I enjoyed Berni and Leon’s webquest which had great links re digital literacy.  It was a big help because we are currently reviewing our Information Literacy framework which comprises research and IT skills.  I’ve been tasked with writing a paper on Digital Literacy for discussion, re the changes that are required to the existing Information Literacy programme.  From work that we’ve done so far we find that most undergraduate students can use a browser, use Word to write an essay and use social networking sites.  Most students don’t have an understanding of audio and video, advanced word skills, excel, or knowledge of other Web 2.0 applications such as blogging tools, wikis, RSS feeds or News Aggregators. 

I think the approach will be to talk to staff to see how these tools can be integrated into their programmes and support the staff in their use.  

It was interesting to read the literature which investigated the causes of student attrition and described the link between community and student retention.  It’s also interesting that it’s still necessary to challenge academic staff’s views that students fail because they are not up to the task and there is nothing the institution can do about it. 

 I like the quote from (Beatty-Guenter, 1992, quoted in Simpson, 2003)  that the “The first transformation . . . .is that the college must care about attrition”.   This brings home the need to revamp the induction processes for our fully online course, SUDS Online.

 The experience of participating on a student led seminar, brought home how important it is for the lecturer to be a subject expert, but also an expert facilitator.  From the feedback we received we appeared to be neither!  Students are definitely looking for feedback on all their ideas and information to take the discussion further.  Responding as a team seemed to confuse everyone, it’s obviously important to ensure the teaching team does not contradict each other, but probably best if they respond to different aspects of the discussion in their own voice.  I think the importance of remaining neutral and welcoming all contributions cannot be overemphasised.  I thought the feedback received on the task was helpful and the peer feedback on our performance very useful.  I think that peer review has to be handled quite carefully as it could be detrimental to the learning community’s trust and respect for each other.  None of our team had expected to be able to see the feedback from other students so I’m not sure how clear this was in the assignment instructions. 

 With respect to what’s next.  I’m looking forward to Web 3.0 the semantic web, can’t wait frankly.  Not really sure whether immersive technologies are Web 3.0 or Web 4.0 at the moment, but time will tell.  I think the potential for immersive technologies in education are fantastic, but not sure how accessible they will be to the average user.  At the moment 2^nd life falls into the category of “takes too much time to learn”, but I’m sure things will improve.

On the subject of blogging, I’ve tried Blogger, WetPaint (which I realise is a wiki) and Eduspace and am now using WordPress.  I think I like it best and will stick with it until the end of the course and try out a few of the other buttons and bobs while I work on my digital literacy!  Hope I haven’t left too much dotsam and netsom out there, leaving a digital trail straight to my bank account.  I have been experimenting with video and YouTube but I won’t inflict my holiday videos on you here. 

Glister, P., A primer on Digital Literacy Adapted from the book Digital Literacy.  [Available online] http://horizon.unc.edu/projects/resources/digital_literacy.asp.  [Accessed 17/4/09].

Hokstad, L. M., Dons, C.F. Digital literacy – Towards a re description of literacy for the digital learning environments, Conference ICL2007, September 26-28, 2007 Villach, Austria.

Jones-Kavalier, B. R., Flannigan, S. L., Connecting the Digital Dots: Literacy of the 21^st Century. 

Palloff, R. M., Pratt, K. 2003. The Virtual Student: A profile and guide to working with online learners. SanFrancisco: Jossey-Bass.

 Simpson, O. 2003. Student retention in Online, Open and Distance Lerning.  Oxon: Routledge Limited.

 How Distance programs will affect students, courses, faculty and institutional futures. Turoff, M., Discenza R., and Howard, C.

The main points of Turroff, Discenza nd Howerd’s article  are taht social pressure makes students work harder in team work. No-one can hide.  Other students can see what outstanding students can learn which has the effect of lower performing students improving. 

In the future universities will need to accept skill knowledge from work experience and unaccredited courses, or any accredited institution, otherwise they will become uncompetitive.

Universities must co-operate to provide joint programmes.  Lecturers can be based anywhere in the world. 

Communicaiton Tools should allow questions and answers, be able to control who views answers forcing students to propose their own response without being influenced by other students.  Students should be able to be anonymous to allow discussion of real data.  Voting is useful for promoting discussion and tracking changing views

Calendars, Gradebook facilities and  Announcements all help to stop threaded discussions going off topic. LMSs should allow educationalists to create a repository of learning objects.  Students should be able to go through the learning objects at their own pace. 

Online courses will soon be compared via comparison web-sites.  Teaching quality will become more important and remuneration will need to be aligned to the importance of quality teaching.  The consumer will become much more discerning.

As more and more universities put their programmes online, geographic borders will be broken down and those universities who have not invested in this medium will lose market share.  Universities need to invest in robust learning management systems with sophisticated communication capabilities.  (Turoff, Murray, Discenza Richard, Howard,Caroline) recommend that universities do not get tied into one LMS provider, but I think some sort of stability is needed to provide a coherent experience for students and minimise the staff training required.  There are also questions regarding restoring information from previous years if the platform was to change regularly, although this can be a problem anyway because of system upgrades within the one system.

I’ve come to the realisation that a synchronous discussion tool such as Elluminate or Wimba is necessary for groupwork to be carried out and it was interesting to read what was said regarding lists, Delphi systems, polling users, shielding content and peer assessment.  To enhance our SUDS online programme we will be using collaborative working on authentic tasks.  We will definitely need this type of software, so now I’ll have a clearer idea of what to look for when comparing one product with another.  We have tried Dim Dim but it seems to be very resource hungry and perhaps doesn’t have the level of sophistication that is required. 

Regarding eU, accreditation of prior learning is an accepted practise these days.  We are currently involved in a collaboration programme with an English, Norwegian and Dutch university on one of our environmental programmes.  The future is now, so we need to ensure our online course product follows best practise so that we don’t become a victim of an online comparison website.  Our course tutors are very charismatic, but it is a culture shock to promote their social presence online and be able to have such close contact with students and allow students to work together online.

(Garrison, D. R. and Anderson, T., 2003) in e-learning in the 21^st century  emphasise that the net changes everything.  Educationalists cannot ignore the technology that is being used to change business and personal practise.  E-learning is the future as it empowers the life-long learner and facilitates the continuous learning required by all segments of society who are forced by circumstances or through choice decide to change careers.  Information has such a short shelf-life today, that constant learning is necessary. 

Flight simulators are an example of how technology can provide learning experiences.  The growth of computer games can be put to use in creating immersive environments.  While personally, I am not a fan of 2^nd life, I think it is only because the interface is not intuitive enough.  It will improve and become easier to construct meaningful learning environments which will benefit learners.

The challenge for e-learning in the  21^st century , according to (Garrison, D. R. and Anderson, T., 2003) is to take advantage of it’s interactive and reflective affordances to take learning beyond lecture halls and fact assimilation to stimulating higher order learning.

It is very easy for lecturers just to mimic what they do in the classroom online, especially with the quick authoring tools available.  I think the difference between an interactive networked learning experience and the straight lecture was brought home to me when I tuned into a webinar on webinars given by ALT on Friday.  The first presenter  posed questions, used the poll tool,  responded to answers and engaged the audience.  The second just talked to his slides.  After 5 minutes, of the second presenter, I realised, I’d totally lost the thread, and left the webinar.  (I did have somthing I had to get to, but if he’d been more interesting, I’d have made myself late).  How many times does that happen in a lecture where even if the students don’t physically leave, after 5 minutes they’ve mentally wandered off.  Unless the presenter interacts with the audience in face to face teaching the value of the experience is limited, similarly with e-learning, educationalists need to use the full functionality of the interface to engage their students and allow them to communicate together.

Looking at ways to improve the retention rates for the SUDS online course.  The entire course needs to be re-designed , but we should look at the induction side of the programme.

Questions need to be asked are:  

How do students find the course?

Important to get student’s most used e-mail account.

Do you have promotional material for the course?

Can the current CD be changed to be a taster for the course material?

Can time be spent on a course taster?

What are the procedures for registering?

What type of student do you attract?

Do you assess their technical skills?

Welcome pack should contain

• List spec of IT equipment needed
• How to Access the Course
• How to access help with IT
• Student E-Mail account with guidelines for use, eg most information will be contained within the course.

Induction materials in Course should contain

• Audio introduction to course from Course Leader
• Photographs of all involved in the module, Teaching  Assistants,Administrator, description of their role.
• Module Information
• Details of Assignments and Marking Schemes
• How to access the Portal
• How to access Library Material
• How to access Student Support Material which has been amended to include reference to Online Learners
• Tips on being a good online learner (adapt resources from  Palloff, R. M., Pratt, K., 2003., The Virtual Student: A Profile and Guide to Working with Online Learners,  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass
• Netiquette Guidelines

Should include sample activities e.g.:

• Post a message about themselves, what they do and submit photographs of themselves
• Submit an assessment (Ask them to create an article from a relevant online journal document  in the library type a small summary of why  they thought it was interesting and provide the link , similarly, provide a link to something of interest on the Portal. 
• Open all the File types in use on the course
• Ask them to print module information
• Quiz to find out if they have read everything they should have before they start. (Scavenger Hunt)

If students do not complete most of the activities and/or the Scavenger Hunt give them a call to see if everything is ok.   If this is too expensive, send an e-mail to their home account.  Have a script.  See guidelines, (Simpson 2003, p 67-69).  Amend questions as necessary.

Notes:

I need to contact student services to see how their materials can be amended to be relevant to fully on-line /distance learners.  Ask them for help with Tips for Online Learners.

Devise Retention Script with SUDS team.

Simpson, O., 2003, Student Retention in Online, Open and Distance Learning, Oxford: Routledge

The article on Facilitating On-Line Discussions by Ko and Rossen (2004)  was very useful prior to the student seminar.   They indicate that there are clear strategies that should be followed depending on the size of the class.  The larger the class the more a lecturer should use group activities.  It’s important to facilitate discussion so that the same core of active students are not the only participants.  This will lead to them becoming bored and angry about carrying the rest of the class.  The shy and reluctant must be brought into the discussion some of the time.

Practical advice given when facilitating online discussions is for the tutor to provide something extra to the discussion that the students will not get from set readings.  Questions must be focussed, but not closed.   The Tutor must post frequently, to model good practise and respond to a theme mentioning a group of student responses.  Comments can reflect good student responses and point out where students may have difficulties .  Try to encourage student interaction by asking  them to respond to a post by a student.   Be mindful of cultural differences, some may not want to divulge their personal experience, better to ask students to give suggestions from their reading or personal experiences.

We tried to be mindful of this advice when responding to our online seminar. 

Synchronous chats can be difficult to schedule for working students, need extra time for social chatter, hellos and goodbyes.  Good for social bonding and group cohesion, providing immediate feedback.  Good for brainstorming and finalising details, clarifying misunderstandings.   Limi t to 4 or 5 students.   Slow down chat by chunking messages.  I must admit the BOE course came alive for me once we started talking to people in real time, hearing voices  and being able to have a normal conversation.

Different models of course management can be used.  Shared responsibility, Divison of labour or primary, secondary model.  Needs to be organised beforehand and clearly communicated to students.   It’s good to have this understanding of management models and an idea of how many students a lecturer can reasonably look after when designing a course. 

The experience of running a seminar with live students was really interesting.  Although the temptation to put questions up and see what everyone comes up with is very strong, it wouldn’t work.  The seminar tutor needs to be an expert in the area to be able to comment on student’s posts in a constructive and interesting way.  Students are always looking for guidance in the form of feedback  and extra resources from their lecturers.  It felt like quite a responsibilty.   Mark, Lori and I discussed how we would respond to students offline in our discussion board and in Elluminate discussions.   There was some discussion about whether some students were trying to run the seminar themselves and should be asked to tone it down, but the agreed approach was that we should be glad that students were engaging with the seminar and be welcoming and comment on their posts.   It was good to look back at the behaviour modelled by Christina and  Keith to see how to respond to students, bringing threads of posts together.   Mark also brought in some useful articles to direct students to further study on the topic.

Ko, Susan & Rossen, Steve, (2004) “Encouraging participation and managing your workload”, Ko, Susan

& Rossen, Steve, Teaching online : a practical guide, 200-222, Clarion Books

When I came back Mark and Lori had set up the seminar with reading links and Mark had drafted his podcast. Lori had drafted the initial questions. I helped edit the look of the discussion to overcome the html problems.

We then all waited in anticipation to see what the response would be. I think our student peers were very generous with their time and thoughts and there were some really interesting discussions. The themes were:

• There should be a distinction between social and academic spaces but that the method of communicating via Social Networking sites is just too good to ignore for Universities.
• SN or something like it is probably here to stay and once people have got over the novelty they will probably use them as they need. You can write a novel, a letter or a recipe with word processor, so presumably you can use Social Networking sites in different ways.
• There was concern expressed about safety on-line and the need to educate parents as well as children re the possible dangers.
• A lot of the literature shows the link between social interaction and academic achievement, but I can’t help wondering whether it’s just a reflection of the time and effort spent by students. To participate online, the student has to have kept up with the reading before they can actually post to discussion forums, although I understand that by engaging in group projects a student is more likely to keep up and be prepared as they don’t want to let others in the group down.
• Is using Web 2.0 technologies part of teaching digital literacy to those who are not digital natives. The student body is very disparate today, not everyone is aware of these technologies.
• Could we be adding another layer of exclusion, where likeminded cliques form sharing knowledge, but isolating some. We need to avoid this happening in a educational setting where we want to provide a level playing field.
• There was also reflection on whether Social Networking sites are harmful, re-wiring childrens’ brains to have short attention spans. I’m not so sure after watching my 19 year old niece revise for her 2nd year University exams at the breakfast bar of the open plan kitchen while the rest of the extended family are having multiple discussions in the living room, while others are watching a film on television and her sister sat and revised for her GSCEs (also on a laptop) and her brother played video games. She didn’t seem to have any problem concentrating in the middle of a maelstrom. I couldn’t believe it.

As we moved into the 2nd part of the discussion on how to implement Elgg questions were asked re the purpose of the implementation and whether the student body had been consulted. Does it offer anything that can’t be found elsewhere? Should we try to make people work in groups, some people may find it tedious and restricting?

I think Mark’s Bedfordshire University Elgg project was definitely along the lines “Build it and they Will Come”, but I think the seminar has given him useful feedback along the lines of it will probably need more support than he originally thought. At Abertay any initiative like this needs a business case. I think the feedback from the seminar has helped him investigate some of the issues he would have explored if a business case had been required. I think he was surprised by the sceptical tone of some of the responses. I think the responses were a useful reminder of the difference between theory and practise. Knowing the theory of the benefits of community doesn’t mean providing a technical tool that will enable the formation of communities will flourish without considerable effort in gaining the buy-in from stakeholders.

Reading Rovi’s article on Sense of Community, perceived cognitive learning and persistence in asynchronous learning networks. Reinforced the ideas found in reading for Unit 3 and personal experience that a sense of community within a course both aids retention and improves commitment to learning. (Tinto 1993) defines community as a mutual dependence, interactivity and trust. A sense of community means that students are more committed to learning goals as they do not want to be unprepared when engaging with their peers on group work.

Low retention has been a problem with online courses, retention in some cases being between 10% – 20% lower than face to face courses (Carr 2000). Another problem has been the low academic achievement of online students. Rovi’s article draws the link between both these problems and a lack of community in online courses.

There are gender differences, men are more likely to want to go it alone and dictate during group activities, women prefer a co-operative approach. However, women report learning more so this supports the importance of community to learner satisfaction and achievement.

Rovi reports that Harasim, Hiltz, Teles, and Turoff (1995), say that an online course must make the computer screen seem like a window to a classroom where students are interacting with and learning from each other. He suggests this is done by “facilitation skills, team-building activities, and group interaction.”
Rovi, A. P., “Sense of Community, Percieved Cognitive Learning and Persistence in Aschronous Learning networks., The Internet and higher Education Volume 5, issue 4, 2002, Pages 319-332 [online], Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1096-7516(02)00130-6 [accessed 10/04/09]

There are many models regarding the factors affecting retention. 

Tinto (1975,  quoted in Simpson, 2003) argued that it can be predicted which students will continue with a course or dropout depending on the level of social integration between the individual and the institution or learning communities. 

Kember (1995, quoted in Simpson, 2003) suggests that successful students are those who get support from their family, employment and their learning institution and are able to resolve the conflicts these facets of their lives can pose.

Bajtelsmit (1998, quoted in Simpson, 2003) thought that a student’s personal circumstances were more important than their social integration.  He thought prior learning, family and job commitments, plus the academic support the institution offered along with the student’s distance learning skills were more important.

Visser (1988, quoted in Simpson, 2003) argued that motivation to succeed either for job or personal reasons is the key to whether a student will continue on a courses.

Wanoski (1973, quoted in Simpson, 2003) at Napier found that students completing successfully tended to be emotionally stable, confident, slightly introvert  individuals who knew how to learn independently, were realistic about the future occupations open to them on completing the course and accepted the work demands of the course,

The key aspects appear to be personal resilience, motivation, family support, preparation and organisational support.  A tension can exist between recruitment and retention, where the organisation wants to recruit as many students as possible, so omits to warn students about the factors that make them likely to fail.

Institutional Attitudes to Attrition.

I like the quote from (Beatty-Guenter, 1992, quoted in Simpson, 2003)  that the “The first transformation . . . .is that the college must care about attrition”.    (Simpson, 2003) points out  that although there will always be some students who drop out of a course because they can’t cope with the standard of the work and standards must be maintained, there will be others who are capable of continuing who don’t.   (Simpson, 2003 )has found that  the attitude of many teaching staff is that retention is out of their control because some students aren’t bright enough or don’t apply themselves, despite recent research that indicates some students can be helped to overcome their difficulties and continue successfully.   Simpson says that the average drop-out rate in an on-line course is 30%, if 20% is due to life event factors, then 10% of students are salvageable.  This is a very rough measure and salvageable student percentages change depending on other factors such as their level of previous learning. 

These figures were quite interesting and helped to put the point across regarding the need for change to the course leader for our SUDS online course.   At present this is a CPD course and as such probably not subject to the same scrutiny as an undergraduate module.  Retention figures of 50% for this course have not been a real matter for concern in the past because the students had paid for the course whether they had completed it or not.  We’ve discussed the need to change the course from being a content transmission model to a course which has the community of learners at it’s core who can work together using the course material to work on authentic tasks and are able to carry on their learning with their network of contacts once the course has completed.

Literacy, the ability to read and write as always been essential to ensure people can participate in society successfully and progress in education, with implications for the broader economy.    However, computers and the internet mean that there are new literacies we must master.  (Jones-Kavalier,B., Flannigan S.L., 2006).   They refer to Presnsky who described non-IT literate individuals as “burdened with an accent – non-native speakers of a  language” .  Teenagers at the moment are the digital natives.   This has implications when  teaching them because the teaching methods of the non-natives appear so dull.   At least one lecturer I know struggles to use PowerPoint, so embedding streaming video, hyper-linking and synchronous chat with audio and video interaction would be out of the question, but these are  the tools students use every day.

The librarians currently run a TAFLIN course introducing local librarians to Web 2:0 technologies.  This covers the use of blogs, wikis, social networking, news gatherers like bloglines, resource stores like delicious and the use of YouTube.  We need to expand this and use it with our own staff, possibly integrating elements from the BCS Digital Cre8or qualification.  See syllabus, http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=nav.9546.   Staff can then integrate technology into their module descriptors.

The only answer is to start using the technology.  I’ve now got my blog which I’ll probably continue.  I’m using Bloglines to aggregate the sources I find.  I’m using delicious for my personal bookmarks and to share resources with  the rest of our department  and I intend to convert some shared documents at work to a Wiki.    I’m face-booking and twittering now and aim to get my friends to do the same, however most of them are too busy playing tennis.

I’m improved my research skills by reading the Primer on Digital Literacy (Glister, P. 1997).    I liked his knowledge assembly techniques when using news delivery services.eg News Page Direct,   by running a test search on the subject you want and see how the news service catalogs stories on the subject.  Use the tags on the stories you are interested in to specify the categories for your personal newsfeed.   I definitely need to find a copy of Gilster’s book, Digital Literacy, all other articles  seem to refer to his work.

My favourite resource was the http://tsheko.wordpress.com/ blog.  The reference to Howard Rheingold’s article on 21^st century literacies sums up the questions educators face.

“Will our grandchildren’s century grow up knowing how to pluck the answer to any question out of the air, summon their social networks to assist them personally or professionally, organize political movements and markets online?  Will they collaborate to solve problems, participate in online discussions as a form of civic engagement, share and teach and learn to their benefit and that of everyone else? Or will they grow up knowing that he online world is a bewildering puzzle to which they have few clues, a dangerous neighbourhood, where their identities can be stolen, a morass of spam and porn, misinformation and disinformation, urban legends, hoaxes and scams.

 He goes on to say that just because your teenagers can Facebook, . . . .don’t think they have the skills of “online crap detection”.   Rheingold’s thoughts chime with the utopian, dystopian perception of the Internet.   Becta have issued guidelines on” Safeguarding Children in a digital world”.  They aim to embed e-safety in the national curriculum, teacher training and CPD for education staff and that e-safety will form part of the inspection process.  It’s important to include this aspect of digital literacy in any programme.

We need to educate the educators so that they know how to use the tools available.  This may be just letting them know what’s out there and letting them find out how to use them the way the e-generation did, by teaching themselves as proposed by Gadamer (1975, 2001, quoted in Hokstad, L. M., Dons, C. F., 2007). 

We need to move everone towards the utopian idea of people being connected to social and professional networks, able to evaluate the information they find and not be overwhelmed by it.  They need to be aware of their digital trail and the “dotsam and netsome” (quote from Wikipedia which I liked) and able to keep their information safe. 

References

Glister, P., A primer on Digital Literacy Adapted from the book Digital Literacy.  [Available online] http://horizon.unc.edu/projects/resources/digital_literacy.asp.  [Accessed 17/4/09].

Hokstad, L. M., Dons, C.F. Digital literacy – Towards a re description of literacy for the digital learning environments, Conference ICL2007, September 26-28, 2007 Villach, Austria.

Jones-Kavalier, B. R., Flannigan, S. L., Connecting the Digital Dots: Literacy of the 21^st Century.