Learner Integration – Listening to Learners on the PLE

We report on our findings so far from the JISC-funded Learner Integration at Ravensbourne (LIN-R) project. This project is funded under the user-owned technologies strand of the elearning programme, and is a demonstrator of making the institution's elearning platforms more useful to learners who increasingly wish to make use of their own technology and extra institutional services as well as institutional ones. This involves asking questions such as: To what extent does the notional PLE (Personal Learning Environment) resonate with learners? Is it just a three-letter acronym, doomed to be discarded when a more fashionable technology catches the eye of the elearning industry? What is the relationship between learner-as-learner, and learner-as-user? How personal can a personal learning environment be that is scaffolded and constructed – and how useful to the learner?

Background

Ravensbourne College is a specialist institution with a strong vocational focus in a discipline area (design and communication) that is undergoing rapid, disruptive change. Exploring the ramifications of that change on professional practice requires a partnership between learner and educator for two reasons: One, learners and practitioners bring differential perspectives and contexts to understanding it. For example, a learner may see Facebook as an online space to meet with friends. An educator may have more concerns about privacy, and the monetisation of human relationships, but also be interested in social networking as a platform for reputation management, for example. Two, learners may well have more practical skills suited to a post-transformation world.
To some extent, the traditional status/authority hierarchy doesn't map onto current trends in technology usage (the educator may be the technical novice, the learner confident in the use of TheirSpace), learners and practitioners meet increasingly as equals. In this project, we conceptualise the PLE as the sum total of feeds and flows that a learner aggregates – perhaps using a desktop aggregator like NetNewsWire, or a web-based aggregator like Google Reader, or, in a less-sophisticated example, simply the collection of "stuff" on the learner's laptop.

Project description

The overall aim of the work described here has been to identify and apply approaches that support learners' development more systematically and encourage them to increasingly reflect upon and integrate their learning. Also to do this within a context that is meaningful and can support them in making sense of their different learning experiences in relation to their own developing identity and direction. Specifically this is being put into practice by developing a framework for students to develop online profiles within the context of Personal and Professional Development Units. This is designed to encourage students to progressively record the development of their work and working process, reflect on this and their learning, and to share and contextualise this with peers, staff and wider communities.
PPD encourages students to recognise, and participate in, communities of practice that will form a crucial part of their professional lives. It is therefore a very suitable vehicle to support them in making effective use of digital technologies that are an increasingly important part of engaging in these. Students are encouraged to take responsibility for being both an information consumer, and an information producer and to acquire skills, which will equip them for this.
We are aiming to develop a continuum from recording development privately, through to representing and sharing this with others- from peers and staff to wider communities- and then also doing this as part of the process of (increasingly professional) collaboration. This has led us to adapt the idea of a PLE, as part of a learning design that encourages the integration of different areas and processes of a learner's experience. For us this means integrating processes and activities that are often seen as conflicting, notably reflection with self-representation with assessment, thus aligning key aspects of the curriculum.
We have aimed to support learners to develop a workflow that includes aspects of learning that are often marginalised such as recording the development of their work and ideas and representing their contribution to collaborative projects and in supporting peers. Further the aim has been to use this to encourage them in synthesising their reflections as part of an online profile and representation of their learning journey and themselves as a reflective practitioners. This also is intended to encourage connections between different areas, notably theory and practice.
Our project isn't complete yet, so our findings are a work in progress. What we have found so far challenges some of the conventional Net Generation rhetoric. For example we suspect that some of the wildest excesses of this rhetoric are comparable to confusing being able to work a VCR remote control with being able to build a VCR. We would argue that learners' facility with computers doesn't represent a shift in a generation's understanding of the world. Few of our learners used aggregators, and some had difficulty with email. This goes some way to explain the popularity of all-things-in-one-place lock-in of platforms like Facebook.
In practice, learners do not currently engage in using technology as an integrated part of their learning. In fact, learners are not even aware, by and large, of the possibilities of a PLE. They take an instrumental or functional view of technology on the desktop – that is, they want to improve their Photoshop skills or FinalCut Pro skills. Learners have to be further supported to learn about learning, and this can take considerable time, resource and planning from educators and institutions.
Significantly, our students tend to see technology as a set of tools to support their design / production process and not really to support them in learning or developing collaborative practice. Also there is a (possibly related) tendency for many to see the Internet as being useful for showcasing their best work, especially towards the end of their degree but not so much for collaborating on or reflecting on the process of the development of either their work or working practices.
By and large our learners' expectations of elearning systems is unsophisticated – a repository for lecture notes, preferably available in advance of lectures, and in no way a replacement for what they perceive as the "real" activities of practice-based education – programme making and studio culture.
However, in discussion with educators, and in the right context, learners did often recognise the professional applications of social software, and began to consider it in a deeper and more sophisticated manner. Educators, for the most part, did not enjoy a reciprocal boost in their confidence with using software tools!
If the PLE as aggregator is a realistic technology (it certainly is from the technical standpoint), its fruition exists in the future – it is not a technology that is self-evident (or even iteratively evident) to learners. Indeed, contemporary thinking on the PLE (like much contemporary thinking on education itself) is distant from learners' conceptions. Also, whilst co-working between educational practitioners and learners can rapidly enrich concepts of learning, these enriched concepts do not easily translate into technological "fixes". That said, scaffolding learners' contextualisation of technology does not lead to alienation or anomie.
We suggest that learning technology is best introduced to learners with its underpinning rationale and philosophical biases made explicit. We suggest also that learners are empowered to think critically about the technical infrastructure they are provided with. This does not mean that elearning should reduce itself to the learners' expectations – but that learners should not have their expectations defeated by the technologisation of their learning experiences.
In general, managers and practitioners should not be overcome by technological hype, nor over-awed by software-industry-friendly rhetoric about epochal change. An informed pedagogy of web 2.0 does not start from the presumption that the Net Generation changes everything – and continues to understand that the technological instrumentation of learning is neither explicit nor self-evident.
We have identified in line with other JISC supported research that the level / sophistication of student engagement with social software and web 2.0 tools can be overestimated. For example very few of our students have used any form of aggregation. Also their awareness of the value and uses of social software for anything beyond social interaction and their ideas about managing an online identity are limited. It also seems at least initially that there is an overlap between the level of independence and maturity of learners and their approach to using technology and engaging with communities of practice. This highlights the need to scaffold this process for students and staff, even more fully than we initially thought but also re-enforces the value of this for independent learning.
The engagement of students has been varied. Some have engaged with the learning outcomes, content and in using the tools in ways that are very encouraging and which represent an initial validation of some of the principles of the learning design. Others engaged less fully in one or more aspects and this highlighted the need to integrate the innovations into the whole learning and teaching approach.
For example, where students were encouraged to identify examples of designers using the Internet and there was structured discussion of this within forums and classes this encouraged many to recognise the opportunities offered by web 2.0 developments for reflection and public representation and relating these. Where students were using their PPD work to help them to get work placements, the desire to show only their most polished work and to focus on finished products tended to limit the willingness of some learners to engage in deeper reflection particularly about their working process. On the other hand this connection was motivating and encouraged students to put in considerable effort. Issues such as this highlight the need for the wider aims of the learning design to be more transparent to learners and embedded in the unit and course as a whole.
We have found that user-owned technology presents challenges along three specific dimensions, which we can characterise as pedagogical, technological and social.
The pre-eminent pedagogical problem is making effective use of user-owned technology. Although our project is demonstrating that we can add a façade to the College's systems to enhance the usefulness of user-owned technology in conjunction with institutional systems, the institution hasn't yet developed a general pedagogy of user-owned technology. For example, if it can be safely assumed that learners are equipped with a laptop or web-capable smartphone, it is critical to understand how learning activities can change to take advantage of that capability. By and large, and almost by default, these opportunities tend to go un-addressed. Even simple innovations that harness possibilities such as spontaneous backchannels and Wikipedia fact-checking are slow to emerge, and learners' interaction with their devices in tutor-led situations continues to often be perceived as disruptive.
Technological issues range from on-going issues with the stability of a wireless network which has a large number of simultaneous users (particularly a problem in studios, seminar, and lecture rooms), to a shortage of physical spaces that appropriately support user-owned technology. However, the College's service departments are engaged with the institution's strategy to move to a more "user-owned" culture. More interesting are the technological issues surrounding extra-institutional Web 2.0 platforms. We can sketch out an idealised "architecture" for a PLE that integrates extra-institutional resources: an architecture where RSS and OpenID would predominate, and "semantic" markup would enrich information flows. However, the institution isn't ready to become an OpenID provider, Microformats and RDFa are yet to become mainstream technologies. This creates a PLE experience that has an "experimental" edge – appealing to some, but frustrating to the majority, especially those who still see elearning as a peripheral or supporting activity.
Social issues arise from skills or capability related issues, or from prior technology choice. One of the strengths of the VLE is the simple fact that it is a container for learning activities. Although it's possible to plug in, through embeddable widgets, RSS, or simple hyperlinks, content from almost any source, it's also eminently possible to create a worthwhile learning experience entirely bounded by the VLE – and this becomes increasingly compelling as the difficulty of integration increases. Also, both learners and practitioners have made pre-existing extra-institutional technology choices. These choices may be sub-optimal for integrating into a PLE.

Conclusions

The project so far has established the value of developing a PLE model. However it has also established, as discussed, that to do this successfully involves re-considering the role of the institution and academic practitioners. A personal learning environment as has been outlined must be built by the learner and supported by their staff and the context they understand themselves to be in. The extent to which students are prepared to do this is variable and particularly dependent on learning design, staff skills and preparedness. The recognition of the opportunities of user owned technology and tools and models from social software and Web 2.0 can play a part in this but only if they are accompanied by fundamental changes, notably the embedding of the relevant values and principles in the whole of the curriculum and approach to learning and teaching.
We have conducted focus groups for learners to better understand their perceptions of institutional systems, and their use of extra-institutional technology – and to gauge their reactions to the PLE model we are articulating. As noted above, learners expect a high degree of integration from institutional, or institutionally advocated systems. We note in passing that the designers of Facebook have had an important insight in this respect. By and large, learners don't like to integrate information for themselves – they would prefer if everything they needed was available "automatically". Learners are happy to go to sources of content on the web, provided they are notified of updates. Few learners use RSS for this purpose, and most described an update mechanism as email-like: "Facebook email notification when something's changed". However, students by and large complain about College email notifications as they cannot opt-out of this system. Students themselves use Facebook for information sharing "because everyone is on there every day", but they are divided about whether they would like to receive information from tutors/the VLE through Facebook. Students value forums and discussions on the VLE, and it is these discussions that engage them – otherwise they will check content "if my tutor tells me they've put something on".
Other key lessons include the fact that personalisation and the model of a PLE present considerable problems of scale. These can be addressed by standardisation, though only at the expense of personalisation (you can choose any blogging system you like so long as it's from our approved list). Even a limited choice creates an increased support burden, particularly where learners are being directed to systems rather than integrating their own user of tools into their learning activities. In the absence of effective support learners converge on "lowest common denominator" approaches to integrating their activities – hyperlinking and copy-and-pasting. In fact, copy-and-paste is the most widely used integration technique. For example, learners report pasting the contents of Moodle courses or individual Word documents into Facebook.
Also learners have an expectation that institutional systems are integrated, or at least present the illusion of integration. Decoupling the learning experience across a range of platforms chosen either by learner or institution appears to learners as though the institution is opting out of one of its key roles. To an extent this contrasts with the learners' own use of systems – however many students have commented that they like Facebook because "everything is there" – Facebook's chat and messaging features substituting for instant messaging and email alternatives.
Another key lesson is that academic practitioners should have, themselves, an underlying model of a PLE that exceeds "a collection of your stuff on your computer". This should be coherently articulated, with concrete examples of tooling and tool use, embedded in a clear rationale. In general, learners will not "take" to a model without considerable contextual scaffolding. Through the overall model described above and other outputs such as a tools matrix the project and team are supporting the development of this but clearly further work needs to be done in this area.
Also we have come to recognise that whatever coherent model might be proposed, it is vital to consider how this relates to learners' (or practitioners') own preferred software landscape.