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The Flexible Learning Planning Guide provides a set of 10 guidelines for teachers planning a small-scale implementation of online learning. The first guideline is:

Learning is guided by a clear schedule of objectives and activities which establish an effective developmental progression.

This is not always easy to do: too often learners are confronted with an intimidating list of items (resources, forums, links, …) with little guidance as to how these relate to specific course outcomes or objectives. Even learning management systems such as Moodle and Blackboard provide a calendar for scheduling learning activities, but these are often not linked to course outcomes and assessments. The danger is that learning activities are seen as arbitrary tasks and learner motivation to engage can be affected.

LMS, wiki or blog?

In a small-scale implementation where the technology incorporated does not include a LMS, there may be no features to help teachers develop such a schedule of activities. On the other hand, if the online course is built around a wiki or blog, the teacher is not constrained by the LMS interface.

Whatever the technology used, one clear way to communicate a clear structure of course activities is a table which maps weekly activities to outcomes and assessment:

…etc…

This sort of schedule clearly explains to the learner not only what you want them to do, but why it’s important and relevant. See making learning processes explicit for why I think this is important.

The bad news is, most learning management systems, blogs or wikis don’t provide simple tools for creating such a table. The good news is, it’s not hard to create a table like this in HTML that you can then reuse as a template to provide a common schedule format for all your courses. A much simpler option is to use Google docs to create your table as a published spreadsheet. However, you lose some of the flexibility of HTML (eg embedded links), and you may not be able (as here in WordPress) to embed a Google doc in your own page.

Limitations of the matrix

The read-write matrix provides a model for analysing the roles of learners in working with documents in a Web 2.0 context. The complexity of Web 2.0 tools, however, has prompted me to explore ways of extending the model to provide more detail, including different forms of contribution and collaboration. In addition, some readers have found the two-dimensional matrix difficult to interpret.

I’ve been wondering for some time how to show additional dimensions to the read-write matrix. This is necessary because it’s helpful to distinguish between different sorts of editing rights. For example, the blog reader cannot usually edit someone else’s blog posting but can normally add comments to it.

We can simplify the read-write matrix by considering only three user types:

• self (the learner)
• peers (fellow learners enrolled in the same course)
• the world

We can now assign a value to each of these user types based on the ability to:

• read the document
• comment on the document
• edit the document

Table 1: mapping the roles

We can now create a simple table for any given application of Web 2.0 tools:

We can use such a table to define clearly how we might want a specific wiki or blog activity set up for a learning activity, and we can use it to communicate to teachers and/or students how an activity is meant to work. A simple tick or cross in a cell shows that that user type has that role.

Table 2: the geek version

And for the more technically-minded, we can steal an idea from Unix’s chmod to provide a shorthand way of describing the characteristics of the activity:

We now have a shorthand way to describe the read-write roles within a learning activity using (say) a blog or wiki – add the values in each row that apply and show as a three-digit number. The roles shown in table 1 would be 731. (I’m not sure that this version will be popular, however!)

Where to from here?

We could easily extend either version to include the additional user types in the read-write matrix: the sub-group of peers and the wider group of a learning community. We could also add other types of contribution in addition to commenting and editing: eg annotation or bookmarking.

In addition, I envisage simple planning tools which incorporate something like table 1 to help communicate decisions around educational use of Web 2.0 tools to other teachers, technical support staff and learners. The table extends the read-write matrix by adding detail to the types of collaborative contribution, but also provides a simple means of communicating the analysis to others.

I’ve been asked how wikis in Moodle relate to the read-write matrix I published recently. There is significant correlation, because the standard wiki module installed with Moodle offers various settings to control who has read access and who has write access.

When creating a new wiki, it’s best to check out the help file for the wiki type setting. This is a screenshot of the help file, with labels added for reference. The matrix of 3 rows and 3 columns provides 9 options for who can read and who can write to the wiki.

I’m not concerned here with the first row (options 1 to 3) since these are teacher wikis and cannot be edited by learners. Types 1 to 3 are useful for teachers to publish materials they don’t want learners to be able to edit: eg administrative information or course details.

The types I find most useful for read-write learning are types 4 (for a fully collaborative class wiki) and type 9. But a class incorporating small group activities might use other types such as 5 and 6.

I’ve mapped some of these Moodle wiki types against the read-write matrix below:

While the Moodle wiki has quite a few limitations, the ability to control access and the ways that learners can collaborate can be very useful. But my advice is to plan the teaching and learning strategies carefully before setting up a wiki in Moodle – once the wiki is in use it’s not always easy to change the type!

A few years ago, Scott Leslie published his matrix of some uses of blogs in education, which provides a very useful analysis of potential applications for teachers and learners.

For my professional development workshops, I wanted something similar but which was focused solely on learning applications. In addition, I wanted to reflect some of the additional options that learning management systems such as Moodle and Blackboard provide. In particular, wikis and blogs within an LMS tend to provide greater granularity and control of who can access learner-created documents.

To reflect these needs, I’ve developed the read-write matrix of web 2.0 tools for learning which maps various uses of blogs and wikis onto a similar two-dimensional matrix to Leslie’s. The matrix is intended to apply also to other Web 2.0 tools for writing, such as Google Docs.

The purpose of the read-write matrix

I’m hoping the matrix will be helpful to teachers in planning the educational use of Web 2.0 tools. Careful planning is needed because:

• While blogs and wikis within learning management systems typically are less sophisticated functionally than stand-alone software tools, they provide more complex options for controlling who reads and who writes.
• For varying combinations of read and write access, there are both risks and opportunities for learners and effective learning. It’s important to consider these and how they will be best managed.

Presentation: the read-write matrix

The presentation should be reasonably self-explanatory, or you may prefer to read about the matrix first.

I’m a fan of using wikis as a tool for collaborative learning – in my context, I’ve used it as a professional development activity for tertiary educators. I’ve briefly outlined some of the benefits I’ve perceived in an earlier post: Read-write learning in professional development

In an recent Educause conference paper entitled Within the Wiki: Best Practices for Educators, Barbara Schroeder describes 10 ‘instructional strategies for successful learning with wikis.’ This is a really useful list of guidelines for teachers planning to incorporate the use of wikis into courses.

The teacher’s role

One of Schroeder’s guidelines is ‘define and identify roles for collaborative activities.’ From my own experience, I’d add that it’s important to be clear about your own role as teacher/facilitator. For example, what will you do when a student contributes information which you can see is clearly wrong or misinformed? You could:

• Ignore it
• Correct it
• Point out privately or publicly that it’s incorrect
• Hope that another student corrects it
• Give someone the role of responding

Each of these has advantages and drawbacks!

The truly collaborative wiki has the potential to change the power balance between teachers and learners and their respective roles: no longer is the teacher the sole source of authoritative knowledge. On the other hand, ‘wrong’ information can be detrimental and even dangerous, in vocational or academic education. It’s important to be clear about your own role in relation to the shared knowledge and communicate this to learners beforehand.

Photo: wiki pegboard by Luigi Chiesa.