My Personal Learning Environment

My Personal Learning Environment
Originally uploaded by dopey_home

This is my first PLE diagram. It combines the tools that I have been using so far plus traditional media as well as what I learn from interacting with people on a face-to-face basis. This diagram will likely evolve as I pick up new tools and new skills!

Wk 3 chat on Immersive Worlds

Some interesting sites in Second Life include these:

http://slrul.com/secondlife/Cisco%20systems%202/121/144/24(Cisco)
http://slurl.com/secondlife/NBC@201/145/123/43(NBC headquarters)

I didn't know that many companies are already using Second Life - for selling virtual equivalents of real life products, selling real world products through virtual stores, using the platform for prototyping,R&D and other kinds of collaboration, to holding meetings, and conferences virtually.

In addition, you can do a private chat if necessary with someone on SL, but you can't do that in a video conference. Managers can meet in certain rooms to discuss sensitive stuff too, and access could be restricted to some people.. In a video conference, you cannot "travel" to websites together, or work on prototypes together but SL allows one to do that. Hm.... apparently, only of the affordances of VW is the level of immersion that participants experience. You can also do streaming audio and video in SL, show Powerpoint slides and use collaborative document editing tools.

Some others things I learnt :

Griefing - that's an activity that causes someone else grief. Avatars cannot get killed but thre are other kinds of griefing including harassment, throwing obsence pictures,etc. Even financial scams.. Perpetuators can be punished by temporary or permanent bans. The abuser can be reported to Linden Lab by going to the Help > Report Abuse menu

Rez - second life term which means "come into being" or "come into focus". Quite often if the words on signboards in Second Life appear blurry because chances are the sign texture has not finished downloading into the computer yet. So, a little patience does it!

Local chat vs IM window:

The IM window allows everyone to communicate with each other in the group no matter where our avatars are in SL. The local chat is only visible to avatars who are standing nearby (20 virtual meters)

Some technical bits:

1. To teleport to home location, World > teleport home menu

2. To do a private chat, right click on another avatar, and select "Send IM" from the pie menu.

3. World > Create Landmark menu (find landmark in inventory)

4. To find a friend and teleport him/her right next to you, click on the Communication tab at the bottom of screen, highlight the required name and choose teleport.

5. To offer someone the gift of friendship, just click on their avatars.

6. To find your friends online in SL, click on the Edit tab right on top, Search, people, Find XXXX and then ofer teleport.


I am looking forward to learning more about how virtual worlds are used in business. It would be nice to attend a virtual seminar on SL too.

Info Literacy in Singsapore

Some things institutions in Singapore are doing to increase IL skills :

http://www.ida.gov.sg/News%20and%20Events/20050725163022.aspx?getPagetype=20

http://www.nlba.sg/courses.asp

http://www.ntu.edu.sg/sci/research/infolit_new.html

Video - The Machine is using US...

Some info on blogs, wikis and RSS feeds

Readings:

Duffy, Peter and Bruns, Axel (2006) The Use of Blogs, Wikis and RSS in Education: A Conversation of Possibilities.

And something on personal learning enivornments..

http://edtechpost.wikispaces.com/PLE+Diagrams.

Use of Twitter for journalists..

http://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2009/07/09/twitter-tips-for-journalists/

Journalists can use Twitter for a variety of uses: Some things include:

You can monitor the activities and discussions of people in your community or on your beat.
You can connect with people who will provide you helpful tips and information.
You can connect with colleagues and share ideas with them or get ideas from them.
You can “crowdsource” stories by asking your followers for story ideas or information.
You can quickly find people who witnessed or experienced an event.
You can drive traffic to your content.
You can improve your writing as you learn to make points directly in just 140 characters.

An interesting site on wikipedia and something new... Peekyou!

Here they are :

http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Main_Page

http://www.peekyou.com

Some interesting articles on Second Life

Here' some stuff I read regarding SL which I must say, I enjoyed :)

Readings:

Virtual Worlds? "Outlook Good" by AJ Kelton EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 43, no. 5 (September/October 2008).

Ducheneaut, N.; Wen, M.; Yee, N.; Wadley, G. Body and mind: a study of avatar personalization in three virtual worlds. 27th Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2009); 2009 April 4-9; Boston, MA.

Kozlov, Slava and Reinhold N., (2008) To Play or Not to Play: Can Companies Learn to be n00bs, LFG, and Level Up?

Second Life - some things I learnt from the chat( wk1 & wk2)

This is my first foray into a virtual world. Second Life seems to be quite intriguing... One gets to represent ourselves in different ways. Students can do role-play, including dressing in the right gear of a certain profession. I am wondering what is considered appropriate etiquette in Second Life. Hmmm.. the kinds of avatars that people choose to come in can be so distracting too.. monsters and all..

Some technical stuff I learnt include :

1. Hold the ALT key+ LEFT click to centre view on a different place on the screen.

2. Click local chat button to review the text if it is flying past too quickly

3. To enable voice chat - edit menu > preferences > voice chat tab > enable voice chat

4. To get another avatar, right click, choose Buy and then choose KEEP when it offers you the folder.

5. To wear an avatar, find the foler in your inventory, and drag the avatar folder that you receive on to yourself.

6.To get back original avatar, find the folder with it and then just drag it back onto yourself. Original avatar is in the Library folder.

7, To wear individual components in inventory, right click > wear

E-portfolios

The use of e-portfolios is a tool that we can explore for all students at the institution. I think all students should start doing an e-portfolio from year 1 of their course of studies, to document the various milestones in their learning journey.

This would showcase their personal beliefs, goals, plans, academic results, competencies, achievements, key learning experiences (projects, work attachments) and testimonials, so that when they graduate from the institution, they will have something to “sell” themselves with, be it for further education or for employment. An e-portfolio with its multisensory mode of presentation will indeed be more appealing than paper copies of one’s certificates.

Some free tools for creating e-portfolios include the following:

http://www.angellearning.com/

http://www.rcampus.com/help/about/eportfolios.cfm?

http://www.eportfolios.ac.uk/

http://mahara.org/

http://www.wordpress/

http://www.weebly.com/

Perhaps all educators should be encouraged to build their own e-portfolio too, to showcase their teaching - what they have done or used in their teaching plans and strategies, what competencies they have, what their teaching plans for the future are. If these e-portfolios could be shared, this would indeed be very helpful for colleagues to learn from one another in related modules. Across academic sections, such sharing could be a platform for cross-fertilisation of new ideas in teaching.

Archiving the web

I am also surprised to learn that web pages can be archived. These URLs could well come in useful when there is a need to look for information that is not so current but was on the web before. A couple of useful sites are http://www.archive.org/index.php, http://www.mementoweb.org and http://chronicle.com/blogPost/New-Web-Site-Makes-Internet/8887/ .

I guess resources such as these could also be shared with students to broaden their research efforts. I am not sure if there are Singapore-based websites which archive local content.

Wikipedia or not?

Perhaps too, it is opportune for the institution to consider a common policy across all schools regarding the use of the Wikipedia as a reference for research. Like it or not, Wikipedia is widely used by students and probably by staff as well. A possible stance is to allow the use of Wikipedia as a starting point for research, and require that its sources of information should be cross-checked for authenticity. In addition, students could be instructed specifically that they need to go beyond Wikipedia, say, make it mandatory that three other sources of information should be cited and from a variety of sources, for example, a book, a website and a journal. This could be worked into the marking rubrics so students know what our expectations are.

Providing students with some guidance on research methods (a start-of-academic year-session on how to use library resources like how to find relevant books, news archives, journals, e-databases, e-books, etc, as well as a helpdesk or hotline to provide guidance on a just-in-time need basis, or online quizzes / games / video tutorials on IL to raise awareness like http://library.uncg.edu/game/ or http://www.library.auckland.ac.nz/instruct/tutorials/voyager/index.html) would go a long way towards ensuring that students do not just rely on Wikipedia as a quick source of information, but go beyond it. However, a one-off session is unlikely to be helpful, as students may not take these library sessions seriously until they see a need to do research. As such, to hone information literacy skills, librarians and teaching staff need to work together, by infusing it within the curriculum throughout all three years of their education at the institution, starting from year 1.

Academic Integrity

Another challenge would be to reinforce the importance of academic integrity, from a young age, perhaps even starting from upper primary school levels, so that the practice of attributing information created by others is ingrained. Being able to do so would help in character-building and inculcate the values of honesty and respect for others. Students need to understand what constitutes plagiarism, how it can be detected with software like Turnitin or SafeAssign, why citations are necessary, how citations should be done and the consequences of plagiarism.

Schools, library staff, and staff from Student Services Office could work together to communicate such expectations to students and reinforce this regularly. Having an Integrity Week on a regular basis, for example, in the third or fourth week of each academic year, when students start working on their projects, is an interesting idea. No doubt some students may think this is just another campus activity, I feel that it will nevertheless highlight to students the importance of academic honesty, be it concerning projects, tests or exams.

One interesting example would be the Integrity Week at the University of Manitoba which includes a quiz on academic honesty ( http://umanitoba.ca/student/resource/student_advocacy/integrity12.html). For example, a question like – “Your professor can often tell that an essay has been plagiarised, even though they may not know where the plagiarised information comes from”, and the answer, “Professors study the topics they teach. They will likely have read many of the sources you will use to write papers”, tells students that it’s hard to beat their professors who are likely to know more than them, so any attempt to cheat is futile. This may seem quite obvious to the professors, but to students, maybe we need to tell them this in the face, to be sure they know it.

In the same light, maybe students could be quizzed on the exam regulations too. I am not sure how many students are actually aware that if they turn up X minutes late at an exam venue at the institution they are enrolled in, they are not allowed to sit for an exam and would be deemed to have failed. Although all these are important rules posted on an institution’s Web, many students may not have bothered to read them carefully.

During Integrity Week, there could be workshops to teach students about formal writing – academic writing, maybe organised on a school basis – different workshops for students from different disciplines, for example - Engineering and Business. These days, students are so used to SMS and MSN language, that writing a formal report (e.g. learning how to do paraphrasing) could be a real struggle for them. Students could also learn how to use open-source citation machines (e.g. via instant demos at booths). These citation machines include:

BibMe http://www.bibme.org/
Ottobib (books only) http://ottobib.com/
Zotero (for Firefox only) http://www.zotero.org/
EasyBib http://www.easybib.com/

Online Privacy

We need to teach students and staff how to protect themselves online, so that their privacy is not intruded on. All too often, people take these new technologies for granted, and use them for immediate gratification - quick answers or instantaneous information, without giving too much thought about what the secondary effects down the road might well be (See http://www.cbc.ca/canada/montreal/story/2009/11/19/quebec-facebook-sick-leave-benefits.html ).

Some things I have learnt about how to protect one’s online privacy are detailed below. Some are "common sensical", but mostly these are things I am not familiar with :

• Set up my web browser using a pseudonym instead of real name, and to leave out any personally identifiable information that need not be shared

• Check the internet default program – Windows Internet Control Panel to ensure that all personal information is anonymised

• Turn off cookies that can track my motions through a web site. Cookies can be managed or blocked using cookie management software and services, for example, Internet Junkbuster at http://www.junkbusters.com/ht/en/ijb.html, InterMute at http://www.intermute.com/, Adsubtract at http://www.adsubtract.com/ ,CookiePal at http://www.kburra.com/cpal.html/ or http://www.websashger.com/

• Cookies can be deleted after surfing

• Use Cookie cleaner at http://www.ccleaner.com/ to delete traces of online activities such as Internet history

• Keep a clean email address, like a side account using some pseudonymous or alternate address (e.g. free yahoo mail or hotmail account)

• Use someuser@example.com if needed to furnish an email account to use a website ; this is fine so long as there is no need to actually go to this email account to access information (like passwords) sent to this address

• Keep a tight fist on personal information online and be wary of online acquaintances

• Avoid sending/discussing sensitive information using office email

• Avoid Web usage at the office unless it is for work-related purposes; employers can monitor all web usage

• Be aware of sites which offer rewards for contact information

• Do not reply to spam mail, as doing so confirms that the email is read by a real person

• Use anti-spam services such as Spam hater at http://www.cix.co/uk/~net-services/spam/spam_hater.htm to block spam mail

• Check for web security when transacting online – look out for https:// instead of http://

• Disable spyware (spies on online habits and other personal details) from your computer by using http://www/lavasoft.de/• Active X should be turned off when surfing, and should be turned on only when it’s a trusted website

• Turn off home computer when not using it to prevent malicious attacks or stealing of confidential information. Sites like http://wwwshareware.com or http://www.download.com can also offer protection

• Check offline contact information before engaging in online transactions and check if seal programs such as TRUSTe at http://www.truste.org are in place to protect one’s privacy

• Use encryption software for email and files such as Pretty Good Privacy at http://www.pgpi.org/

• Use proxies across the internet to wrap your IP address while browsing the web - http://www.torproject.org/

To be honest, I have not had time to really go into these websites to do much exploration as yet, but certainly intend to find out more soon. Indeed, I think it is needful for both teaching staff and students to know what they might be getting into on the web. Perhaps it is good to have everyone go through a course to learn some of these tips and tricks to protect their online privacy. All students should be taught early on, especially so they are even more vulnerable than adults on the web. I think we have to remind ourselves often, that we can and should control what information we choose to reveal, when, why and to whom.

Then and now..changes in the education landscape .

In the past, students who had to do research for their projects would simply do so by poring through books and journals at the library. The scope of their research was a lot narrower then. These days, we are not talking about just being information literate but this literacy has evolved and is now made up of pieces of a bigger multi-literacy puzzle. Students need to be able to do the very basic - read and write, students need to possess skills to search for information, students need to be digital literate to navigate the mountain of information in the online world and to do this, and there is a need to be IT literate. This is indeed quite a tall order, compared to the old days!

The students of today are digital natives, having grown up in a world where not having a laptop, internet access, mobile phone, iPod would be unimaginable. Students live in a digital world and make use of Web 2.0 technologies primarily for social networking.

The challenge for educators is to level up their knowledge of Web 2.0 technologies, embrace and harness the power of these Web 2.0 technologies as a new resource for teaching and learning. We have to adapt our teaching pedagogy to be attuned to the rapidly-evolving learning styles of students. Ignoring these changes would inevitably create a digital divide between educators and students – the battle is lost even before we begin. We have to learn new ways to engage our students and help them learn in environments and ways that they are already comfortable and familiar with. The challenge is to help students use Web 2.0 as naturally in their studies, as in their social lives.

In fact, many schools have already started doing this early on in the education system. Many secondary schools in Singapore begun using Web 2.0 technologies in their teaching (See http://www.moe.gov.sg/media/parliamentary-replies/2009/09/information-and-communications.php); to force students to go one step back to a print literacy dominant environment would lead to a disconnect with the students. We need to capitalise on Web 2.0 technologies to develop a learning skill set which is expected of the 21st century workforce – communication, collaboration, networking, creativity, leadership and technology proficiency. At the same time, we will also need to address the downside of such technologies, for example, the cut-and-paste mentality and failure to attribute information or, the lack of ability to critically evaluate information and form their own opinions about an issue.

Educators need to be convinced that the students’ profile (their disposition - a strong sense of belonging to online communities and learning preferences for sharing and participation) and the environment has changed irrevocably. Even the government has started using social networking to engage the youth (see http://www.ssc.gov.sg/publish/Corporate/en/news/media_releases/2009/1st_asian_youth_games0.html and to garner feedback from citizens (http://app.reach.gov.sg/reach/default.aspx). Charitable organisations have also jumped on the bandwagon. See http://www.clicktoaid.com, where organisations like the Community Development Council are using Web2.0 to raise funds for charity, or http://www.give.sg.
Indeed, there is an urgent need to respond to these waves of change accordingly. It requires lecturers to learn to “let go” and come to terms with the fact that there are many ways in which students learn these days… not just from the pearls of wisdom from the lecturer’s mouth anymore.

Content is no longer king – students are capable of learning beyond what lecturers tell them and what books write about. Open-source materials and online universities have diminished the attractiveness of higher education and made content from credible sources readily accessible (for example, http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm ). Lecturers need to be digital literate to guide students to the relevant sources; the tutor takes on a facilitator role more now, than ever before. Of course, it would be erroneous to assume that technology has to be used for technology’s sake - merely adopted wholesale for window-dressing purposes and an end in itself. Technology must be seen as a possible tool for providing a more relevant, enriching and challenging learning experience for students, whilst recognising the fact that face-to-face contact with students is still vital for adding a personal element to learning.

Applying IL to assignments...

In the Information Literacy assignment for week 2, I have already relooked and reworked the newspaper article assignment instructions for the module Microeconomics, to hone IL skills in students, albeit with some hand-holding, since these are first-year students at the polytechnic.

I intend to discuss this with colleagues and use this set of assignment instructions (perhaps with some modifcation if needed) for the new academic year in April 2010. I think the most important bit in reworking the assignment is realising that I need to let students know explicitly why they are doing an assignment! As such, the project objectives must be clearly articulated to students. In addition, they also need to know how the project objectives dovetail into course objectives.
 
As for the marking rubrics for this assignment, it might look something like this:
Breath of analysis (20%)
- Article selected incorporates at least three economic concepts
- Concepts are interrelated across different topics in both semester 1 and 2

Depth of analysis (60%)
- Ability to read text and select main ideas
- Restate textual concepts in own words
- Identify verbatim ideas that can be appropriately quoted
- Select information that provides evidence for the concept
- Recognise interrelationships among concepts and combines them into useful statements
- Draw conclusions based on information gathered
- Diagrams are used appropriately in explanation

Sources of information (10%)
- information sources are acknowledged using APA citation style
- provide a variety of formats as sources of information

Timeliness of submission (10%)
- project is submitted on time as scheduled

My reflections on Digital Literacy

We started off the course on Digital Literacy by learning about what Information Literacy. I think all of us do know what IL is about, but mostly we don’t spend much time thinking about what the exact standards are.
Information literacy is a set of abilities encompassing the ability to do the following:
• Determine the extent of information needed
• Access the needed information effectively and efficiently
• Evaluate information and its sources critically
• Incorporate selected information into one’s knowledge base
• Use information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose
• Understand the economic, legal and social issues surrounding the use of information, and access and use information ethically and legally

(Association of College and Research Libraries – ACRL Information Literacy competency standards for Higher Education)

How can we develop students who are information literate and grow them into self-directed life-long learners? Firstly, educators need to build learning environments where students take greater responsibility for their own learning. Students should be given ample opportunities to find things out for themselves – to solve problems, to find evidence from multiple sources, to make inquiries. To do so, they will need skills in information literacy. We need to frame our research projects and how we assess those projects, such that we build in outcomes which help students to attain information literacy skills. For example, if we want students to be able to gather information from a variety of formats (e.g. books, electronic database, websites, videos, podcasts, etc), or if we want students to be able to evaluate information and its sources critically, or learn how to acknowledge the use of information sources, then all these should be clearly articulated in the project requirements. The marking rubrics for projects may need to be tweaked to include assessment components which grade students not just on the quality of their research and analysis, but also on attaining IL outcomes.