learnE – My experiences in elearning

Description of the community

IWB (Interactive Whiteboard Revolution) is the learning community in which I have been participating.  The community has attracted over 200 members since I originally joined in mid March and recently passed 430 members.  As stated by the creator, there is an understanding that all members will follow simple yet clear set of guidelines for etiquette – play nice, be kind to each other and share your stuff.  It is evident from the information that is posted that the members are ‘loyal to the cause’ and all information is shared in good faith. 

The site was created in early March by Chris Betcher.  He mentions that the prime focus of the website is ‘to form a community of innovative IWB users, and to start a revolution’.  He also adds that it is ‘a place to build a global community of IWB users, a place to share ideas and experiences.’  From a comment by Chris on the blog, Self-IWBing, the intention of this community was to ‘move beyond the brand-wars and get into the underlying conceptual ideas of good IWB use’.

The community has been built using the Ning environment and customised by Chris Betcher using the following key features:

• add member profiles;
• invoke privacy ie you can only view the community if you are a member;
• invite new members;
• enable search engine capabilities;
• show dynamic activity feeds and latest activity information;
• customise text and widget options;
• enable RSS feeds (in and out);
• upload and share photos; and
• add groups, discussion forums and blogs.

Although there is an international memberships, most of the members come from Australia and USA.  It seems primarily that teachers, university employees/lecturers, trainers in corporate organisations and some vendors constitute the membership.  I realise that this seems a vague statement but it is only possible to ascertain professional circumstances from the information that people include in their contributions to discussions and forums.

Learning Events/Activities

IWB used forums and blogs as the primary focus for discussion purposes which in turn provide the primary avenues for learning events and activities.  There are approximately 30 discussion forums with topics including Using LRS (Learning Response Systems) with IWB’s, Impact on teaching practice, Accessing impact of IWB technology, What training and support is given when IWB’s first introduced to an environment and Impact on Teaching Practice.   There are also approximately 15 Blogs with topics including IWB’s and Web 2.0, IWB – The First Steps, Voting devices and IWB’s and Introducing IWB’s across schools.

Three other avenues for activities have recently been added – a Chat option, upload Videos (separate from the discussion avenues) and a RSS feed to Twitter.  The Chat option resemble an instant messaging programme and as such there is no avenue for recall on the conversations. 

My Role as a learner/participant

I originally joined this community because I believed I would be able to learn from and use the information that was being discussed in an attempt to make better use of the SmartBoards installed in the training rooms in my workplace.  Initially the variety of information that was appearing was very interesting and thought provoking.  I ‘tagged’ certain forums and blogs in order to follow the flow of information and directed them through my student email to my work email environment so that I was immediately able to review any comments.  I became involved in conversations that interested me and contributed where I felt that my knowledge could benefit the discussion.

In my first part of this assignment, I mentioned that I believed that any community (learning or otherwise) is only as good as its participants and the input that they give.  Over the weeks that I have belonged to this community, I have noticed certain dynamics becoming apparent – members who dominate (including the creator), those who ‘propose’ their opinions very forthrightly, members who make haphazard contributions and those who have not yet contributed).  How have the such dynamics affected me when considering participation?

According to Weerasinghe, Ramberg and Hewagamage in Designing Online Learning Environments for Distance Learning, they acknowledge the work of Honey and Mumford who have developed four categories of learning styles based on Kolb’s learning style theory.  These categories including Activist (learn by doing), Theorist (learn by observing), Reflector (see concepts, models and overall image) and Pragmatist (learn by practice).  Although I have not completed this test, I feel that I identify with the Theorist and Pragmatists categories.  Honey and Mumford believe that theorists ‘learn by observing and think about what is happening.  They listen (read) carefully to what everyone says (contributes), think over all ideas and repeat the learning when they get a chance’.  On the other hand, Pragmatists ‘learn best when they are given a chance to practice what is immediately demonstrated or explained.  They enjoy experimenting with new ideas’.  I have certainly observed heavily and taken note of those discussions that highlighted functionality with the IWB’s that could be used in my own environment and consequently used them where applicable.

I would determine that the role I have played as a learner/participant in this community is that of a ‘lurker’ and I ‘delurked’ occasionally.  According to Nonnecke and Preece, I seem to be among the estimated 90% of people that belong to online communities ‘who reads but seldom if ever publicly contributes to an online group’. Nonnecke and Preece in their paper ‘Silent Participants: Getting to Know Lurkers Better’ (posted by Tatiana Lozano on our community, eLearning Experiences) states that ‘lurking is a complex set of actions, rationales and contexts’ and that people lurk for various reasons including ‘preservation of anonymity, shy about posting, satisfy own information needs and act with constraints’.  I believe that this certainly display my approach.

Analysis of the community as a vehicle for learning

The emphasis for this online community is primarily collaboration and investigation.  There are no predefined learning objectives or predicted direction for how the information is construed thus enabling a more open environment for participation, involvement and inevitably learning.  Learning environments following these themes tend towards constructivism.  Constructivist theorists, according to Terry Anderson in ‘The Theory and Practice of Online Learning’ (posted by Anne Bartlett-Bragg on eLearning community) believe that people learn by interpreting the information and the world according to their personal reality – they learn by observation, processing and interpretation and then personalise the information into personal knowledge’. 

The information included in most discussions and blogs are assigned categories – General IWB Discussion, Technical stuff, Come into my Classroom, Better on the Big Screen and How to …. It appears that the various contributions include detailing experiences, Q&A, options and examples of how IWB’s being used, information about developed models and lessons learnt, links to other online reference material, etc. 

Support/hinder learning

During my involvement in this community, not only has the site grown considerably in membership, more comments, discussions and blogs have appeared.  Although confessing to be a lurker, I have noticed that I am feeling less inclined to participate because of being frustrated with the decrease in response time, particularly when navigating within the community.  The response time appears to slow further outside working hours when obviously people are visiting the site.  Prior to the recent addition of the Video option, videos or other media were added into the discussion topic itself which can considerably influence the response time.   The following are blogs are examples of this ‘congestion’ – The Great Detour posted by Dragon09 and The IWB – First Steps posted by reuw.

I believe that the quantity of graphics incorporated into the background and the use of bright colours (including all the colours of the rainbow and a predominated red border and background) are somewhat distracting.  I’m not sure if the creator has considered the likelihood of a member with red/green colour blindness using the community and what difficulties they may have.  According to Wiki as viewed on 29 April, 2009, red/green colour blindness is by far the most common form, about 99%, and causes problems in distinguishing reds and greens. 

From the perspective of supportive learning environment, the community:

• has centred discussions around IWB’s and maintain this distinct focus;
• regularly ’seeds’ content and activities proposed; and
• showed an appreciation for each contribution as there was very little languishing and to date, I have only noticed one discussion without comments.

My experiences in relation to my research and readings on learning communities

In a review written on ‘The Fifth Discipline’, Peter Senge is said to describe a learning organisation as being ‘an organisation where people continually expand their capacity to create the result they truly desire and where people are continually learning how to learn together’.  Senge believes that five disciplines help build such learning organisations/environments – one of which is team learning’.  He believes that within team learning, ‘the discipline of dialogue involves learning how to recognise the patterns of interaction in teams’ and whether such patterns can undermine or accelerate learning.  For me this is true – my learning has certainly accelerated but I am still struggling to some degree with the communication process.  Kaye says that ‘our ability to relate well to other people corresponds with our ability to understand and manage the communication process’.  Maybe I’m just coming to terms with understanding the communication process and this environment.

Reference List

Downes, S, 2004, ‘Learning in Communities’, Australian Flexible Learning Community, viewed 25 March 2009, http://community.flexiblelearning.net.au/GlobalPerspectives/content/article_5249.htm

Kaplan, S, ‘Strategies for Collaborative Learning, Creating Collaborative Communities, viewed on 26 April, 2009, http://www.icohere.com/CollaborativeLearning.htm

1997-98, ‘Professional Learning Communities: What are They and Why Are They Important’, SEDL, Advancing Research, Improving Education, Issues…. about Change, volume 6 no 1, viewed on 26 April 2009, http://www.sedl.org/change/issues/issues61.html

Cornford, I. 1999 ‘Social learning’, in J. Athanasou (ed.), Adult educational psychology, Social Science Press, Katoomba, NSW, pp. 73-96.

August, 2001, ‘Continuing professional development: Learning styles’, British Dental Journal, British Dental Journal 191, 125 – 128 (2001) viewed on 26 April, 2009, http://www.nature.com/bdj/journal/v191/n3/full/4801116a.html

Nonnecke, B and Preece, J., 2000, ‘Silent Participants: Getting to Know Lurkers Betters’, Usenet to CoWebs: Interacting with Social Information Spaces: Springer Verlag, Chapter 6 pp 110-132, viewed on 29 April, 2009, http://www.cis.uoguelph.ca/~nonnecke/research/silentparticipants.pdf

Review of The Fifth Discipline, http://www.rtis.com/nat/user/jfullerton/review/learning.htm

Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness

Anderson, T., 2008, ‘Foundations of Educational Theory on Online Learning, The Theory and Practice of Online Learning, Part 1 Chapter 1