Friday Reflection!

I've seen this before!

Twitter and the real world!

+Philip Spalding  

also on holc.co.uk and twitter: @HOLC1

Half-term week in Suffolk and Essex.  Little call on my time from Cambridgeshire so have been working on the Haverhill Online Learning Community.  Have been confident enough in the content and where we are going to start to use the twitter account!  

Twitter does require a bit of effort as I have found over the years that I have had personal twitter accounts.  Finding people to follow is not a problem.  Getting people to follow and continue to follow is the challenge.  Choosing who you follow back when they have followed you is also a judgement call.  Have had this on Google+ Communities recently where obviously some people passionate in their interests  have invited me to some potentially dubious groups that at best conflict a little with the web presence I am trying to maintain.  Once it's out on the web, it's out or exposed so to speak!  Some of the invites are enough to scare the horses (old English saying)!

Gathering pace this week then, HOLC has tweeted a bit,  but not a lot?  In the #fridayreflection for HOLC I have described the meeting I attended yesterday organised by +Elaine Carr of Best of Haverhill at a local hotels' conference venue.  The value of meeting people such as the local mayor and other stakeholder groups will often only reveal themselves on these stages.  You cannot do it all online in a local community you have to meet face to face!  It also provides that personal connection that builds lasting local networks!  

MOOCs this week have seen Coursera become the largest online campus.  The numbers at 2.8 million are still relatively small compared to total populations of students in universities globally but it is massive grow than in just a year!  I struggle at the moment to find the time and inclination to enage with the MOOCs I have signed up for at present.  Work commitments and other interests such as HOLC are taking precedence.  The fact that I already have a Masters and I am not depending on future advancement  upon completing the course are other factors.  It will be interesting to see the measure of drop outs at the end of the first year from the people like myself who have joined out of curiosity to see how they work.  

Genuine figures of engagement of students who are using the MOOC to further their career as opposed to attending a full time residential campus course will be difficult at the measure in my opinion at the moment.  the question will be are they sustainable from a financial point of view?  Should they be sustainable from a financial point of view as a direct replacement for campus based instruction (or do I mean learning)?  Should they be considered as part of the role of providing access to universal education that Universities/Colleges have to satisfy in order to be allowed to grant degrees?

So my reflection for this week is can the MOOC stand on it's own or is it part of the blend of learning offered by Universities and Colleges for the benefit of society?

Next week getting back with the plan for spending more time on the OLC Google + Community that +Jeannie Crowley facilitates and trying to do some Python Programming on the Raspberry Pi! 

 

  

Friday Reflection!

Week 2 of 2013 and Still going!

We are approaching the end of the second week of 2013.  This week I have started to take a little bit of a perspective of the size of the task I have taken on and the work needed so far for Haverhill Online Learning Community (HOLC).  I have used my new Google profile picture (pictured left) to illustrate the effect the effort has had on some days.  The cat appreciates a comfortable sleeping place and the fact that I am not in front of a screen!  A bit of quality purring going on!  That said there is starting to be a bit of satisfaction in the fact content is starting to be added to the website.  Recognition of the idea by others (thanks +Gail Poulin and +Rob Perhamus for your Google Plus comments) and it's potential value for a Learning Community.

HOLC itself is a relatively small community at present.  We are in the establishment phase at the moment.  The lag phase (to borrow a term for biology and bacteriology) so to speak of establishing a new community. this is the stage of adaptation to the needs of the community by interaction.  Once a critical mass of participants the log or exponential growth phase should be steady.  Reaching a stationery phase of growth is the difficult stage to recognise.  Four scenarios may exist once a stationary phase is reached.  Firstly the community remains the same and is limited by the "space" of the interactions and activities   Secondly a  death phase of the community starts to take over as interest and engagement is lost.  Thirdly a community interaction puts the community back into the lag phase or growth phase.  The fourth scenario is the formation of a new colony or community separate or in addition to the original community.  There are precedents in Ancient Greek society for this which resulted in the formation of new colonies such Marseille (Massalia), Syracuse (in Sicily) and Emporium (Spain).  These examples still survive today but do not necessarily (or have to speak) Greek because they now have their own identity.    

Measuring the success of the community and being able to recognise the different phases is a  skill of the moderator or facilitator of the community.  The last thing that needs to be done  when a community appears to be going into the death phase is to throw the baby out with the bath water!  Do we judge objectively success of a community by numbers of members?  Do we judge it by the number of active members?  There are a lot of Google+ Communities with 2000+ (in some some cases 30000+) that have been set up.  I have joined some of these larger communities and it is quite apparent rapidly that there are only a relatively few core active members.  There are a lot of "lurkers".  But as we have discussed in the #oflc set up +Jeannie Crowley these may become active when there is something they feel they have an opinion on.  A index of Active or lurker/size of community (AL/C) within  a time frame could be a measure of the success of the communities aims and the ownership of that community by it's members.

Is the success criteria  of AL/C  a measure of the quality of engagement?  I suppose it all depends on which stage of the lifecycle of the community you are in.  Subjectively as a facilitator you may have the success criteria that establishment shows that you have a successful community.  Objectively the participants may say the quality of the interactions and the scope of the material might be their success criteria and why they joined.  Pictures of cats might not be everybody's cup of tea, for which other communities might be a more appropriate forum (honest only use the four legged assistant for illustration purposes).

Meeting diverse success criteria are some of the  challenges that the online community community and facilitators must face in the evolution of the online learning community.  MOOCs which are the longest established are undergoing a possible  entry into a stationery phase.  I say stationery phase as it has been identified by some that their  free model of engagement might not be sustainable  against the other demands that their constituent universities might have to satisfy.  

The success of an  educational model is a trade of the finite price of what the market is prepared to pay for and a floor price at which providers are unable to go below.  This is possibly where the Open Learning Community has it's place.  The initiator of awe and wonder in Life Long Learning.  Where certification is required the MOOCS take over.  A community that keeps a core perspective of why it was set up will probably be adaptable to it's members needs.  Also there has to be a realistic view that a community  can be considered to be a living organism as well.  The health of an Online Learning Community is not  necessarily judged as to does it meet the success criteria of the initiators.  The quality of the social interactions might overwhelm the learning aspects.  For instance the idea of visiting a garden together in a group to learn the  names of flowers might have been the original intention for forming a Garden Group.  The social aspect of having a day out might be goal of the people participating.

A fairly wordy discussion of the life cycle of an Online Learning Community.  The phase that Haverhilll Online Learning Community and ukonlinelearningcommunities.org are in definitely the lag phase.  The task for this week is to try to publicise the community to grow size of the community.  I have a number of meetings coming up including attendance of the Best of Haverhill event organised by +Elaine Carr which providea a great opportunity for local networking of the "traditional" face to face variety.  Will have to remember to take some business cards along!     

Friday Reflection

Treading Water!

The Friday reflection has come round again, well Thursday evening. It is Friday already somewhere in the world. Have been having a bit of week of treading water.  A week of considering whether that hillock is the top of the mountain or only anthill that could have been avoided without disturbing the occupants.

To start off with, something that I have learnt this week.  I found out when  reading and posting to Google+  that there was a hump day.  Being in the UK I was a little puzzled.  Camel support day?  But I was politely informed it was Wednesday by another name.  So over the hump I went.

I have had a little review my own personal experiences of completing courses and lack of engagement afterwards.   This led me to conclude that there is a place for the Everlasting Class to become a new forum for professional dialogue.  A Networking opportunity not limited by geographical boundaries.  In a small country like the UK relatively short distances with congested infrastructures are such barriers.  Google+ Hangouts  can be a solution.  I was unable to attend a local meeting of Best of Haverhill , owing to a few conversations via mobile phone, discussing a very worthy topic of reconnecting Haverhill back to the railway.   We had our rail link removed nearly 47 years ago in a so called rationalisation.  In my apologies for absence on the Best of Haverhill Event Facebook page I suggested that a Google+ Hangout or YouTube channel broadcast would be ideal for small business owners to be informed of such an important topic. We will see what comes of that.

On Wednesday (my Hump day apparently)  I blogged on the topic of the changing mantras of UK education.  The article that prompted my meandering  was  thought provoking as it gave insight on the influences of our current Minister for Education.  The book that he was most influenced by according to the article promoted the ideas that there were no individual learning styles.  That rigorous testing was good for the development of learners and should be the norm.  Without having read the book yet I am not in a real position to comment (sitting on the fence?).  I haven't found a Kindle version of the particular book.  Amazon  do have it for sale in print version.  However, I predict that that the book may be a mini-bestseller as every Head Teacher, Deputy Head and journalist will clamour to buy a copy in a bid to understand the future path of education in England and Wales (Scotland has it's own apparatus for mass education).

After one of the pillars educational thought had been questioned how did this affect my perception of Open Learning Communities (OLC also stands for Online Learning Communities).   A reference to the Royal Society in Tuesday's blog and it's origins prompted a comment from one collaborator of the Bank Street OLC.   The  original format for Royal Society meetings was a kind of "show and tell".  He was interested how this element could be introduced into Google+ Hangouts.  Smartphones were mentioned as a possible tech solution.  The new Nexus range launched this week could be in the part of the enabling technology.  Especially if there are front and back mounted cameras that can work independently in separate Hangout Windows.

So how did I do with the plans for this week.  Well I have edged a bit further along the path to coding and producing a Google Course Builder application.  Still a little way off.  Have to catch up with the edX and ALISON courses. Did use Study Room   for the edX course.  Interesting experience, a bit like a game navigating the Avatar to interact with other students.  Have not yet blog posted the updated Virginia Tech thoughts.  May look at the context again to see if it is Learning Style independent.  First thoughts are that it is since it works on the student-instructor continuum.

So for next week.  I will look at how OLC could be set up in the local area for Haverhill and float some ideas.  The coding courses really need to be caught up with and put back on track.  Long Term plan may need to be completed!

Well just about cat is in front of fire.  One side is done the flip side soon to happen.  Think I will join her next to the fire as it starting to become very wintery in Suffolk!