I recently gave a keynote presentation at ICETC 2011 in Changchun, where I discussed some of the experiences from facilitating the course “Introduction to CSCL” on P2PU, and pointed towards some ideas for technologies and ways of organizing courses that could enable deeper learning in open courses.

I started by noting how we live in a world with an abundance of resources, and then mentioning some of the ways in which we can be informal learners. We can use “site-specific information-centric communities” such as StackOverflow to get quick answers to something, while we are working on a problem (I absolutely agree with David Wiley that this qualifies as learning).

Much of my learning happens in what I call “long-term distributed topic-based communities”. This would be something like the “edublogosphere”, with people who discuss issues and share information over a long time, held together through RSS feeds, crosslinking, Twitter-hashtags, etc. However, as Mike Caulfield pointed out, there is something very powerful about a cohort moving through a set learning path or collection of materials together. Open courses, whether they be small learning groups on P2PU, or big MOOCs, is about offering more people the opportunity to participate in such learning experiences.

I then discussed some of the issues that came up during our course, such as the “dream of amplification”, the various dimensions of open courses, the dimensions of course organizer "authority" and our interesting experience with "threaded chat".

Finally, I discussed ways in which the course data could be analyzed and introduced two metaphors for organizing online courses: stimulus/response and divergence/convergence, and looked at how the latter model could be implemented in an open course based on a multitude of Web 2.0 platforms.

This talk, together with the links above, represent a lot of my current thinking and some of the research I would like to pursue. I would love to receive feedback, pushback and ideas. (PS: The slides are synchronized with a recording of my presentation – you won’t get much out of them if you just view the slides by themselves).

Stian

What is a follower?

P2PU courses have always been entirely transparent, even without logging in, a visitor would be able to see not only the course outline and the links to all the freely accessible course resources (often linked from other websites), but also all the interactions and discussions between the course members.

On the new P2PU platform, we decided to formally enable people to “follow” courses. This would function similar to Twitter, where you can follow anyone without needing their permission (different from Facebook, where friending is reciprocal), and receive their updates.

Thus, when we launched our course called “Introduction to Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning” on P2PU this spring, we explicitly offered two different modes of participation. You could apply to be a core member, and be expected to do the readings every week, post on your own blog and participate in the weekly meetings. I have blogged about the participation statistics of the core members earlier.

How did following work in our course?

However, many people might be interested in the course topic, yet not have enough time (or inclination) to commit to being an active member. These people could “follow” the course. People added themselves as followers throughout the course, and currently we have about 50 people signed up. We were very curious about their experience of the course. Our course launched at the same time as the new platform, so it is natural to assume that some of the followers were just trying out new functionality. Others might have used it as an internal bookmark, reminding themselves to go back in the future. Did anyone actually actively follow along and get something meaningful out of the course?

(Part of the problem with evaluating this, is that the website was under rapid development, and a lot of new functionality was added as the course was running. Initially, followers did not receive any e-mail updates. About mid-ways, they began receiving updates that course organizers marked as “important” (typically the bi-weekly updates). In the future, followers will probably have the same choices of e-mail notifications as course participants, which might significantly change how they interact with courses they follow).

Survey of followers

We had hoped to see our course “amplified” through our followers, with retweets and blogs about topics they found interesting. There was, however, very little evidence of this. There was some retweeting and mentioning in blogs, but this was mainly along existing individual social networks. Thus, hearing nothing from the followers, it was hard to guess whether they were getting anything out of the course. So we decided to design a simple survey (see the questions we asked).

We got about 10 answers, which was more than I had hoped for, given that the followers were by definition not very active (some of them might even have left the P2PU platform altogether). Some said they had signed up, but never had time to look, some were planning to go back and review the material later, and some said they had popped in once in a while, and gotten a bit out of it. But one person stood out, professing a lot of enthusiasm, and answering “10″, where we asked students to rate how much they’d learnt from 1-10. I was very intrigued and e-mailed him, to see if I could ask him some more questions. He gracefully agreed to let me do a short e-mail interview, and post it here.

This is interesting not only to get a novel perspective on “following”, which is a rather new feature on the P2PU website, but also because the subject of “lurking” has caused quite a bit of debate in the MOOCosphere (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 for a random selection).

One of the things that especially struck me by his answers was how the concept of “eight weeks” for the course has little meaning to a follower. I do believe that having a cohort (like Mike Caulfield talks about) moving through a set learning trajectory together can be very powerful, but that doesn’t mean that the course materials (the initial ones, and the generated discussion) is worthless once the course is “over”… And one of the things I am thinking about right now, is to how to better present all the great resources that were generated during the course to new visitors – currently you need to dig around a bit to find the gems.

Who are you? Where do you live, what do you do?

My name is Daniel Marcell Góngora Flores, I live in La Paz, Bolivia, I am an Electronics Engineering student at Universidad Mayor de San Andrés.

Currently, I am working on my undergraduate thesis project, a Virtual Control Systems Laboratory based on the Furuta pendulum for experimentation under the Computer Supported Collaborative Learning approach.

How did you first hear about P2PU, how long have you been involved, what has your experience been, have you taken any other courses, etc.

Since I found MIT’s OpenCourseWare, I started looking for open educational resources in order to be a competitive student today and a competitive professional tomorrow.

I remember reading a blog post about a “School of Webcraft” that somehow was related to Mozilla. That was enough for me to look for more information, and that is how I arrived at the P2PU web site.

I first took a course called “Algoritmos y estructuras de datos”(Algorithms and Data Structures). I quited after 4 or 5 weeks. Then, I took a course called “Getting started with Scilab”, I did not quit this time just because I couldn’t find a way to do it. Why I quit? Despite the course organizers effort, I was not really comfortable with the teacher-student method and I didn’t have much time to do the tasks due to work in the first course (there was not a “follower” type of student at that time), in the second one I felt that I was reading another Scilab tutorial, nothing new, no activities to encourage discussion nor active participation.

I was not happy with the courses, but how to organize a course so that the participants become real participants and not only receivers?

How did you hear about the CSCL course

With the arrival of the new P2PU web site, I started browsing the courses almost every week. One day I found a course called “Introduction to the field of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning”. At that time, I didn’t knew anything about CSCL. Nevertheless, it being such an active course, I decided to follow it.

What made you interested?

Once I started reading the course material, I realized that CSCL was about learning through social interaction. Reading about that simple idea was such an eye opening experience to me, because I was used to learning by myself. Thanks to the Open Educational Resources, I was able to fill the spaces and connect the dots in my head without needing a teacher neither a partner. Now, it seems there is another way, a very interesting one.

Why did you decide to follow the course instead of participating

So, participating is the way to go. Being an active participant is how I will learn more. However, there was a problem: my English level. I am still building my English skills, the language barrier was stopping me from participating in this course because I was not able to participate in the chat rooms nor to write weekly blog posts in English, Spanish being my mother tongue. That’s why I became a peripheral learner.

What did you expect when you chose to follow the course – what did you think it meant?

I did not expect to find the topic of my undergraduate thesis project by just following the course, but I did (at least in some sense). Given that this was the first time I “heard” this term, my very first reaction was to look for CSCL in Wikipedia to try to understand what was this about.

How was your experience of following the course? During the eight weeks, what was your involvement – what part of the material or conversation did you look at, how much time did you spend, what was useful or interesting to you?

Being a follower, a peripheral learner, to talk about “the eight weeks” doesn’t make much sense because I am/was free to read the material (papers, wiki entries, blog posts, chat logs, etc.) at my own pace, whenever I wanted to. In fact, I’m still reading the material from week 4.

This is important to me because I am a engineering student, and even if I had read some papers related to education, I don’t have the background necessary in some cases to understand the material.

I could not say exactly how many hours I spend reading the course materials. However, the amount of time I spend reading the material is increasing significantly every week.

That being said, I always find it interesting reading wiki entries because of the references. Also, I found the blog posts and the chat logs very valuable because reading those made me feel part of the group, a group of people hungry for knowledge. I must admit that I’m a little bit jealous, because for me it’s hard to find people willing to learn and share their opinions in my “environment”. I think that this is a direct consequence of the commercialization of education here in Bolivia. A large number of friends of mine, students and professionals, think that what really matters is to have a really big CV filled with “n’importe quoi” instead of looking for opportunities to grow up. Filling the wallet is their final goal.

To me, the only way to improve education in Bolivia is applying collaborative learning and using open educational resources. Specially when the University teachers in particular and the educational institutions in general are not committed with this important role.

This was my first year attending the bi-annual CSCL conference, which this year happened to be at the Hong Kong University campus. I was very excited, since I had been reading papers by many of the people who would be attending, and it would also be the first time I’d be in Hong Kong (and later China) with my supervisor, and people from my university.

Although the actual core conference only lasts for a few days, I began my participation with two days of pre-conferences, attended post-conference events in both Guangzhou and Beijing, and even the doctoral summer school in Beijing that was affiliated with the conference. Thus, my earliest notes are from the pre-conference on machine learning and data analysis on July 4th, and my latest ones from Gerry Stahl'stalk to the international summer school on July 18th.

However, there were of course sessions I did not capture notes for. Taking detailed notes is exhaustive, and it’s difficult to do it the entire day. This is added to mundane issues like finding power outlets, etc. Either way, I hope the notes might be helpful – they certainly are to me. Overview over all notes.

The first pre-conference which I mentioned above was organized by Carolyn Penstein Rosé and her post-doc Gregory Dyke, and discussed tools to analyze computer-mediated communications. We got training in using Tatiana, a tool to analyze synchronous events with time-coded data from multiple media (for example videos, transcripts, chat and a shared whiteboard). In the afternoon, we learnt to use SIDE, which is a GUI for a machine-learning framework. Although nobody can become an expert in machine-learning in one afternoon, it was a great overview of the state of the art of machine learning, giving you a sense of what kinds of problems machine learning might be appropriate for. (For people interested in ML, [@mclaren2010supporting] is a great paper showing how ML can be applied to a specific educational challenge, and the thinking that went in to choosing the right algorithm).

The second pre-conference was about connecting levels of learning, organized by Dan Suthers, Chris Teplovs, Marten de Laat, Jun Oshima and Sam Zeini. I’ve read about these ideas before, in [@suthers2010framework], and found them interesting, but quite complex. In this workshop, Gerry Stahl gave a great historical/philosophical overview over CSCL as a discipline, and Dan Suthers presented on their theoretical approach. Then, a few datasets had been shared between researchers who provided different analyses of them – very interesting (although not always easy to tie back to the original theoretical framework of the session).

Ed Chi from Google Research opened the conference with an interesting keynote on augmented social cognition, with several neat cases from his work with access to huge data sets. From the conference sessions, I managed to capture two very interesting sessions on technology-enhanced interactions & analysis (1, 2), and one session on MUPEMURE, a “Model of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning with Multiple Representations”.

There were some very interesting presentations about the future of Knowledge Forum in the Guangzhou post-conference, which I did not manage to capture (but check out these slides 1, 2). I did get some notes from two of Gerry Stahl’s presentations, one describing two case study analyses he did, and one on the history and future of CSCL.

I’m looking forward to the International Conference on Learning Sciences next year in Sydney (CSCL and ICLS alternate every other year), where I hop to present a paper on open learning environments. I’m also planning to dig into all the notes I took, and all the connections I made, read more papers, etc.

Stian

The course

During the past eight weeks, Monica Resendes and I facilitated a course called “Introduction to the field of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning” on P2PU. We are both interested in developing a research agenda around open courses, although this first course did not have an explicit research design or research questions. We approached it as a “baseline”, to get an idea of how it is to facilitate courses on P2PU, and also to try out some ideas regarding design and organization.

I can certainly say that I learnt a huge amount from the course, both from the actual content of course (all the course participants were scarily brilliant, lot’s of great insights in the blog posts and discussions!), and from the experience of facilitating the course in itself. Having been so close to the runnings of P2PU from the very beginning, and having worked closely with many course organizers, I was actually surprised at how much I learnt – but I did. Being a course organizer yourself is a whole different experience.

Part of it is the change of focus. Earlier, I thought of technical changes in terms of all the different courses, how much support it would need, how much in demand a feature was etc. But when you are a course organizer, you have laser-focus on your own course, and what it needs. And you’ve spent a lot of time developing the ideas, imagining a vision of how the course will go, etc. (Of course, it becomes interesting when this vision is not the same as the students’ vision of how the course should run, which I will blog about later).

Lessons learnt

Anyway, last week the course ended, and now we are thinking about what we have learnt. We posted five simple questions for all the active participants:

• What was the best thing about this course?
• Did you learn anything that will help you in your job or studies?
• Approximately how much time did you spend on the course each week?
• How should we improve the organization of the course in the future?
• How could the different tools and communication channels work better?

and we’ve got some great answers in this thread, and Martin also replied on his blog.

Participation

Monica and I are planning to do more analysis of the participation patterns etc, and we are currently preparing a survey to send out to “followers”, but I did a quick count of participation statistics for the people who signed up to “participate” in the course.

Of 13 participants (plus Monica and I, who also participated actively in all activities, but whom I have not included in these statistics), there were two whom we never heard from again after they were admitted to the course (one of whom has not done anything else on P2PU either, the single item in their activity feed is being admitted to the course). Apart from those two, a further five students “left us” during the first few weeks (one actually posted a message stating that she was not able to keep up due to other commitments, the others just “faded away”).

That left us with six students who were fairly active, and committed to the very end. Together with the course organizers, the eight of us have become a pretty tight-knit community, and really enjoyed the ride together. We’ve participated in different ways, one was never able to make the Saturday group chats, whereas most of the others did, some have used the forums on P2PU actively, others preferred their own blog, one never blogged, but made every single group meeting, etc. But they were all fairly active almost every week of the course, from the start to the end.

I know this is a very simplified analysis, but it also correlates with what I experienced (although going back to look at the data was useful – some of the people who signed up but never showed up, I had kind of forgotten about, but I had also forgotten about some of the people that were active during week one or two, but then faded out).

I am really grateful that we were able to finish strong (almost everyone made it to an amazing meeting in week 7 with guest speaker Sandy McAuley, and again to the last meeting this weekend, and every single person of those eight has posted a reflection on the five questions we asked them). I really didn’t want this course to slowly fade out. While we are all discussing interesting ways of carrying the course community forwards, including creating a sort of CSCL “book-club”, it’s valuable to have some kind of “closure” for our experience together these eight weeks.

However, I would of course have loved to see more of the about 50% of people who didn’t “complete” the course engage more actively. I myself was absent from the course for almost two weeks due to travel and an eye infection, and experienced how hard it was to “reinsert myself” into the community. At that time, I wrote to several students who had not been active, and encouraged them in a non-judgmental way to “get back on the train”. I received several positive responses to that message, but nobody actually did.

I’ve also written to all the participants who have yet to post reflections, and asked them to do so – even for people who were not active at all, I’d love to hear their thoughts. Or – if someone was reading a lot, but never posted, that’s also very valuable information.

The future?

Any lessons for the future? Well, although I did make it quite explicit what kind of participation I expected of “core participants”, there was no way of linking to this from the sign-up page, when the course was getting started, so I had no guarantee of students having read it.  (I really hope this will be fixed before I run another course). I’m also thinking that perhaps next time, I will make the sign-up question a bit “harder” – not in terms of difficulty, but in terms of engagement. For example, by asking students to read one article, and post some thoughts about it on their blog. That way, they have to do something a lot more active than just clicking “subscribe”, and two sentences about their interest, and I’ll already have their blog URLs.

On the other hand, there were 7 people who applied to the course and did not provide enough information. I asked them to do so, but they never responded. (It’s possible that they did not receive the notification). Perhaps if I had let some of them in, they would have gotten interested, and would have participated more than some of the people who did get in… Given that participation beyond week 1 was such a strong measure of completion, perhaps we should do like undergraduate classes, which let almost anyone sign up for the first two weeks, and then kick people out who are not active enough.

Of course, I could just open enrolment to anyone – and indeed, maybe the active group had settled on being exactly the same. I still think there is a value to having a small group of people who make an explicit commitment to learning together over a certain period of time, but I certainly don’t think it’s the only way to do things.

Stian

I was very excited when I first came across Dan Suther’s 2008 article "Empirical studies of the value of conceptually explicit notations in collaborative learning" in the book “Knowledge Cartography: Software tools and mapping techniques” (a book which is filled with other very interesting chapters as well). I had been acquainted with Knowledge Forum for several years, and also seen a few other graphical discourse environments, but never had any vocabulary for describing them, or taxonomy for analyzing the design, and how it could impact learning.

Suther’s article lays out a whole theory of how graphical discourse systems impact collaborative learning discourses, through the two concepts of salience and constraints, and runs a number of experiments with different systems to show the actual impact of the design changes. This was very refreshing to me, after having read a lot of Knowledge Building literature that mostly acted like the base design of Knowledge Forum was sacred, and never referred to other graphical discourse tools, or experimented with radical changes in the design to see how it impacted the learning process.

For week 5 of CSCL intro, I read both Suthers (2008), as well as an earlier paper from 2001, Towards a Systematic Study of Representational Guidance for Collaborative Learning Discourse, where he laid out his research agenda for the next few years, and touches on more of the theory behind his ideas. I’ve taken quite detailed noted, as usual, so I won’t spend this blog post trying to explain all of his ideas, but rather to bring up some of my questions, or ideas.

He cites a lot of interesting papers, and I plan to read many of them in the future – in fact, it’s just this kind of a situation that my wiki was made for. If reading the paper and highlighting / adding notes is first-order processing, and using the sidewiki to synthesis and write organized notes/key ideas is second-order processing, then the third-order is moving the ideas out of the individual article pages. I’d like to have a page, for example, on “salience”, which integrates the knowledge from all the articles I’ve read (with links back to the individual articles, of course).

Implementation

Many of Suther’s studies are laboratory studies, where two students sit in a room with one or two computer screens for an hour or two. This is an interesting design which allows him to test a number of different “configurations” with a large number of students in a relatively pure environment. However, a two-hour interaction is a poor substitute for a two week class section, or even an entire 12 week course. Even if we accept that certain forms of representational guidance help students think more systematically and deeply about issues, how do we implement them as part of a curriculum – what is the ideal balance between time spent online, time spent face to face (if it is a hybrid class), other instructional activities etc?

Suthers mentions two studies (Suthers, Toth & Weiner 1997; Toth et al 2002) which “developed comprehensive method for implementing Belvedere-supported collaborative inquiry in classroom”, and I look forward to reading them. I also hope to find other studies that can shed light on this issue.

Granularities of collaboration

I’ve previously discussed the idea of granularities of collaboration (1, 2). In most of the cases that Suthers’ experiments with, the granularity of collaboration is extremely low – there are two people who directly interact, and immediately express their ideas, etc. In the asynchronous cases, there might be a little bit more individual processing before posting, but it is still likely to be minimal.

However, most courses are not conducted in dyads, what happens when there area many more participants? Perhaps there are sub-groups (as happens naturally when two or more students share computers and work on an artefact, like is common with Knowledge Building)? Or there might go days between each time people contribute, and they might do a substantial amount of processing individually, either in their head (what Suthers calls “cognitive operations” from Zhang (2007)), or even externally, taking notes or drawing up a diagram, before posting something to the central artefact (“perceptual operations”).

Suthers writes that: “People construct representations together, elements of the representation becomes imbued with meanings for the participants by virtue of having been produced through the negotiation mentioned above.” This was what prompted my question above – I am thinking of for example people who were unable to participate in an Etherpad meeting, who look through the log and look at the finished artefact. They can still access the same representation, but they don’t have the same shared memory.

I wonder if there are ways of overcoming this – Etherpad for example, provides a “playback mode”, so you can see how the artefact took form (although right now, the chat is not replayed in sync, which would be useful). Or you could even imagine someone doing a screencast with the replay tool, providing a narrative voice-over of how the group arrived at a certain point.

(These reflections were also prompted by the fact that I often find diagrams, flowcharts or mind maps in academic articles or blogs very difficult to understand, and often prefer narrative explanations. Clearly, diagrams work very differently if you constructed them yourself, or if you are looking at somebody else’s finished product. )

Representational guidance literacy

Suthers’ (2008) concludes that:

System designers should treat representational design as design of resources for conversation between learners.

A designer or teacher might ask:

• What activities does a given representational notation suggest or prompt for?
• Do the actions that can be performed on a shared representation in this notation correspond to the potential ideas that we want learners to negotiate and distinctions we want them to attend to?
• Do the resulting representations express and make salient the ideas and relationships that learners should revisit and relate to new information?
• Are the needs that should be addressed by subsequent activity, such the lack of information, made obvious?
• Do the representations capture important aspects of learners’ thinking and expose conflicts between alternative solutions or perspectives?
• Stepping beyond the scope of the studies reported here, one might ask: does the notation provide the preferred vocabularies and representational perspectives that constitute both the target skill to be learned as an aspiring member of a community, and focus learning activity on ways of approaching a problem that are productive?

Does this mean that it would be useful to develop a range of different tools, or even tools that were configurable by teachers, to suit different instructional methods and subject areas? Let’s say a tool that you could easily configure to show node-links, with a chat that was deictically indexed for one task, and for another task, you used Knowledge Forum, for a third task a week later, you used an Excel spreadsheet with theories and proofs on different columns – this would be a very different approach from the “one-size-fits-all” of for example Knowledge Forum.

Gan (2010) suggests that the use of graphical discourse toools, such as Knowledge Forum, can help students gain “graphical literacy”.

Graphical literacy involves a range of visual thinking and communication skills (Jolliffe, 1991) and the ability to use graphic tools to construct, present, read, and interpret charts, maps, graphs, and other visual presentations (e.g., spreadsheets, timelines, cartoons, photographs) that supplement prose in textbooks, nonfiction trade-­‐books, and newspapers (Readence, Bean & Baldwin, 2004).

Visual thinking is defined as processing information through images or graphics instead of words (Olson, 1992) and graphical representations help support and externalize visual thinking, aiding creative problem solving and intellectual development. Visual thinking is a fundamental and unique part of our perceptual system aiding in the construction of mental models that can lead to productive thinking and learning (West, 1997) and supporting verbal and symbolic forms of expression (McLoughlin & Krakowski, 2001).

I wonder if the use of a number of different graphical discourse systems can make students meta-cognitively aware of the salience and constraints of these different systems, and if so, what the effect would be on the learning.

This could be furthered by students not only being exposed to these different systems during teacher-initiated group work, but also using various ways of externalizing and systematizing their knowledge individually (mind mapping, etc). Ideally, this would be a skill that students could bring with them throughout life.

Visual salience and cognition

I am fascinated by the distinction between “direct perception”, which requires automatic computation, but no executive control (such as the color of a node), and other perception, such as whether a node is connected to another node, which requires active visual search. It is a fascinating perspective to use for analyzing different discourse platforms, and also thinking about new ways of representing knowledge (I dream about a room with gigantic touch screens, so that I can put all my different ideas up there, drag them from one room to the next, etc – there is something very powerful about “seeing everything” at the same time).

Thanks to the generous recommendation by Zaid Ali Alsagoff, George Siemens invited me to give a talk to the Connectivism 2011 MOOC. I decided that instead of giving a talk about something I know and have thought a lot about, like open access or OER, I would try to challenge myself by proposing a topic that I was in the middle of grappling with, where I really didn’t know where I was going or what my conclusion would be. It’s quite scary to be giving a presentation on something that is so “raw” in your mind, but I figured the CCK11 crowd was the perfect crowd for it, and the preparation of the slides helped me really gather my thoughts.

I have thought a lot about how we think and work with ideas, individually, in small groups online, in face-to-face workshops, and in distributed networks. There seemed to me to be something fundamentally similar with approaches to mind-mapping and note taking, collaborative discourse tools like Knowledge Forum and Compendium, innovative workshop methodologies like Unconferences and Open Space methodology, and visualizations and sensemaking of massive amounts of networked data… Yet whenever I read about one of these dimensions, they never seem to mention the others. So I tried to map out some of the overlapping areas, and principles that seem to apply.

This is something that I would love people’s feedback on, but despite the fact that we have both an Elluminate recording, an MP3, as well as a Vimeo recording, I knew that many are too busy to sit through a 45+ minute presentation. I wanted to do something similar to what I did with my presentation on OER and multicultural students, where I exported all the slides into PNGs, added them to a blog entry, and then added text – both from the talk, and from other sources – around the pictures. It became a massive blog entry, but I got some very positive feedback on it.

Lately, I have been playing around with a wiki to keep my notes. It’s a DokuWiki installation, and I will write more about the specific setup later – I’ve tweaked it quite a bit, and am becoming quite happy with it, but there are still a few more things to do. Anyway, I decided to try to do it in the wiki instead, both because it’s much easier to handle so many pictures (just resize them with Automator, move them to the media directory, and create a file with {{idea001.png}, {{idea002.png}} etc, and then type the relevant text around those image links.

This turned out to work excellently. See my extended notes here. The other advantage is that I can add links to wikipages on people or theories that I discuss. Currently, many of these are placeholders, because I’ve just gotten started, but eventually I’d like these pages to link to their most important articles, my  notes from those articles, etc. (And already, there are some pages offering a lot more depth, like the one on tagging, which I extracted from an online course I was doing this winter, or the one on monologic and dialogic learning, where you can both see my organized notes, and the raw notes from reading the article.

I later wrote a paper for a course, where I also tried to process some of these ideas. This was my first paper written with Multi-Markdown, using Pandoc to process the Bibtex bibliography (I’ll write more about these things later too). The nice thing about this, was that I could then use Pandoc to convert the Markdown document to Mediawiki markup, which is very similar to DokuWiki. Thus I was able to publish the entire paper as a very nicely formatted wiki page. Much nicer than PDF, if you ask me!

Hopefully you’ll find the talk interesting, whichever format you consume it in, and I would love to hear ideas on how to take my thinking further, especially if you know about anyone who has been looking at all these different levels before – seems to me that most thinkers concentrate on one, whether it’s Tony Buzan and his mind mapping (individual), or Marlene Scardamalia and her knowledge building, etc.

Stian
PS: You’ll notice a tiny little icon behind links to the wiki. I’ll probably be keeping more of the notes that I would have otherwise published on my blog, on the wiki, in the future, but I’ll blog about it so that it arrives in your feed reader.

I have been intimately involved with P2PU since the first courses started in September 2009, working on supporting course organizers, designing and developing some of the technology, and thinking about the models of learning interactions that we wanted to support. However, I have still not taught a single course myself. Time to change that!

I am currently doing my PhD at OISE, University of Toronto, as part of the Encore lab. Our work is located within the field of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, a very fascinating field which I have been spending the last year getting into, and whose major conference I will attend for the first time this summer in Hong Kong. However, when getting into this field, I faced one challenge – OISE does not offer any courses directly on CSCL. Instead, you have to kind of “pick it up” by talking to fellow students, and your supervisor, doing the core readings yourself, etc.

I figured this would be a great topic for a P2PU course. Much of the foundational literature in the course is open access (both because it is a relatively young field, and because many of the core researchers support OA – the core journal in the field is entirely OA, for example, meaning that we would be able to link to key readings without worrying about people being able to access them). In addition, the idea behind P2PU is “peer-learning”, and this would be a true example: I am not organizing this course because I am an expert, but because I want someone to learn with.

I was lucky enough to find Monica Resendes, a PhD student with the IKIT lab, also at OISE/University of Toronto. It’s been very interesting discussing our different ideas about how we should approach this, and I really appreciate not doing this by myself.

To get a feeling for the field, we began by surveying the key academics (as identified by being on the board of ijCSCL, the annual conference committee, etc) and looking at the people who had posted their syllabi online. We found about fifteen faculty who had done this (and often they had course syllabi going ten years back, many times with open wikis so we could see their students’ work as well). This gave us a sense of how core faculty see “the field”, and which topics we should cover. There was much more than could be covered in an eight-week course, so we decided to create a separate “analysis and assessment” course, which will hopefully run sometime in the fall.

We began writing up a course outline on Google Docs, with tentative readings, and a structure for the course. We are doing some interesting things with badges (see also our current badge platform, and the badge whitepaper), as well as with core and network participants, inspired by the Wiley wikis on one hand, and the Massive Open Online Courses (more) on the other.

I hope you will join us – either as a core participant (sign up is open for another week), or as a part of our network (go to the course website, and click Follow). We would love for the discussions in the course to take on a life outside of the course – maybe someone will write a blog entry, record a YouTube video, or edit a wiki page that gets retweeted, reblogged and discussed about far outside the confines of the course. The topics should certainly be interesting to a wide variety of folks.

Here is the introductory video (we’ll aim to do one of these a week, usually much shorter though):

Hope to see you, and looking forward to all the conversations!

Stian

This term, I took a Knowledge Media and Design Institute class on values and design. Part of the class was a group assignment that had us choose a public venue, and do unobtrusive participant observation (this could be a public square, a museum or another place where people congregate). Based on what we found through our ethnographic ministudy, and the readings and ideas from the class, we would come up with a design intervention to further a certain value. My group chose the value of “collaboration”, and used Peer2Peer University as the “venue”.

We were able to do the study in P2PU, because all interactions are archived publicly – the ethics approval for the class would not have allowed us to do research on a class that was protected by password. For me, it was fun having a group of people with a lot of ideas around design and knowledge media, but who did not know much about P2PU. Of course, this was a small project in one class, so it cannot be seen as a full-scale research project, more to get your feet wet with ethnography and design, but it was still a lot of fun, and hopefully could inspire further work.

The group visited several current and archived P2PU courses (here’s an example “notification” that I posted in one of the courses to let them know that we were having a peek). We did not do any rigorous analysis of the data gathered, but from the notes that the group members took, their feeling was that course organizers were trying very hard to promote collaboration and peer-learning, but that participants did not take enough cognitive responsibility, which led to conversations that were very course organizer-centric.

We discussed many possible reasons for this, and brainstormed ways of improving this state of affairs. We came up with a number of ideas, like designing some kind of an “orientation” for new participants, to let them understand better the P2PU principles. In the end though, we wanted to create a design intervention. Based on the readings from class, we thought that perhaps the linear design of the discussion forums, which lead to good ideas being “buried”, could be a factor hindering deeper engagement from the students.

To demonstrate our idea, we were asked to create a “future scenario” video. Creating a video always takes much longer than you think, but it was a fun assignment, and we were lucky to have a very photogenic “protagonist”.
We also wrote a small paper describing some of the literature we consulted, and our thinking around the video.

I am very interested in the theory around visual representations of discourse in online learning. I will be giving a talk about this tomorrow (Wednesday, April 5th, 2011) at the CCK11 course. It will also be an important component of the P2PU course on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning which I will co-organize on P2PU starting later this month.

Thanks to Arlo, Rebecca and Eleonore for a fun collaborative project.

Stian

Existing approaches to course-based OER

There are generally two approaches to course-based “big OER” (institutional OER projects, as opposed to resources released by individual professors or others). The first is the MIT OpenCourseWare approach (which has been replicated by universities across the US, and the world). Given that professors are already developing a set of materials to be used in their face-to-face teaching, let’s grab these and upload to the web. The result is a curriculum, maybe some PowerPoints, sometimes lecture recordings, some quiz sheets, etc. From the perspective of self-learners, this is rarely enough material. Only a fraction of all OCW courses provide lecture recordings, and even if they do, most of the resources listed in the syllabus will be unavailable (books that cost $100s of dollars, articles that are only available through university libraries).

The other approach is more common for distance universities which tend to develop much more of the material by themselves, using a more industrial approach to curriculum development (with teams of subject experts working with instructional designers, web and media specialists, etc). Because they have developed more of the material in-house, and for online presentation, they are able to share more coherent and accessible packages – OpenUniversity UK is a great example of this. MIT OCW Scholar is an attempt at making a few selected OCW courses into more complete packages, with additional resources necessary for students to learn. Most of this is still generated by MIT, but they also link to some outside resources.

Of course, there are also plenty of OER resources which do not take the shape of “college-level 12-week courses”, from projects like Connexions, an online authoring platform for educational modules, to Free High School Science Textbooks in South Africa, and even resources that we often don’t think of as OERs, such as Wikipedia, and Directory of Open Access Journals. However, for an independent self-learner, it can be very difficult to put together a sequence of learning by picking and choosing from these sites, especially in a subject that is not familiar.

The one thing common to most of the approaches listed above, is that they focus on producing and sharing their own materials. In the case of many institutions, it’s a point of pride that “MIT videos”, “Yale videos”, etc. are being watched by people around the world. They are branded products, sharing the “excellence of the institution” with the wider world. The predictable result is that we might have ten or twenty “Economics 101″ courses, all skeletal and incomplete, all containing the material from only one institution. It might be much more beneficial to the world if a Yale professor spent his time improving, and adding to a course created by an MIT professor, instead of just putting out his own material – but that might not bring as much attention and publicity.

This dilemma was one of the reasons why we started Peer2Peer University. Our model is basically based on three pillars. First, course organizers create course outlines that only link to resources that are freely (gratis) available on the web. These resources can be from OpenCourseWare collections, from open access journals, from Wikipedia articles, YouTube videos, newspaper articles, etc. These course outlines are published on P2PU.org, and made available under an open license – anyone can access them, and begin learning by themselves, whether or not a course is running right then, or not. The second pillar is to create a community of learners around this course, which goes through the resources together, discuss the ideas, and support each others’ learning. The final pillar is recognition of learning and accreditation, which we are still experimenting with in several ways.

I wrote my MA thesis about a large project for publishing open courses in China, which resulted in more than 12,000 courses being published by more than 700 universities. When I talked to groups of Chinese students and professors in the open education field, they often complained that the quality of these courses was not high enough, and that students would not be interested in visiting them. I encouraged them to think of these courses as resource collections, and curate curricula that were excellent – find a great video from this course, a great reading from that course, put it all together. I also suggested making this easier, when I was invited to give a talk to the Top Level Courses Resource Portal team, at the Higher Education Press.

Saylor Foundation Free Education Initiative

Today I came across the Saylor Foundation Free Education Initiative, and was extremely impressed. The Saylor Foundation was started by Michael J. Saylor, co-founder of a company called MicroStrategy (apparently an interesting guy), and had assets of around $14 million in 2009. The mission of the foundation is to provide access to a free college-level education for all (they say that high school and post-graduate courses might be coming in the future). Their strategy for achieving this is:

By developing, soliciting, and disseminating free online academic materials in a structured and intuitive format, we will be an alternative and a complement to mainstream education providers, especially for students who cannot take advantage of educational opportunities because they cannot afford them.

They have identified the ten majors with the highest enrolments in the US:

• Biology
• Business Administration
• Chemistry
• Computer Science
• Economics
• English
• History
• Mathematics
• Mechanical Engineering
• Political Science
• Psychology

And for each, they’ve endeavoured to create a full compliment of courses. For example, the Economics major lists fourteen courses, seven in the core program, and seven electives. All but three of these are complete.

Core Program

• ECON101: Principles of Microeconomics (100%)
• ECON102: Principles of Macroeconomics (100%)
• ECON103/MA101: Single-Variable Calculus I (100%)
• ECON104/MA121: Introduction to Statistics (0%)
• ECON201: Intermediate Microeconomics (0%)
• ECON202: Intermediate Macroeconomics (0%)
• ECON203: Econometrics (100%)

Elective Courses

• ECON301: History of Economic Ideas(100%)
• ECON302: Money and Banking / Financial Economics(100%)
• ECON303: Labor Economics(100%)
• ECON304: Economic Development(100%)
• ECON305: Public Finance(100%)
• ECON306: Industrial Organization(100%)
• ECON307: International Trade(100%)

What’s unique about these courses is that they are curations of material freely available on the web, put together in a very well thought-out structure. For example, the course History of Economic Ideas consists of five units. Each unit has a brief introduction, learning objectives, and a list of carefully selected resources. Here is the first unit:

Unit 1: Ancient Economic Thought

• 1.1 Political, Economic, and Social Thought in the Near East and Greece
• 1.1.1 Ancient Egypt to Mesopotamia
• Lecture: iTunesU: University of Wisconsin-Madison: Professor Charles Anderson’s “Political, Economic, and Social Thought: Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Ancient Israel”
• 1.1.2 Greece
• 1.1.2.1 Xenophon
• Reading: Project Gutenberg’s version of Xenophon’s The Economist
• 1.1.2.2 Aristotle
• Reading: Project Gutenberg’s version of Aristotle’s A Treatise on Government
• 1.2 China
• Reading: Wikipedia’s version of Fan Li’s “Twelve Golden Rules and Safeguards”
• 1.3 India
• Reading: Fordham University’s version of selections from Chanakya’s Arthashastra

As you can see, the foundation does not aim to produce all the material themselves, rather they link to resources from OpenCourseWare, Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia, and other sources (some of the math courses link to Khan Academy videos).

I have to include another module from this course, the last one, about visionary thinkers and economic utopias:

• 5.1 Fictional Utopias
• 5.1.1 Sir Thomas More
  • Reading: Project Gutenberg’s version of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and University of Wisconsin: J.P.Sommerville’s “Thomas More, Christian Humanism, Catholicism, and Utopia”
• 5.1.2 Edward Bellamy
  • Reading: Project Gutenberg’s version of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwards, 2000-1887 and Bolling Green State University: Wayne Sneath’s “Edward Bellamy”
• 5.1.3 Modern Discourse
  • Lecture: iTunesU: Walker Art Center: Stephen Duncombe’s “Utopia is no Place: the Art and Politics of Impossible Futures”
• 5.2 Economic Experiments
• 5.2.1 The Shakers
  • Reading: The University of Virginia: Kathleen Hogan’s “The Shakers”
• 5.2.2 The Qarmatians
  • Reading: Bahrain Government’s “al-Qaramita”
• 5.2.3 The Anarcho-Syndicalists
  • Reading: Anarchosyndicalism.net’s “Anarcho-Syndicalist FAQ”
• 5.2.4 Marxists
  • Reading: Marxists.org’s Rosa Luxemburg’s The Russian Revolution, Chapter Six
• 5.3 Buddhist Economics
  • Reading: The Centre for Bhutan Studies’ “Gross National Happiness”

Really exciting stuff – I would have loved to take this course as part of my undergrad!

These course outlines were designed by hired professors – here is an ad in The Chronicle of Higher Education for “College-Level Course Designers for Free Education Initiative”. They are licensed under Creative Commons BY license, and almost all the material is available as very nice HTML pages (except, for some reason, for the reading comprehension questions, and model answers).

There’s also school.saylor.org, a Moodle install where you can take the final exam in each course as a Moodle quiz. I took the final exam in the course mentioned above, about 50 multiple choice questions. I got 72% – a C-, but I didn’t exactly study for it. Not sure what the intention with this site is – it isn’t advertised anywhere, but is perhaps the first step in a process of offering more social features, or a pathway to accreditation.

Here’s Saylor’s Alana Harrington presenting their project as part of the OER University discussions, and she mentions that one of their outstanding problems is the accreditation.

These course resources would work great for P2PU classes – bringing together people to go through the material together (I can imagine some great discussions between people who have been reading about Buddhist economics, anarcho-syndicalists and the Shakers!)

Stian

• @gsiemens In which building of the Banff Centre is #lak11 preconference tomorrow?
• @courosa I fell off the lak course too early, from what I gathered though it’s quite a grab bag. The conference will be interesting #LAK11
• Finally at #Lak11, great place. Already buzzing with conversations and excitement. This will be fun!
• Should be of interest to #lak11 participants RT @eknight A Working Badge Paper (for your feedback and collaboration): http://bit.ly/dG4Q9k
• @gsiemens recommends newcomers in #elearning field to “go data” – that’s where the careers will be. All the big companies hiring. #lak11
• #lak11 “doing data analysis “to” the learner, vs. “for” the learner”
• #lak11 One of my concerns is that a lot of the “open learner models”, etc, is based around guided discovery, tutoring. How about 1/2
• #lak11 more open-ended inquiry based, constructivist learning? Training vs education vs discovery vs creation?
• #lak11 “As soon as you start measuring something, you change people’s behaviour” – yes! One of my big concerns.
• First mention of latent semantic analysis at #lak11. Great – how does it tie in with semantic web and social web?
• @dgasevich Could you share a copy of the ’06 “Learning Object Context on the Semantic Web”? UToronto doesn’t have access to fulltext. #lak11
• RT @sbskmi: Learners won’t care about algorithms — until an algorithm thinks you will fail your course and blocks your course admission… #LAK11
• .@dgasevich shows software tools loco-analyst http://bit.ly/fF59m6 and intelleo http://bit.ly/e8dRXb – fascinating #lak11
• Great conversations around coffee break@ #lak11. Corporate training, #CSCW, business analytics, research collab, #OA, … All connected!
• For fun, I’ll try to take notes in #etherpad, feel free to jump in and add stuff: http://bit.ly/hxleEj #lak11
• Wish presenters at #lak11 could use short urls on their slides, make it easier to type in on our side, before you change slides.
• The #lak11 visualization shows how little time I spent in the course, and how quickly I fell off. ariadne.cs.kuleuven.be/monitorwidget-lak11
• “altruistic learning (MOOCs etc) vs competitive learning (for grades, curved, zero-sum game)” – see differences in collab. behaviour? #lak11
• #lak11 “Participation is nice, but it doesn’t really tell you what learning is happening – content analysis as well”
• #lak11 DataTel already hosts big datasets of learning interaction – wants more. Very interesting to #P2PU.
• #lak11 Is there a common format to describe learning interactions across different platforms, to make it available to lot’s of vis tools?
• #lak11 So many fun new tools to play with / explore. Hope these will be gathered somewhere (rather than having to mine all the PPTs)
• #lak11 Would be great to have a “speed-geeking” session where people can showcase their tools etc more intimately.
• #lak11 Oh oh, @psychemedia is up. I have a feeling my fingers are going to hurt from all the notes I need to take…
• Great intro – “how can non-programmers do this kind of stuff, extract and analyze data” #lak11
• #lak11 @psychemedia : “Data is a dish best served raw” – great slogan for the #od #opendata movement
• #lak11 “A way of having a conversation with data in a visual form” – something we are very good at (doing through vision vs through math)”
• A few people are starting to help me keep notes from #lak11 on #p2pu’s #etherpad. Very fun, and useful. http://bit.ly/hxleEj
• RT @malpaso: HIrst neglected to mention “transformation” (one structure to another) as a step. Not a trivial step for non-programmers. #lak11
• @aribadernatal Maybe. But would be useful with a list of data that these tools need, so we can know what to export. #lak11
• #lak11 Note to self: read up on and play with ManyEyes.
• How do you link your own data, if there is no unique identifier? If I want to writ about OU academics, how do I make it easy to link? #lak11
• #lak11 Try to use consistent usernames. Not perfect (might not be available, someone could set up acct w/your username on new soc service)
• #lak11 Again, Twitter following isn’t necessarily meaningful. I follow more than 800 ppl, but I don’t read all of their tweets every day!
• #lak11 Retweets might be a better metric, but also not perfect. Would be neat if there were “twitter trends” showing me whose tweets I read
• #lak11 But Twitter doesn’t know, because Nambu pulls down all the tweets and filter them for me.
• #lak11 It’s funny how incredibly much easier it is to map Twitter followers, then to map co-citations in academic papers!
• @gconole We need unique academic IDs, and unique paper IDs, and citations/papers need to use them. There are initiatives but … #lak11
• RT @sbskmi: @psychemedia is the mashup DJ spinning his discs here at #lak11 But is current SNA adequately tuned for LEARNING?
• RT @malpaso: Endless data. Endless patterns. Endless visualizations. What’s relevant for decision and action? #lak11
• @gsiemens Yes, there are others too. But haven’t seen a single journal including this info yet. #lak11
• @sbskmi Philosophizing abt diff. ways of live collab. notes – wonder how would be different in Compendium etc. http://bit.ly/hxleEj #lak11
• RT @niklas_karlsson: Data from the course #Lak11 can easily be misinterpreted when personal interpretations are made. http://bit.ly/fnAiLe #lak11
• #lak11 Wonderful lunch buffet, and great conversations about the amazing surveillance potential of data analytics. We know your appliances!
• #lak11 One of the frustrating things to me is the disconnect between schools of education and teach&learn in higher education.
• #lak11 No link between Office of Teaching Advancement and School of Education at University of Toronto.
• When where? :) RT @gsiemens Who’s up for dinner/beverages later tonight? #lak11 @mweller is organizing :)
• One of the core questions of #P2PU!! RT @rmitchell Who Does? ;) RT @aribadernatal: “Students don’t *do* optional.” #LAK11
• Brilliant. RT @dougclow @houshuang @rmitchell @aribadernatal Students don’t do optional, but many learners do! d:-) #lak11
• Unfortunately #p2pu etherpad seems to be unstable, moving notes to #piratepad: http://bit.ly/hH3EHN #lak11
• RT @technostats: @sbskmi – socio-cultural discourse analysis as a potential measure of knowledge acquisition. Very interesting concept. #LAK11
• Great talk by @sbskmi at #lak11. Very excited by new platforms for “reflective deliberation” Use at #p2pu? Potential4analysis&deep learning
• I heard rumours in the corridor about hot springs tonight – I’m interested :) #lak11
• @gsiemens http://bit.ly/f65vfu #lak11 Hot springs location
• #lak11 I find some of todays talks very interesting, others not at all. Wonder if others feel the same. Is learning analytics one thing
• #lak11 or several things? Are there clear overlaps/synergies? Or is this a collection of two different groups of people?
• #lak11 @gsiemens: Do we need different analytics for different disciplines? Is there no universal “learning science”?
• #lak11 gsiemens: Learners will game metrics. Me: only if the metrics are high stakes (ie. does it also apply at P2PU?)
• #lak11 gsiemens: Interesting disciplinary differences between socsci/humanities and CS in conference steering committe.
• Great talk RT @sbskmi Theory-based Learning Analytics: #LAK11 talk slides at http://bit.ly/i8y4Ag
• RT @psychemedia: @gsiemens Presentation graphics may well be different to visualisations used in more analytic phase…? #lak11
• RT @CosmoCat: Don´t miss @dougclow ´s “The Learning Analytics Cycle” http://t.co/6BCewhf – and notes from @houshuang http://bit.ly/fTTLW6 #lak11
• Starting collaborative note taking today here: http://bit.ly/g2b2wC, yesterday’s notes are here: http://bit.ly/hH3EHN #lak11
• #lak11 @gsiemens: “@psychemedia is the McGyver of data” – absolutely
• RT @lgully: Hirst: irony of course descriptions written for grads not students seeking info #LAK11. Need discoverable info.
• RT @lgully: RT @CrudBasher: #lak11 Totally agree -> Hirst – learning should be lifelong. Universities should keep a learning relationship with grads
• #lak11 “Predictors vs causes:predictors of learning outcomes may be useful for “diagnostic” purposes, but need not be causally related”
• RT @opencontent: @JonElmSherrill We almost always have ~more~ data online, it’s just significantly impoverished… Pick your poison? #lak11
• #lak11 Finally a presenter using short urls, thank you @aribadernatal
• #lak11 Ah, it was http://bit.ly/egV5Rt Mahout – thanks Andrew.
• #lak11 Reputation as a proxy for learning in informal learning contexts – Doug Clow. Very interesting to #p2pu!
• RT @Anna_De_Liddo: @dougclow I LOVE iSpot! We would need an iSpot for learning! what about laSpot: spot new learning analytics tools/theories! #lak11
• What does @dougclow have against power-laws anyway? :) #lak11
• Very dense talk by Dan Suthers on multi-level analysis. Just read his paper last night – lot’s I don’t understand, but fascinating #lak11
• #lak11 Interesting design of sessions here – very little time to ask questions or involve presenters in discussions around their prezos.
• For new arrivals, collaborative notes on #lak11 sessions being taken here: http://bit.ly/g2b2wC Feel free to join.
• RT @psychemedia: SNAPP bookmarklet code http://bit.ly/hSmBy3 #lak11
• .@cteplovs @dreff Wish you both could have been here! But Ravi Vatrapu is doing a great job. #lak11
• RT @cab938: Bears as learners, what a nice example for a conference in banff #lak11
• Varatrapu: “Many ICT managers say that their IT systems are UNESCO heritage – cannot be touched”. Now cloud-based, avoid problem #lak11
• CommonLibrary on Sourceforge (Phil Ice mentioned this): http://bit.ly/gc0IfA #lak11
• That wraps up some pretty intense note-taking. Check out http://bit.ly/g2b2wC, feel free to add info. Will post on blog tonight. #lak11
• RT @psychemedia: Really nice idea – give students a VM instance within which to do course related activities… and track them while they’re at it ;-0 #lak11
• @dougclow Not competition, complementarity :)Was just saying to Andrew that it would be neat to combine them to get sth more complete #lak11
• Internet seems a bit more stable – I’m trying collab notes on Etherpad: http://bit.ly/dZtfdM #lak11
• Great conversation over lunch with @sbskmi, Dan Suthers, Ravi Vatrapu and @anna_de_liddo, lot’s of new ideas. #lak11
• Hoping someone will announce some collective activities tonight (dinner, drinks, springs, night skiing, improv? :)) #lak11
• #lak11 Sorry about note taking, feeling a bit overwhelmed by great ideas and things to explore. Luckily this is all being captured.
• @dougclow Or maybe we should collaboratively create an interpretive snow sculpture that embodies the key lesson from the conference? #lak11
• #lak11 Interesting UoC has drop-out rate of 40%. Wonder if #p2pu can aim to beat that…
• @xaoch It’s a really nice hike, but I think it gets dark around 6:15, and there is no lighting there. #lak11
• @sbskmi This is key even for #p2pu, which uses multiple external platforms for courses. #LAK11
• @xaoch Easier if people could use same e-mails. Also need to get all the info in, not all services provide RSS etc. #lak11
• .@gsiemens Summing up #lak11 with “intimate encounter with tree” metaphor. Field is indeed moving fast, and lot’s of opportunities 4 collab
• We’re thinking of going to springs at 6 (meet in lobby), and then for dinner/drinks if people want. #lak11
• Just back in Toronto after great #lak11 conference. Now lot’s of follow-up and thinking about conference themes. Stay in touch all!
• RT @markmelia: Glass – a key component to ubiquitous learning in the future – maybe – http://youtu.be/6Cf7IL_eZ38 – thanks to tony bates for sharing #lak11
• Notes from second day of #lak11 posted: http://bit.ly/gkfwxV. Hope to write more reflective blog posts soonish. #oer