Top Seven E-Learning Technologies & Trends for 2008
I’ve noticed that a great many of these lists seem to hover around the 5, 10 or 20 mark so so I thought I’d try for a magnificent 7. And rather than concentrate on actual technology I think it’s worth considering the implications of their use. So in no particular order:
One: Increased use of collaborative & dialogical technologies. This year will see the continued rise of the wiki with regards to educational use but also for institutional level management (drafting policies etc.). Of course this is not new and indeed corporate use has risen steadily while publicly available wikis already exist. HE use however still tends to be sporadic whereas in the school sector wikis are enjoying continued growth with many wikis pushing the boundaries particularly with regards to the manner in which they are used (I’m thinking of the sheer level of freedom some students are given) and the subjects and goals for which they are tasked with. There’s a lot of exciting stuff happening there (for example the Discovery Utopia Project http://discoveryutopias.wikispaces.com/). In terms of the HE context I can see wikis being used at 2 levels: one as placement support (for diaries, communal knowledge bases) and second as collaborative exercises in which the students develop the subject content and in doing gain a level of expertise and deeper connection or ownership of the topic.
Two: Merging of blogs and wiki concepts. I’m not talking about blikis but of greater use of both tools in support of each other. There’s way too much attention being paid to the use of either one or the other when in fact a teaching strategy utilising both could provide the student with sufficient autonomy to develop subject expertise and the confidence to put forward and defend opinions (through blogging). In turn their opinions can then be used to scaffold further ideas and generate knowledge in collaboration and competition with peers (the wiki bit). More and more I’m seeing this happen at school level and I expect this to filter into HE as early wiki and blog pioneers move on to explore the benefits of using both. They curriculum intensive however but as a learning journey invaluable.
Three: Who’s the student, who’s the tutor? We should start to see more classroom inversion. Not a new concept by any means. What we’re talking about is students learning through content creation. In other words the students are the content providers. And the tutor? What role would they play? Correcting the students as they progress I guess. So would this mean that the tutor becomes the A mentor? Or a fellow learner? Again this is another instance in which wikis have proved effective. For example the Critical Analysis Of Media course at the University of Toronto has given responsibility for creating the study notes, together with FAQs and the like, to the students (Critical Analysis of Media Wiki). Another example is the ‘Youbric’ created ot the Discovery Utopia Project (another school wiki) in which the students themselves make the decision on not only whether their efforts should be assessed but also how they should be assessed (and in doing so decide what is appropriate content / action). Class blog and wiki scribing, similar activities, should also come to the fore, (see Scribe Posts).
Four: Linky MLEs. The rise of social networking amongst the student community (really quite obvious since Facebook was originally created for students) has caused some educators to moot the possibility of relying upon these networks to induce learning and support learning rather than the institutional MLE solution. True current incarnations of the MLE tend to be monolithic but this wont always be the case. What we’ll see is the further progression towards MLEs being more social with resources and contacts being delivered to a user on the basis of what they are studying, what they are interested in, where they have been in the system and what they have done within the system. Basically using similar personalisation technology approaches to that of the Amazon recommends system. The idea is that the MLE more and more reflects and changes according to the user needs and hopefully goes some way towards adaptive tutoring. But it’s also about connecting. Connecting the student not only with content but with the content’s creator. Students will have the opportunity to form or be a part of hubs - networking within their own university, and possibly with others, reaching and sharing with fellow learners whom they might normally never reach. The flow of information from the module to the student will still exist but there will be additional information incoming from the students network of friends and from the student out into the university community.
Five: We will ignore good things. I feel guilty because I have had to ignore a lot of great learning resources I’ve had sent to me or found over the last year. The manner in which I discover new material has changed gradually over a 3 stage process. Stage 1 : searching the internet using standard engines, judging returns and bookmarking items; Stage 2 : plugging into blog communities in areas related to my own aims and sifting information and finally Stage 3 where through subscription software I no longer spend time searching and sifting but the information comes direct to me. By stage 3 I realised I have now subscribed to those information outlets (blogs, websites, newsfeeds) which produce valuable information. As such its like being at a great conference, every day, all the time, as new, insightful and relevant information comes streaming to me. It’s getting too much and so try as I might I find myself having to ignore certain items over others. As an indication click here to see what sites I’m subscribed to (currently 94). I don’t keep count of the amount of information delivered to me through the subscriptions. Most of the time I gloss over the title and save anything of interest for future investigation. But as an indication of how much material I have yet to sift through – I currently have 454 items pending further study. Will I ever get through it all? Yes but there will always be more items. So I’ll never come out on top. But I don’t care, (the trick is to simply enjoy the journey…).
Six: HE (over?) reaction to social networks Although web 2.0 does carry the promise of fostering enhanced knowledge sharing, generation and collaboration among students there is a darker side. Social networks such as Facebook as well as media sharing sites (Flickr, YouTube) and virtual worlds (World of Warcraft, Second Life) have come under heavy fire from the school sector with regards to resource bandwidth use, time wasting, cyberbullying, personal data protection and exposing students to adult related content. As HE staff increasingly investigate the use of social networking to facilitate teaching (this is particularly prevalent within those institutions who do not possess an MLE) we may start to see similar fears being voiced from senior institution management, (indeed some of our associate colleges have difficulty accessing YouTube). Additional concerns relate to the storage of student data on such systems, their exposure to spam and advertising, ownership and copyright of teaching or student generated material or data. Currently, across the sector, I’m not seeing much in the way of a dialogue to resolve these issues but I expect this will start in the forthcoming year as senior management realise the implications of their use in a teaching context.
And finally.
Seven: What’s the cost? Previous years have seen an explosion in the various web 2.0 tools available, in which user empowerment in terms of creating and editing together with the ability to immediately share the results through richly connected communities are the norm. This year I am hoping to see a settling out / evaluation period in which greater emphasis is paid, by tutors and learning technologists, to making sense of these technologies in terms of using them TOGETHER and in recognizing their resource cost with regards to service provision and curriculum design. So a time out period is needed to evaluate and extrapolate principles to enable us to leap frog from web 2.0 to the next big thing. If we stop and smell the roses we may find that we have more than enough tools to do the job already…
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