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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.

Inserting a link in WordPress 2.5.1 can cause a validation problem. The problem arises when you insert a link using the Visual editor mode and include a title attribute, generally regarded as highly desirable for reasons of accessibility and promoting your content. The HTML for such a link looks like this:

<a title="Paul Left's blog" href="http://www.verso.co.nz">

W3′s HTML validator doesn’t like this tag: it seem that having the title attribute before the href attribute is invalid code according to the WordPress document type. So the link code should be:

<a href="http://www.verso.co.nz" title="Paul Left's blog">

I click on the HTML tab and go through the code prior to publishing and edit any link tag to ensure the title attribute follows the href attribute. It’s a minor nuisance but there doesn’t appear to be any way to configure WordPress to avoid this. I’m using Firefox and Mac OSX but the same problem happens using Window XP so I assume it’s platform-independent.

The significance of the validation issue is open to heated debate but it does seem desirable to post pages with valid code where possible.

The Digital Strategy

The New Zealand government’s draft Digital Strategy, was released recently. It states:

New Zealand will be a world leader in using information and technology to realise its economic, social, environmental and cultural goals, to the benefit of all New Zealanders.

An ambitious vision, and one that builds on New Zealanders’ self-belief as can-do people. But I’m not convinced the performance of the country’s technology providers supports such ambitious goals.

Hype vs reality

I knew my ISP was keen for me to sign up for their new ‘unbundled DSL’ service when the information pack, on expensive paper and complete with faux wax seal, was hand delivered to my front door by someone far more glamorous than the usual courier drivers. I’m too cynical to be taken in by the claim that the new service would ‘bring New Zealanders the ultimate communication experience‘. But over the last few months my broadband had been getting measurably slower and the email service less reliable – perhaps ADSL2 would fix all my problems?

You can probably guess the rest of the story – the recurring failure of various parts of the system, the constant calls to support staff to log faults and to check on progress, the lack of proper documentation about the system and its status. The details are too tedious to go into here. Suffice to say it’s 1 month later and I’m still disappointed in the service. My personal elearning capability and productivity has fallen away as I’ve become preoccupied with technical problems.

Technical support vs management

Overall, I’ve found the provider’s technical support staff to be very helpful and responsive in trying to resolve faults. Conversely, the management of the roll-out seems to have been very ad-hoc: the impression is of a process relying on trial-and-error and the competent fire-fighting skills of technical staff. Many times I’ve thought to myself: ‘if only they had planned this properly’ or ‘if only they’d spent as much on communicating information as they did on hype.’ Sadly, I’m sure this is not the first or last time I’ll have such an experience.

Being good at fire-fighting and fixing faults might make you a good follower, but it won’t make you a world leader. Innovation is extremely difficult in a culture focused on a constant round of short-term fixes. If New Zealand is serious about being a world leader in information and technology, it will need to radically change its management culture, not just upgrade the copper.

Some related news articles:

Internet nightmare: why NZ broadband sucks

The future of broadband in NZ

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.

Educators getting started with using wikis and blogs and other Web 2.0 software as tools for learning need to develop a structural understanding of the different potential forms of collaboration and interaction. But some of the models used as references for such educational use come from other contexts, and are unlikely to be sufficient as models for designing effective learning and teaching.

For example, an Open University blog refers to the ladder of participation, a model developed by Forrester Research. The participation ladder categorises consumers according to their level of active participation with online social networking tools.

I don’t find the ladder metaphor and the categorisation particularly helpful for educators, because:

• The ladder metaphor suggests both a hierarchy of behaviours and progression up the ladder, whereas in a learning context such behaviours are complementary and equally important.
• Categorising learners in the same way marketers categorise consumers is not productive: learners are not a market to reach and exploit but autonomous individuals who dynamically use a range of behaviours depending on the context

I’m not intending to suggest that the ladder is not a really valuable tool for marketers, or that education cannot learn from and apply models developed in a business context. Indeed, the ladder does provide a valuable insight into the diversity of learners in terms of the use of such tools.

But to help educators develop effective strategies for applying Web 2.0 tools, we need models which build on models such as the ladder and better reflect the educational context. In particular, we need models which:

• Reflect the values and ethos of the education sector, with learners as autonomous individuals
• Provide a means to analyse the dynamic and diverse nature of learning and teaching interactions

Until we develop such models, the application of Web 2.0 tools for learning is likely to be hit and miss.

Related posts:

The read-write matrix of web 2.0 tools for learning

Wikis in Moodle and the read-write matrix