Month: May 2013

Tin Can: missing the optimal audience?

A post pulled together from different thoughts I drafted commuting in the last week…

It might just be down to my media sources of choice but it seems Tin Can is continuing to only really make major waves in corporate learning and development.  This is perhaps understandable considering the relative importance of SCORM to different learning industries.  Indeed, at one stage, whilst SCORM was the first thing Learning Management Systems for corporates needed the likes of Blackboard and Moodle struggled to provide robust SCORM players to their customers.  As schools and 16+ education providers created many of their own resources this was not as big an issues as for L&D departments handling elearning packages from 3rd party vendors and importing multitudes of external ‘off-the-shelf’ content.  Things have changed though and combinations of OER, badges and TC potentially could really transform the landscape.

Whilst I can see uses of Tin Can in the corporate environment, it is of course being seen as a way to acknowledge the 90% of the 70/20/10 model, I wonder if the most useful implementation would actually be with younger online learners.  Whilst accreditation is important in the corporate environment and online testing is often dominated in firms by compulsory training around compliance, health and safety, IT skills, etc. the accreditation element of Tin Can could be far more useful for schools.  For example, rather than setting a pupil a worksheet with questions to complete, a school teacher could setup a task where learners must show their learning path by submitting their activities via Tin Can.  This could show what they have read and done to learn the topic.  It is this use of resources which can now be revealed to the teacher and avoid the ‘doing homework to get teacher of my back’ syndrome.  Its all a bit 1984 but tracking your students could open up a whole new way of looking at what ‘schooling’ entails.

Lets take an example.  I remember when at school we would be asked a question about a topic.  The teacher knew we would effectively be limited to the school library’s resources.  We might be adventurous and find a CD-ROM, related TV/radio show or even venture to the public library but that would be about it.  In some cases the teacher would end up with multiple copy jobs either copied from a textbook or encyclopedias.  Today it is of course Google and the risk that any activity will simply be met with a cut and paste job from the web.  Whilst TurnItIn and the like can indicate where this has happened it does not reveal the learning path.  References/bibliography in traditional work was a hint towards this path but could also raise as many questions as answers.  For example, I remember one of my MA essays, which happened to be the only one I ever had marked by the head of the department, had something like “you couldn’t/shouldn’t have read this much – this is a dissertation length bibliography”.  Now what I had done was to have skimmed through a considerable batch of resources, as the question asked for an evaluation of different options (related to search engine mechanics) I went through a number of old resources to try and understand why the evolution happened and how Google (AskJeeves and maybe some others) worked in the way they did.  I even found an article on Ceefax/Teletext which had a huge amount of similarities to the hopes attached to the Internet (learning anywhere, breaking education barriers, etc).  Tin Can then could provide a capturing of what someone does for an assignment and a bibliography becomes either redundant or simply a list of the references actually quoted in the paper.

To me this offers a more manageable and clear use case than corporate learning where ‘informal’ may be something worth capturing and sharing but volume vs relevance will be a difficult balance.  Would my line manager want to know about every YouTube video I watch?  If we are just talking about the good ones why are we not already sharing those experiences via team collaboration sites?  One aspect is automation versus manually logging an activity, simply speaking you need to be enforcing manual (i.e. a student fails the assessment if they do not log a relevant path) or automatic (potentially too much noise).  In either case I would see more use for a teacher in the data than a manager or L&D department.

What will of course surprise some teachers is that, to an extent, this is nothing new.  Many Learning Management Systems (aka VLEs etc) have offered tracking of accessing resources from the system, for example accessing links supplied by the teacher.  Indeed this might be news to some corporates who have been stuck in the SCORM/course model and not appreciated the full range of, albeit bespoke/proprietary, options in the LMS marketplace.  The potential with TC will be to build on this to track multiple sources in an open way.

What we should be looking to use Tin Can for is to harvest the learning paths of individuals, in corporates this might be harvested by knowledge management to highlight the best ways for learning but in schools it offers much more – how are people using resources, what search techniques need improving in the learners, how are they synthesizing (rather than copying and pasting resources), etc etc.  If we map this to models such as the SCONUL information literacy model it offers even further possibilities for assessing ‘core’ skills.  Overall, hugely interesting times and new ways to consider what learning design means in a hyper connected world.

…I’ve recently installed the WordPress application on my phone so I might start posting rougher notes again.

Vetiquette – the new Netiquette?

I recently attended the CIPD’s HRD Exhibition and amongst the free seminars was one which covered Vetiquette.  Now the presenter seemed to think that everyone would have heard of this, but I must admit not remembering it if I had.  Indeed a Google search shows that unless you start adding some ‘-vet’ and ‘-pet’s it is not a term with a particularly big footfall.  The basic idea in the talk was that Netiquette was somewhat out-of-date as it came out of early web discussion boards and email; vetiquette relates to the modern web of video conferencing, multimedia collaboration, etc.  I did not think too much about this until this weeks BSN MOOC grouped Netiquette within digital citizenship.  How much citizenship and literacy overlap are probably a matter of opinion but it made me take another look at vetiquette…

Safari books online has Vetiquette as the below:

VEtiquette, is coined to represent the special subset of behaviors required in a virtual team and to explore the difference in context that virtual work creates that makes special attention to such behavior particularly important…VEtiquette, which stands for “virtual etiquette,” is required in work that is typically real time and synchronous. Vetiquette guides team members’ behavior as they collaborate virtually either while speaking or writing using Internet, mobile, or video technologies. It can be summarized as, “Be effective, or don’t be heard.” This extra attention to virtual interaction matters because the effectiveness of the team depends on it.

Thus for the Blended Schools MOOC we perhaps can consider the need for vetiquette in fostering young people’s belief to be effective/heard but not pushy/rude when online.  This is personally interesting for me as my workplace performance reviews in the past have identified a need to be more assertive in getting my ideas across.  This is perhaps my oh-so-polite Britishness coming through in online environments or might simply be that I find the behavior of others too pushy and ‘tone myself down’ as a result.  As we all move towards a globalized world this will be increasingly important and it is difficult to get the balance right across borders.  It can also be easier to pick a level of appropriate virtual behavior with someone if you have met them in person.

When I did draft a netiquette policy for a previous job I included both the traditional ‘net’ and ‘et’ issues, as well as those identified as ‘vetiquette’.  I guess I really saw all of it as ‘netiquette’ within information/digital literacy.  There is a little bit about what I did on this presentation but in general:

  • The policy was drafted by looking at existing netiquette policies from around the web.
  • It was not really enforced, instead it was embedded in training resources for teachers and students.  It was up to individual instructors how they might adopt, adapt and enforce it with their own students.
  • One would hope that as time passes people will be increasingly confident in this area and the need to train people in vetiquette will be something for schools rather than the 16+ education providers.  Thus it is great to see it being considered in the BSN MOOC (see last two blog posts for more on this).

Today’s Blended Teacher: The Blended Schools MOOC – Week 2 and 3

I was not planning on tackling the Create activities from the last two weeks (see previous post for more information on the MOOC) but decided that a couple of the activities were worth a think.

A Concerned Parent

In this blog post, you will be playing the role of a teacher faced with an important question from a parent.

Make a blog post in which you respond to this message:

“My daughter has told me that you are using online tests in your class. I am very concerned about this practice. What prevents the students from sitting at home with friends using their books and Google to answer every question? My daughter is not a cheater, and I am concerned that her honesty will become a disadvantage in your class. It is very important to us that she maintain a competitive class ranking, as she is hoping to attend Miskatonic University. Thank you for taking the time to respond to me.

Mrs. Lovecraft”

The concerned parent got me thinking as the use of online tests by secondary (aka high school) students is a concern for me in my academic support volunteering work.  It is clear that this homework can be seen as something the kids try to get through quickly without really thinking.  Thus my response to the parent would be something along the lines of the below

Dear Mrs. Lovecraft
I appreciate your concerns.  Please be assured that online assessments are part of the wider learning process and your daughter will achieve the highest grades by not cheating on these tests, instead using them to help learn the course material.  I also use data on assignment completion to identify where students may need extra assistance.  Therefore, if there are any areas where your child is struggling this will be highlighted for me by her online assessment scores.  Those students who do simply attempt to look-up the answers will find that they can answer some of the basic questions quickly but their scores will drop as we progress into more complex areas.  Again, their data will highlight this apparent failure to progress, many questions are authored in a way that incorporates random presentation of answers and complex thinking skills meaning students need to think about the tests, their online and classroom activities to achieve high final grades.

This is something I regularly tell the kids I volunteer with, homework needs to be not something you do to stop your teacher nagging but something you clearly see as worthwhile.

The “When Will We Ever Use This?” Blog Post

Students often ask us, “When will I ever use this in the real world?” Consider a handful of standards taught in your class.

  • How are these concepts used in the real world?
  • How might you use those applications as inspiration for projects in your classroom?
  • How well do your current practices reflect the real-world applications of the standards you teach?
  • Consider offering a full lesson plan based on these reflections

This issue cropped up this last week when I was asked why we should study the English Civil War.  My response was that it is important to remember England has really had many more than the one given the name and that understanding the different conflicts can show the evolution of the country.  However, the particular point I made was that every civil war holds some similarities, even though the English Civil War looks very different initially to Syria and elsewhere today the same key societal factors are at play – power, money, marriage, religion, arms Continue reading “Today’s Blended Teacher: The Blended Schools MOOC – Week 2 and 3”