Personalized Learning Systems and YOU PLE Conference University of Manitoba March 26, 2006

1. Personalized Learning Systemsand YOUPLE ConferenceUniversity of ManitobaMarch 26, 2006 Terry Anderson, Ph.D. Canada Research Chair in Distance Education terrya@athabascau.ca

2. Congratulations You - as a contributing lifelong learner Are the Person of the Year!

3. This Person of the year • Wants to learn things • Continuously moves between on and offline • Is learning to recognize and demand quality when investing in learning • Knows there are many paths to learning • Uses a wide set of information and communications tools “The decline of the compliant learner’. P. Goodyear 2004

4. How do professional educators deal with these “persons of the year”? • “We must look at today's radical changes in technology, not just as forecasters but as actors charged with designing and bringing about a sustainable and acceptable world.” • Herbert Simon, 1916-2001

5. Presentation Overview • Context and the Net • Affordances of the Net • The personal learning environment • Definitions • Implementation issues • Athabasca examples • Your comments or questions

6. Importance of this conference • Educational problems are not solved through evangelism, threats or technologies alone. • Change happens when teachers, administrators and learners make it happen • Perceived benefits – Personal • Readiness - Organizational • Pressure – Inter-organizational • Chwelos; Benbasat; Dexter, 2001) • Each of us is an agent of change

7. Maybe the Sky Really is Falling! • The Net Creates • Great challenge and Great Opportunity

8. Values • We can (and must) continuously improve the quality, effectiveness, appeal, cost and time efficiency of the learning experience. • Student control and freedom is integral to 21st Century life-long education and learning. • Education is an academic, individual and a social experience – both on campus and online.

9. University of ManitobaCanada’s leading Web 2.0 University !! • Checkout your Myspace profile

10. The Ubiquitous Net Context • Context creates and constrains learning • Context affords learning opportunities • Context and Content are created: • through interaction, • through use and creation of artifacts

11. Canadian Connection to the Net • 67.9% of Canadians use the Net Computer Industry Almanac (2005) • 85% access from home • Canadian Internet Project (2006) • Average 13.5 hours/week • 76% Broadband

12. Affordances of the Educational Semantic Web (Anderson & Whitelaw, 2004) Abundance of Content Filtering, Mashups, Updating Read/Write Web 2.0 Connected Learning High quality, Low cost Communication Agent Assistance Automated Facilitation Net as OS

13. Affordance 1. Massive Amounts of Content • Any information, any format, anytime, anywhere • Customizable content • Interactive content • User created content • Open content resources

14. Wiki and Open Courseware • Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing. – • Terry Foote, Wikipedia

15. Content - conclusion • Cheap or free • Need to learn to share and re-use • Don’t build your value on your content • Content is necessary, but not sufficient to create a quality educational experience for the persons of the year • "Centuries of specialist stress in pedagogy and in the arrangement of data now end with the instantaneous retrieval of information made possible by electricity." Marshall McLuhan 1964 p. 346

16. Affordance #2High Quality, Low Cost Communication • Multi synchronous • Synchronous, asynch • Text, audio and video • Stored, indexed and retrievable • Mobile • Embedded • Pervasive • Learner, teacher, community and publisher instigated

17. Each person operates a separate personal community network and switches rapidly among multiple sub-networks • WELLMAN, BOASE & CHEN 2002

18. Learning Happens through Interaction in Communities of Inquiry • At home • At work • In third places – “not work and not home”

19. Affordance 3Agents • Google Alerts • Meeting Wizard • RSS • Athabasca • Freudbot AIML • E-Advisor • Are you ready for AU? Agents

20. These Affordances Stimulate Development of a Participatory Culture • relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, • strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and • some type of informal mentorship • members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another • (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created). • Henry Jenkins, Media Education of 21. Century2006

21. Creating Incentive to Sustain Contribution

22. Pedagogical Basis • Connectivism – “Knowledge exists in the network” (Siemens, 2005) • Community of Inquiry (Garrison & Anderson, 2003) • Integrated Virtual learning – pedagogy of nearness (Mejias, 2005) • Learner construction and sharing of artifacts (Collis & Moonen, 2001) • New learning Environments John Seely Brown, 2006 Our educational discourse is largely stuck in a time warp, framed by issues and standards set decades before the widespread use of the personal computer, the Internet, and free trade agreements.” Stewart and Kagan (2005)

23. New Technology Personal User centred Networked Ubiquitous Durable Affordable New Learning Personalised Learner centred Situated, Mobile Collaborative Ubiquitous Lifelong Expensive Convergence between new learning and new technology Towards a Theory of Mobile Learning Sharples, Taylor, Giasemi (2005)

24. Learning Networks • Imagine a world where there are tens of thousands of online learning paths, communities, experiences and objects. • Imagine that they can be aggregated to demonstrate competence and accrue accreditation. • How will learners find and connect to particular paths? • Where will be the U. of M. be in this world?

25. Who does the work when learning on the Net? • Students used to dropping in and watching the teacher perform. • Net learning demands and creates opportunity for engaged learners • Net instruction theory and practice must not: • Increase teacher work load • Use and re-use • Don’t over teach or over moderate • Use agents and sophisticated tools • Make busy work for learners • Net learning does not emerge naturally from traditional instructive approaches and experiences –it takes work, incentives and experimentation.

26. Living a Learning We have to move learning out of an education context into one that stimulates, creates, rewards and evaluates learning anytime, anyplace, anywhere, for any reason. Are today’s education tools helping create lifelong learners? life long learning Community at Practice

27. John Seely Brown • New Learning Environments for the 21st Century 2006

28. Moving Learning from Institutionally Centered to Learner Centered • The Personal Learning Environment (PLE) Solution

29. Dallsgaard, 2006 http://www.eurodl.org/materials/contrib/2006/Christian_Dalsgaard.htmr

30. What is a PLE? • “The logic of education systems should be reversed so that the system conforms to the learner, rather than the learner to the system.” Futurelab 2006

31. What is a PLE ? • PLE is a concept, an idea, an ideal? • A reaction to institutional Learning Management Systems? • All the tools that you use to learn? • Cool new name to drop at cocktail parties demonstrating how ‘with it’ you are?

32. What is a PLE? • A PLE is a web interface into the owners’ digital environment. • Content management integrating personal and professional interests (both formal and informal learning), • a profiling system for making connections • A collaborative and individual workspace • A multi formatted communications system • All connected via a series of syndicated and distributed feeds.

33. "The PLE is an approach not an application." Stephen Downes • An approach that: • Values and builds upon learner input • Protects and celebrates identity • Respects academic ownership • Is Net-centric • Supports multiple levels of socializing, administration and learning • Supports communities of inquiry across and within disciplines, programs, institutions and individual learning contexts

34. Technologies used to create PLEs • Mobile computing • Wireless • High bandwidth • Cell phones • Digital photography, video and audio recording • Internet video, audio and conferencing • Low cost hardware - $100 laptop

35. PLEs are not LMS • LMS were designed, built for and operated by institutions of formal learning • Designed to meet teacher needs • Based on dissemination model of education • Contributions are owned by the institution • Student is forced to learn a new system at each institution • Designed for a push rather than a pull learning context • Course centric view of learning • Hard to interoperate with competitive or OS products • Designed to protect intellectual property, not make it freely available • Very poor record of innovation

36. PLE- Learner Links their environment to that of education institutions My social Life My work My school(s) My calendar My profile My hobbies My files My identity My publications E-portfolios My conversations(s)

37. Learner Centred OLE.doc – Derek Wenmoth, March 2006

40. Early PLE Prototype products Blogs and Profiles With RSS Welcome to Flock, the safe, spyware free web browser that makes it easier to connect with your friends. With Flock it's a snap to upload, comment, and discover new pics. Read all the news you care about, in one place. Blog freely. Get search results as soon as you start typing in the search box, and much more. RSS Reader on steroids

41. Formal education paradox? • Many PLE applications today are challenging to learn how to use, very unstable and not as administratively effective for either students or faculty as LMS substitutes.

42. Blogs vs Threaded DiscussionCameron & Anderson, 2006 • Cognitive presence • Context beyond the course allows for enhanced verification and application • Harder to follow threads and quickly find new contributions • Social Presence • Increased depth from chronological background • Openness may inhibit self-disclosure, humour • Teaching Presence • Poor navigation and tracking • Difficult to follow conversations • Harder to assess • Little institutional support

43. Typical PLE Applications Profiles Selective Disclosure Communities groups Self-paced Social learning Calendars Individual Space Cooperative Space Wikis Blogs Group Ware E- Portfolio’s Each linked via RSS

44. An elgg instance http://elgg.net

45. Technologies of AU’s MDE 663 Fall 2006 M2U.Athabascau.ca Moodle Blogging Connections Content Admin Asynchronous Int. Portal Products Learning Objects CMAP Elluminate Furl Real Time Pacing Social Presence Dissemination Knowledge Polling

46. Usefulness over 8 Educ Functions N= 9 of 13

47. Advantages of PLEs • Identity • Customizable and control • Ownership • Social Presence • Capacity and Speed of Innovation • Open Connectivity (API, mashups, web services) See my blog posting at: Are PLE’s ready for prime time? http://terrya.edublogs.org/

48. Advantages of LMS’s • Advantages of LMS • Purposefully designed • Mature • Safe and Secure • Ease of Use • Centrally Supported

49. Some see PLE’s as just for informal learning • Learning is “a continuous, (largely) self-organized process of change” Sebastian Fiedler] • PLEs: • provides learning systems for the vast majority of people who are not enrolled on formal learning programmes. • helping learners organize informal learning. • allow people to form their own (transitory) networks for learning. Learning is a social activity and takes place in communities of interest and communities of practice. (from Graham Attwell)

50. Response to my blog posting Are PLE’s ready for Prime Time? • Who are "we" in this case? We in the ed-biz or we human inhabitants of the earth? I may be being hyper sensitive but all too often we in the ed-biz see it as our job to operationalize things for them, the (demonic) other. • Through this, Terry appears to be perpetuating the teacher/learner divide. Too many discussions are about how can we do things for you/them. • Not until we realize that we are them and they are us - without abdicating responsibility for mentorship, inscription, facilitation and, indeed, teaching - can such ideas as PLEs be realized. Seb Schmoller http://my-world.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/01/personal_learni.html