implementation of a very small line in the Strategyc Plan 2010-2014 of the Open University of Catalonia, which consists in foster student participation in the Virtual Campus, based on the philosophy of social networking sites.
Both projects share some issues — I dare not call them problems, though some of them are absolutely challenging —that have definitely to be addressed before implementing any kind of project:
With the increase of broadband penetration and the popularization of Web 2.0 tools and spaces, most participation (and a lot of it, indeed) happens outside the campus, unlike what was usual just 10 (or even 5) years ago.
With the realization of the concept of long-life learning, it is increasingly difficult to tell students from non-students, and even from members of the university community from non-members, especially when one can attend conferences online, download learning materials or follow the faculty or institutional initiatives on Twitter or their own blogs.
Just for the two previous reasons, one’s own learning management increasingly happens off-campus too.
And yet there’s the issue of where the experts are. Some of the experts are in-campus, but many of them (other faculty, professionals, potential employers) are off-campus too. And we definitely want our students to meet the relevant (online) communities of experts and people they should (and we want them to) be in contact with.
But: learning monitoring does require a certain degree of centralization and closeness or quietness, for many reasons: assessment, guidance, “noise filtering”… Or, at least, some educators feel more at ease in these “controlled” scenarios. Not to speak about managers.
And: some people are reluctant to use all that arcane network technologies, because of lack of knowledge, lack of competence, even lack of social skills.
And: some people just do not want to have their identity spread all over the e-place, but to be able to manage different digital personnae. Sometimes for privacy; sometimes for security reasons.
A proposal
So, there are people in and people off the Virtual Campus. There are geeks and explorers and digerati, and there are refuseniks and robinsons and goffmans too.
So, to respect and answer all demands, what do we need?
That the members of the university community that so wish it, can interact with their peers and teachers and all kind of educational resources with the tools and platforms own choice (e.g. off-campus), and thus concentrate or diffuse their activity at will.
That the members of the university community that so wish it, can maintain an idea of a campus as a space dedicated to learning, and use the tools within without having to disperse their energies (and attention) in (for them) low added value activities.
Despite the above said, tear down the concept walls of in- and off-campus, and member and non-member of the learning community. Let third parties participate of learning life, and let active and formal learners participate of informal learning or professional life.
What’s in a name
I ask for a hybrid-institutional personal learning environment. I ask for a HIPLE:
This is a plead for equidistance and eclecticism. Based on:
Being a teacher myself, and having to manage people, marks, syllabuses and on, I heavily rely on centralized solutions that I can barely imagine differently;
being (in many aspects) a learner myself, I can’t help myself from the bounds that tie me to monolithic structures, and hence manage an open personal environment where knowledge (and learning) comes in many ways;
constantly knowing and meeting other people like me (teachers and/or learners), it is just normal that our paths cross and our knowledge environments overlap and enrich one another;
all that said, it is just normal that both as a professional and as a learner I need to assess and be assessed by everything that I do here and there, as learning in the Information Society knows no boundaries.
I increasingly believe that the solution to all this, and put in Simon Grant’s words, may perhaps be not a tool but several tools [and] a tool for bringing together evidence residing in different systems. This is my go at the whole issue:
In general, I see two sets of opposite trends here:
On the one hand, the dilemma between the management needs of teaching, which lead to centralization vs. the self-management needs of learning, which lead to de-centralization;
on the other hand, the dilemma between the assessment needs, which lead towards individualization vs. the socialization needs, which lead towards openness.
Put these four issues one against the other one, I think we can clearly see that there are interesting intersections between them, and these overlaps are crowded with things that are already happening. What I’ve pictured is not exhaustive in any way, but it gives (me) an idea that “competing solutions” might not be as much of a solution as a hammer is an all-purpose tool.
Traditional learning management systems (LMS) have long gone online and included (shyly, though, most of times) the social component by providing Web 2.0 tools or channelling third parties’ content through widgets and open APIs;
on the other end, repositories and (hopefully, but very well yet) monitoring tools by means of which both the institution and the learner can access (and assess, if needed) the content of the latter;
e-portfolios are, in many cases, the bridge between the “inside” and the “outside”, and I truly believe (or expect) that they will gain increasing importance in blurring the frontiers that still separate virtual learning environments from personal learning environments;
last, but not least, personal learning environments do also have a social component, which in its other “end” is linked with virtual campuses, thus closing the circle.
In my opinion the debate of centralization vs. decentralization is not an either-or-debate, but a puzzle that will be solved by weaving the appropriate (and surely complex) tapestry. And I wonder whether the tools (the needles and the clothes, the open APIs and the widgets and the XMLs) are already there, and what lacks is some upgrade on our digital skills and mindsets (and a little bit of time).
I have recently been involved in both a project on citizen participation and participation at the University. Not surprisingly — to me at least — both projects share much more than what they differ on. Indeed, they both share a very similar infrastructure:
They are both initiatives of the public sector (in Spain, private Universities are really a minority).
They both provide core services that have a central source and whose reliability is based on the legitimacy of that source.
They both address a large community that is interested not only in getting those services, but in participating in their design, including the transparency and accountability of the whole process.
The central source and need to certify the information generally goes in the opposite direction of participatory design and engagement. The former asks, naturally for centralization, the latter for decentralization.
The fall of transaction and replication costs (the two big constrains of the industrial revolution) make it possible to separate management from participation. It’s like if you could have a football game being played in every player’s living room while still being able to have a game and keep an up-to-date scoreboard and stats.
But, as said, centralization attracts both management and activity to your own platform (the learning management system, the government’s portal), while participation centrifuges activity out to social networking sites.
Simplifying things to the max, my landscape now looks more or less like this (please understand Management in a non-restrictive way):
Education
Participation in own platform
Participation in alien platforms
Management in own paltform
Centralized in-house Learning Management System
(I)
Core Virtual Learning Environment + Aggregator / open API + PKE (PLE, PRP) Constellation (II)
Management in alien platform
One stop shop + Custom Cloud Services (III)
Social Networking Sites Constellation + Distributed/diffuse institutional identity (IV)
Government
Participation in own platform
Participation in alien platforms
Management in own paltform
Government Portal (I)
Core Public Services + Open data repositories/sources + Citizen initiatives (II)
Management in alien platform
One stop shop + Custom Cloud Services (III)
Social Networking Sites Constellation + Distributed/diffuse institutional identity (IV)
The problem with case IV is obvious to me and is about the risks of Cloud Computing which, again simplifying, are twofold:
The risks of security and ownership, which are still to be fully addressed and fixed by cloud service providers, and which a public service just cannot afford to leave unattended;
and the blurring of the institutional identity, which undermines the main asset of a public institution: legitimacy.
I thus advocate for a mixed solution of keeping your main assets centralized while externalizing all the participatory side (see case II):
The core value stays “home”: data of the students, syllabuses, data from the government, government plans…;
Centralized, the core information is legit, certified;
A centralized management is compatible with a decentralized access: open API and open data provide gateways so that access can be remote but management of data still be centralized, secure, private;
Your staff has to develop skills to outreach your target while focussing on management, which is your core;
Your staff has to develop skills to monitor and even capitalize what’s happening outside of your platform, but without needing to interfere in off-core activity;
Participation is not mediated by management needs or management staff, can freely emerge, and can do it where it pleases.
And, most important, participation has the fuel to fully engage with all the information possible;
If communication and information channels are open and work in two-ways, the (virtuous?) circle closes and the cycle starts again.
In my Predictions for Social Media in 2010 I revisited the importance of the ePortfolio and the institutional website. As I there said, I plead for the construction of the (e-)portfolio, for a return to the personal or institutional website, using social media as a game of mirrors that reflects us where we should also be present.
