Trajectories of e-learningProfessor Gráinne Conole

Director of the Institute of Learning Innovation University of Leicester

grainne.conole@le.ac.ukBlog: http://e4innovation.com

Slideshare: http:// http://www.slideshare.net/GrainneConole/Departmental website: http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/beyond-distance-

research-alliance

Third International Conference On Quality Assurance in Post-Secondary Education, Damman, Saudi Arabia

27th – 29th April 2013

AbstractThis paper will critique the affordances (Gibson 1979) that social and participatory media offer in terms of promoting different forms of interaction and communication. It will explore in particular the nature of digital identity and presence. It will argue that there is a complex interconnection between us and the digital environment we inhabit, and that this relationship is constantly changing and adapting. In terms of harnessing this for learning, teachers need to develop a complex set of digital literacies (Jenkins 2009) and need to adopt new approaches to design that go beyond content to the activities that learners engage with. It will conclude with a description of the 7Cs of Learning Design framework, which aims to help teachers make more informed design decisions that are pedagogically effective and make innovative uses of new technologies.

It will describe a set of theoretical constructs that can be used to describe and understand our interactions online: the notion of digital identity and presence and digital performance, our evolving rhizomatic digital network, harnessing the affordances and new media and the associated digital social milieu, and the nature of our digital traces and the associated digital panoptican.

IntroductionClearly technologies offer a rich variety of ways in which learners can interact, communicate and collaborate. They can support a variety of different pedagogical approaches from independent learning to inquiry learning to dialogic learning. Einstein once said that education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think. Good teaching fosters the following aspects of learning:

Encourages reflection Enables dialogue

1

Fosters collaboration Applies theory to practice Creates a learner community of peers Encourages creativity Motivates the learner.

Social and participatory media have a number of key characteristics that make them distinctive from the so-called web 1.0 technologies (Conole and Alevizou 2010). These include: open practices, distributed cognition, networking and interconnection, complex and evolving interactions, and the development of a personalised digital landscape. These characteristics enable us to interact with others on an unprecedented global scale.

Developing the digital literacy (Jenkins 2009) skills needed to be part of this ‘participatory culture’ is a key challenge facing education today. These skills are way beyond simple notions of ICT literacies and are more about harnessing the affordances of social and participatory media. Skills like: play, transmedia navigation, judgement, and distributed cognition. The extent to which an individual has these skills will impact on how they interact with others through these media. Rheingold1 argues that social media enable people to socialise, organise, learn, play, and engage in commerce. The part that makes social media social is that technical skills need to be exercised in concert with others: encoding, decoding, and community. He identifies five social media literacies: attention, participation, collaboration, network awareness and critical consumption.

1 http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/attention-and-other-21st-century-social-media-literacies

2

Today’s digital landscape

Figure 1: The E-learning timeline

Figure 1 shows the key technological developments that have emerged over the last thirty years. Starting with multimedia authoring tools like Tookbook and Authorware in the late eighties, which enabled users to create rich and interactive multimedia resources. The Internet emerged in 1993 and was initially a very static interface, unable to handle large amounts of images or multimedia because of poor bandwidth. In the mid-nineties, practitioners started to talk about the notion of learning objects (which were precursors to the concept of Open Educational Resources) and the aspiration to create and share learning materials in a vibrant educational marketplace or digital economy (Littlejohn 2003).

At about the same time Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) /Learning Management Systems (LMSs) started to appear. These were significant in two respects. Firstly, institutions started to realise that technologies were core for their learners and established committees to evaluate different VLEs/LMSs and to instigate VLE/LMS policies. Secondly, they mimicked established teaching practice and hence provided a safe nursery slope for practitioners to experiment. Practitioners could upload content, make announcements, set up discussion forums and provide mechanisms for their students to upload assignments. The first generation of mobile devices emerged in around 1998; although they had very limited capacity and it was hard to see what they could offer for learning. Learning Design2 emerged as a research field as a counteraction to the long

2 http://larnacadeclaration.org

3

established field of Instructional Design. The focus was on the creation of tools and resources to help practitioners make more informed design decisions.

Around 2000 gamification emerged and in particular how games could be used in a learning context (de Freitas and Maharg 2011). The Open Educational Resource (OER) movement took the ideas around Learning Objects a stage further in 2001. Promoted by organisations like UNESCO and the Flora and William Hewlett Foundation, a core principle was that educational is a fundamental human right and that educational materials should be freely available. UNESCO estimate that there are more than 100 million people who cannot afford formal education; OER offer them a means of getting an education.3

O’Reilly defined the term Web 2.0 to distinguish the emerging tools and practices associated with the web, which were more participatory, social and participatory (O'Reilly 2004; O'Reilly 2005). This term morphed into the term ‘social and participatory’ media, which is a central focus of this paper.

Virtual worlds, such as Secondlife, gained popularity in around 2005; many believed they offered immersive and authentic 3D environments, which could promote pedagogies such as role play, Problem-Based learning and situated learning (Childs and Peachey 2011). This was followed by a second generation of mobile devices; in particular e-books, tablets and smart phones. These made the mantra of ‘learning anywhere, anytime’ a reality. Finally, the next phase in the continuum of Learning Objects, Open Educational Resources (OER) was the emergence of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), with thousands of people signing up to participate. Two distinct types of MOOCs have now evolved: i) cMOOCs promoting connectivist learning (Siemens 2005) and ii) xMOOCs, which are more linear and didactic, such as those offered by Coursera.

So it is evident that technologies are transforming everything that we do. They provide mechanisms to enable new forms of communication and collaboration, along with providing rich multimedia presentation of information. There are now a wealth of tools to find, create, manage and share knowledge. We are operating in a networked, distributed, peer reviewed and open environment., which is complex, dynamic and evolving.

Figure 2 provides a nice illustration of the relationship between different technologies and traditional ways of communicating. So for example, LinkedIn equates to a professional contacts list, wordpress to a reflective diary, and Twitter to post it notes. Social and participatory media have a number of key characteristics, such as: being open, distributed, networked, participatory, social, complex, distributed and dynamic.

3 http://www.unesco.org/education/wef/en-conf/jomtien%20declaration%20eng.shtm

4

Figure 2: Mapping technologies to traditional forms of communication4

The annual New Media Consortium Horizon reports5 list the technologies that are likely to have the most impact in one, three and five years’ time. In the one-year timeframe Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) and tablets are listed as having the most impact in education. In the three-year timeframe, games/gamification and learning analytics will have the most impact. Finally, in the five-year timeframe, 3D printing and wearable technologies will have the most impact. A recent study6 looked at emergent technologies across four sectors: schools, tertiary education, the Vocational and Training (VET) sector, and adult education. They catagorised the use of technologies as follows:

Productivity and creativity Networked collaboration Content creation Visualisation and simulation Learning Management Systems Learning environment Games Devices, interfaces and connectivity

So it is evident that technologies are having an increasing impact on education and provide a variety of mechanisms for fostering communication and

4 http://wronghands1.wordpress.com/2013/03/31/vintage-social-networking/5 http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2013-horizon-report-HE.pdf6 http://www.menon.org/matel/

5

collaboration, and to enable learners to interact with content. The next section provides a meta-model of learning, which can be used to map how technologies can be used to foster different elements of learning.

A meta-model for learningFigure 3 shows the meta-model for learning (Conole, Dyke et al. 2004). The model consists of three dimensions of learning:

Learning individually or learning sociably Learning through information or through experience Non-reflective versus reflective learning. 

Figure 3: The meta-model of learning

Non-reflective learning needs unpacking. If I am driving across America, sub-consciously I am learning about American culture. If I am sitting in a bar in Spain, I am improving my Spanish through the conversations going on around me. It is what Jarvis calls ‘pre-conscious’ learning. The model can be used in two ways. Firstly, as a means of mapping an activity using a particular tool. For example a reflective blog would be individual, experience-based and reflective, whereas a group blog aggregating resources for a course would be social, information based and reflective. Secondly, it can be used to map different pedagogical models. Jarvis’ notion of pre-conscious learning (Jarvis 2004) maps to individual experience-based and non-reflective learning. Dewey’s reflective learning maps to individual, experience-based and reflective learning (Dewey 1916). Finally,

6

Laurillard’s dialogic learning maps to social, information-based and reflective learning (Laurillard 2002).

Four examples of how technologies can support different pedagogical approaches are now provided: drill and practice, mobile learning, situative learning, and immersive learning.

Drill and practice is an important approach to helping learners develop their knowledge. It is important, for example, in language learning in terms of learning vocabulary and conjugating verbs. There are now a range of tools to enable learners to work through interactive materials and get feedback on assessment of their learning. For example, the Open University, UK using Moodle as their Learning Management System (LMS). They have developed an e-assessment tool called OpenMark, more information about OpenMark and examples of how it can be used are available online.7 The OU UK claim that OpenMark differs from other e-assessment tools in the following ways:

The emphasis placed on feedback. All Open University students are distance learners and the university emphasises the importance of giving feedback on written assessments. The design of OpenMark assumes that feedback, at multiple levels, will be included.

Allowing multiple attempts. OpenMark is an interactive system, and consequently students are asked to act on feedback given 'there and then', while the problem is still fresh in their mind. If their first answer is incorrect, they can have an immediate second, or third, attempt.

The breadth of interactions supported. The OU aims to use the full capabilities of modern multimedia computers to create engaging assessments.

The design for anywhere, anytime use. OpenMark assessments are designed to enable students to complete them in their own time in a manner that fits with normal life. They can be interrupted at any point and resumed later from the same location or from elsewhere on the Internet.

There are now a rich range of sites to support language learning, which provide learners with rich interactive multimedia resources, assessment and feedback tools, and mechanisms to engage with other language learners. These include livemoch,8 babble,9 duilingo,,10 and busuu.11

Mobile learning and the ability to learn anywhere, anytime is now a reality with smart phones and tablet devices. At the University of Leicester, our Criminology department has issued iPads to all their Masters’ students. These students are working in dangerous parts of the world, where access to the Internet is often limited. All the materials the students need for their course are available on the

7 http://www.open.ac.uk/openmarkexamples/8 http://livemocha.com/9 http://www.babbel.com/10 http://duolingo.com11 http://www.busuu.com/enc/

7

iPads. Our Archeology department is using tablet with their students to enable them to collect data when they are doing fieldwork.

Virtual worlds, such as Secondlife, provide rich, authentic 3D environments, which can be used to support role-play and situated learning. The Swift project12 developed a virtual Genetics laboratory in SecondLife, where students can learn the basics of laboratory safety and also engage with virtual instruments to collect data. The jibbigo App13 can be used on a mobile device to provide instant translation of one language to another, both in text and audio.

Finally, in terms of immersive learning, Google have a tool called immersion,14 which translates parts of a web page into another language, you can oscillate between the language you are learning and your native language by hovering over the text.

The social milieuThe social environment, social context, socio-cultural context, or milieu, refers to ‘the immediate physical and social setting in which people live or in which something happens or develops. It includes the culture that the individual was educated or lives in, and the people and institutions with whom they interact’.15

So the digital milieu is a combination of the affordances of new media and an individual’s personal competences and preferences; each person has to find their own ‘digital voice’ and personal digital environment. They need to be able to navigate across the digital landscape; being clear about how different media are used. So interactions in facebook will differ from those in Twitter or Virtual Worlds. We each create our own ecological niche, we connect with different people for different reasons; each of us has an inner core of ‘friends’ and an outer set of acquaintances forming three different types of interactions, what Dron and Anderson refer to as Groups, Networks and Collectives (Dron and Anderson 2007). Goffman in particular stresses the deeply social nature of the individual environment and talks about the notion of ‘interaction rituals’ (Goffman 1976). He talks about the concept of ‘performance’, the way in which we interact and communicate with others online is a form of performance and relates to how we are perceived by others; each of us has an individual digital identity, which is the culmination of our interactions across different media.

12 http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/beyond-distance-research-alliance/projects/swift13 http://www.jibbigo.com/

14 https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/language-immersion-for-ch/bedbecnakfcpmkpddjfnfihogkaggkhl?hl=en15 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_environment

8

We leave visible digital trails as we interact online; a digital equivalent of Foucault’s concept of the ‘Panopticon’ , which refers to the concept of a design which allows a watchman to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether or not they are being watched (Foucault 1995). In the digital landscape our identity is fragmented across different media, we are connected in a complex set of social interactions with others, ranging from loosely connected to tightly bound communities.

Digital identity and presenceDigital identity is about how you present yourself online and how others perceive you. It emerges from the way you interact and communicate with others. Weller (2011) argues that digital identity has the following facets: reputation, impact, influence, productivity, and openness. Our professional identity has changed as a result of our interactions online. In the past a research paper published in a closed journal might only have a handful of readers. Articles published online can be access by hundreds, if not thousands of people. And there is a blurring of our personal and professional identity, particularly in sites like facebook. Weller (2011) argues that:

A key element to realising a strong online identity is an attitude of openness. This involved sharing aspects of personal life on social network sites, blogging ideas rather than completing articles and engaging in experiments with new media.

He goes on to argue (2011: 99) that digital identity is both distributed across multiple channels as well as usually having a central place (such as a blog). And he argues (2011: 136) that there are a number of facets associated with your digital identity: reputation, impact, influence and productivity.

So what is presence? Dictionary definitions include: i) The state or fact of being present; current existence or occurrence or ii) Immediate proximity in time or space.16 Neither of these really captures what I understand by presence. I think it is something more than this. This definition comes closer: ‘the bearing, carriage or air of a person; especially stately or distinguished bearing’.17

I am interested in the difference between presence face-to-face and online. In a face-to-face context presence is related to a number of factors. It’s about someone’s aura, their stance. It might be that someone has presence because they are tall, attractive, have a deep voice or it might be related to their intellect. We have all experienced the feeling of being effected by someone, being very aware of them, feeling a connection with them on a sub-conscious level.In the digital world presence is very different, it is conveyed primarily through text. Presence is channelled through your words and associated emoticons, etc. I often wonder how I am perceived online. What people make of the things I say, the pictures I post. What is my digital personality and how is it different from the

16 http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Presence+(album)17 http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/presence

9

way I interact face-to-face. I find online interactions liberating and different to the interactions I have with people face to face.

Of course technology plays a part. The affordances of different media enable or disenable certain types of interaction. So facebook is a good medium for sharing multimedia, Twitter requires you to speak in a certain way, with its limit of 140 characters. Virtual worlds provide a bridge to face-to-face interaction, via your avatar. The avatar you choose says something about you. Our digital presence is fragmented across these different media. The collective self is a culmination of these individual utterances. The way I speak on my blog is different to the postings I put on facebook or Twitter. They have different purposes and audiences. So what does ‘presence’ mean in a digital context? I think it is about how you are perceived by others through your interaction with them. Presence only has meaning in relation to others. It’s a social construct. For some people you will have presence, for others you don’t. It is all to do with whether your interactions have meaning for others.

Childs provides a useful overview of the concept of presence, along with related terms (Childs 2013a; Childs 2013). He defines immersion as the ‘sense of feeling submerged in an experience’. And goes on to suggest that immersion is something that happens in your head; two people can experience the same technology and one can feel immersed and the other one not, whereas for me presence is more about the impact someone has on you. As I have already said, it is socially constructed. I think this is closer to his use of the term ‘social presence’, which he defines as ‘what we project when we’re in an online environment about ourselves’. I think immersion has more to do with the sense of ‘being there’, whether it is immersing your self in a book or a film or participating in a Virtual World. He uses the term presence to describe the sense of being there. In particular, he suggests that presence is a combination of: mediated presence (“being there” aka immersion) + social presence (projection of ourselves, perception of others) + co-presence (being somewhere with others) + self-presence (or embodiment). Collins argues that place and presence become mixed up online (Collins 2008). She describes the ways in which we are digitally distributed:

So many places I’m in at once, and that’s just trying to keep things simple – we’re not even including all the asynchronous options. But if you asked me “Where are you right now?” the answer I’m likely to give depends on context – if you called me on the telephone or sent me an SMS I’d say I was at home, but if you IMd me the same question in Second Life, I’d say I was in Chilbo, and if you asked me on Gtalk or AIM or Twitter, I don’t even know which way I’d answer. BUT, the truth is, I’m am in all those places and locations and “mental spaces” simultaneously – and yet it’s not REALLY simultaneous because my attention can only be focused on one “space” at a time.. Or is that really true?

10

Moore (1989) lists three types of interaction: learner and teacher, learner and learner, and learner and content. Hillman et al. (1994) add a fourth: learner and interface.

Figure 4 shows the relationship between digital identity, interaction and presence. The figure shows how our digital identity will inform how we interact with others. For example, the degree to which we are formal or informal and the extent to which we are open or closed in our discussions. This in turn will have an impact on how we are perceived by others, i.e. our presence.

Figure 4: The relationship between digital identity, interaction and presence

Rhizomatic learning and connectivismThe nature of our personalised digital landscape or network is not static; it changes over time; we are constantly adapting and co-evolving with the technologies and through our network of peers. And as a result we develop, we learn, we adapt. Two key concepts in relation to our interactions online are the concepts of Rhizomatic learning (Cormier 2011) and Connectivism (Siemens 2005). In terms of Rhizomatic learning, Cormier argues that:

A rhizome is a stem of a plant that sends out roots and shoots as it spreads. This is analogous to how we interact online and in particular the way that ideas are multiple, interconnected and self-replicating. A rhizome has no beginning or end… like the learning process.

So we develop connections with people, who’s ideas are of interest to us. This might be through including them on a blogroll, facebook chatting ideas, liking or commenting on posts, or retweeting in Twitter. We build up connections with those that we have most in common with.

Connectivism is a useful analytic framework for understanding our interactions across this digital landscape. Siemens outlines eight key principles of Connectivism, how these apply to our interactions online are emphasised in italics:

1. Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions. Online we interact and connect with others through a variety of channels, co-constructing knowledge.

11

2. Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources. We connect both with people and with resources. Appropriating them for our own individual needs.

3. Learning may reside in non-human appliances. So in addition to others, an important part of our network are the tools and resources we use.

4. Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known. So it is recognising that we learn and develop through our network.

5. Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning. Being part of a social network is about reciprocity; contributing to the network, as well as using it.

6. Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill. And as such we need to develop the types of digital literacy skills Jenkins talks about, to harness the affordances of the media.

7. Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities. The net offers a powerful mechanism for developing skills and keeping up to date.

8. Decision-making is itself a learning process. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality. Which is about developing our own personal learning environment and critically reflecting on its development.

These concepts are particularly useful in terms of providing theoretical lenses with which to describe the nature of online interactions and the ways in which our online interactions change and adapt over time. They have been used in particular to describe the patterns of behaviour we see in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). MOOCs have no central site or learning pathway, participants can interact with the materials in a variety of ways and can contribute to the knowledge poor through a variety of outlets, for example Google Apps, blogs, Twiter, facebook, etc. The OLDS MOOC18 on Learning Design, which ran between January and March 2013, had the main content available in Google Docs, in addition the Cloudworks19 social networking site was used, along with Google Hangouts for weekly synchronous sessions.

The Community Indicators FrameworkIn order to better understand interactions in social networks we have developed a Community Indicators Framework (CIF) (Figure 5) (Galley, Conole et al. 2011). The CIF is built around four key aspects of community experience:

Participation, i.e. the ways in which individuals engage in activity Cohesion, i.e. the ties between individuals and the community as a whole Identity, i.e. how individuals perceive the community and their place

within it Creative capability, i.e. the ability of the community to create shared

artefacts, and shared knowledge and understanding.

18 http://olds.ac.uk19 http://cloudworks.ac.uk

12

Each of these aspects is interrelated and the whole reflects the multifaceted complexity of what we experience as community. We have argued that these aspects have a multiplicative effect on each other, in that the absence of one is likely to significantly impact on the presence of the others.

Figure 5 The Community Indicators Framework

In the paper we concluded that:

The notion of ‘community’ is complex and nebulous, especially in relation to online, open and transient communities.

And go on to state that:

Finally, we believe the CIF may also prove effective as a framework for supporting and guiding developing communities, as it expresses the tensions and challenges, which can emerge as communities evolve. A critical approach to these tensions and challenges may help to manage and limit risk to the community as people debate, discuss and work to create new knowledge together openly and online. For example a community may reflect on its progression and development using a series of facilitative prompts, activities and tasks informed by the CIF.

The paper up to now has critiqued the nature of online interactions, along with the associated notions of digital identity, presence and immersion. It has also argued that teachers need to develop a new set of digital literacies to be able to harness the power of social and participatory media. Clearly these media offer a wealth of ways in which learners can interact with multimedia, and

13

communicate and collaborate with peers. However, the reality is that these technologies are not being used extensively. The majority of use is replicating bad pedagogy, for example using a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE/Learning Management System (LMS) as a content repository. Teachers say they lack the time to experiment with incorporating technologies into their teaching. The reality is that they lack the necessary digital literacy skill to enable them to harness the power of social and participatory media. Teachers need guidance and support to make pedagogically informed design decisions that make innovative use of technologies. The next section introduces the 7Cs of Learning Design framework, which seeks to address this issue.

The 7Cs of Learning Design frameworkThis paper has described the ways in which we can interact online and the benefits of social and participatory media for learning and professional development. Clearly these media offer a rich set of ways in which learners can interact, however in reality teachers are not using social and participatory media extensively for learning. They need guidance and support to make informed design decisions that are pedagogically effective and make innovative use of technologies to support interaction, communicate and collaboration.

The 7Cs of Learning Design framework20 illustrates the key stages involved in the design process, from initial conceptualisation of a learning intervention through to trialing and evaluating it in a real learning context (Figure 6). The framework consists of the following stages:

1. Conceptualise: What is the vision for the learning intervention, who is it being designed for, what is the essence of the intervention, what pedagogical approaches are used?

2. Capture: What Open Educational Resources are being used and what other resources need to be developed?

3. Create: What is the nature of the learning intervention the learners will engage with? What kinds of learning activities will the learners engage with?

4. Communicate: What types of communication will the learners be using?5. Collaborate: What types of collaboration will be learners be doing?6. Consider: What forms of reflection and demonstration of learning are

includes? Are the learning outcomes mapped to the activities and assessment elements of the learning intervention?

7. Consolidate: How effective is the design? Do the different elements of the design work together?

20 A slidecaste presentation on the 7Cs framework is available online http://www.olds.ac.uk/the-course/week-3-ideate. In addition, the resources associated with the franework are also available online http://www2.le.ac.uk/projects/oer/oers/beyond-distance-research-alliance/7Cs-toolkit.

14

Figure 6: The 7Cs of learning design framework

For each of the seven stages we have developed a series of conceptual designs, building on our work and that of others in the field. Three of these are described here: the course features view, the course map view and the pedagogy profile view. The first is the course features view, which is associated with the conceptualise element of the 7Cs framework. This enables teachers to think about the overall essence of the learning intervention and how it will be delivered and supported. Participants interact with a pack of cards around the following elements:

1. Principles (Figure 7): What is the essence of the course, what are the core principles? So for example cultural or aesthetic aspects may be important, the intervention may have a practical focus or be about applying theory to practice, it may be based on a professional community of peers or it might be important that the intervention includes elements of serendipity.

2. Pedagogical approaches: What pedagogies are involved? For example is the intervention based on constructivist principles, is it problem or inquiry-based?

3. Guidance and support (Figure 8): What guidance and support are provided? For example in terms of a website or module handout, or access to study materials.

4. Content and activities: What kinds of activities are included and what content will the learners be using?

5. Reflection and demonstration: Are the learners actively encourage to reflect at key points? How are they demonstrating their learning? What forms of diagnostic, formative and summative assessment are included?

15

6. Communication and collaboration: How are the learners interacting with each other and their tutors? Are there any elements of collaboration included?

Figure 7" The principles associated with the learning intervention

Figure 8: Guidance and support

Once the course features view has been completed, teachers can fill in the course views map, which considers what Guidance and Support is provided, what Content and Activities the learners will engage with, what forms of Communication and Collaboration are included, and the types of Reflection and Demonstration. This includes details of which tools and resources are associated with each of the elements and any notes such as details of prerequisites required or description of the philosophy underpinning the learning intervention, for example it might be that peer interaction is deemed important or that learners are expected to generate their own materials.

The third example is the pedagogy or activity profile view (Figure 9). This enables teachers to map the types of activities the learners will engage with. There are six types: assimilative activities (reading, viewing, listening),

16

information handling, communicative, productive, experiential (such as drill and practice exercises) and adaptive (such as modeling or simulation). The profile also indicates the amount of time spent on assessment activities. The profile is available as an online flash widget.21

Figure 9: An example of a completed pedagogy profile

Storyboarding is a well-established approach to visually representing a temporal sequence of activities. For example, it is used in the film industry to represent the key sequences involved in a plot. Storyboarding is used in our Learning Design work, as a means of representing to overall design. It enables the teacher/designer to see how the different elements of the design process fit together. It consists of a timeline, with the activities included in the design along the middle (Figure 10). Learning outcomes are mapped to the assessment elements. Above the activities any inputs to the individual activities are include: for example reading materials or podcasts. Below the activities outputs are listed, for example contribution to a discussion forum or creation of a blog post.

21 http://www.rjid.com/open/pedagogy/html/pedagogy_profile_1_2.html

17

Figure 10: A Learning Design Storyboard

Evaluation of the framework and the associated resources indicates that it is welcomed and that the conceptual designs enable teachers to rethink their design practice to create more engaging learning interventions for their learners. The conceptual views can also be used with learners, to give them an indication of the nature of the courses they are undertaking. The activity profile is particularly useful as it enables learners to see the mix of different types of learning activities they will engage with.

ConclusionI would like to argue that we need to move beyond the notion of space and time when describing our interactions online. The theoretical constructs described in this paper provide a richer means of representing and understanding how we interact online. Key challenges face education and indeed society more generally. Education needs to prepare individuals for a constantly changing environment. Individuals will need to develop new digital literacy skills and in particular skills that enable them to be able to adapt, to retrain, as most will have more than one career change. Social and participatory media have an important role to play; providing individuals with a rich, distributed ecology of resources and expertise that they can draw on. We now truly have what Salomon described as ‘distributed cognition’ (Salomon 1993), between our minds and our digital network.

It is evident that technologies provide a rich set of ways in which learners and teachers can interact with materials, and ways to communicate and collaborate.

18

As this paper has shown, technologies can foster a range of different pedagogical approaches. The nature of our interactions online is complex and dynamic and related to our digital identity and presence. The nature of learning, teaching and research is fundamentally changing as a result of the impact of technologies. The nature of education is changing as a result of free resources and expertise. New business models are emerging which are challenging traditional educational institutes. In a world in which content and expertise is increasingly free, what is the role of a traditional institution? We are adopting more open practices and are part of a global distributed community of peers. We need to embrace the power of new technologies and learn to adopt more open practices. The 7Cs of Learning Design framework and associated tools described in this paper provides a means of guiding teachers in their design practice, so that they can make informed design decisions, that are pedagogical effective and make good use of new technologies.

ReferencesChilds, M. (2013). Immersion, presence and immersiveness, available at http://markchilds.org/2013/03/29/immersion-presence-and-immersiveness/. The body electric.

Childs, M. (2013). More on presence, available at http://markchilds.org/2013/04/01/more-on-presence/. The body electric.

Childs, M. and A. Peachey (2011). Reinventing ourselves: contemporary concepts of indentity in Virtual Worlds. New York, Springer.

Collins, C. (2008). Public Twitter Station in Second Life: The “Presence” Problem. Fleep's deep thoughts.

Conole, G. and P. Alevizou (2010) Review of the use(s) of Web 2.0 in Higher Education.

Conole, G., M. Dyke, et al. (2004). "Mapping pedagogy and tools for effective learning design." Computers and Education 43(1-2): 17-33.

Cormier, D. (2011). Rhizomatic learning - why we teach? Dave's education blog: education, post-structuralism and the rise of the machines. http://davecormier.com/edblog/2011/11/05/rhizomatic-learning-why-learn/.

de Freitas, S. and P. Maharg (2011). Digital Games and Learning. London and New York, Continuum Press.

Dewey, J. (1916). Experience and Nature. New York, Dover.

Dron, J. and T. Anderson (2007). Collectives, networks and groups in social software for e-Learning. Proceedings of World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education Quebec. Retrieved Feb. 16: 2008.

19

Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York, Vintage Books.

Galley, R., G. Conole, et al. (2011). "Community Indicators: A framework for building and evaluating communiyt activity on Cloudworks." Interactive Learning Environments.

Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Hillsdale, New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum Associated.

Goffman, B. E. (1976). see especially Interaction Rituals, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

Hillman, D. C., D. J. Willis, et al. (1994). "Learner-interface interaction in distance education: an extension of contemporary models and strategies for practitioners." The American Journal of Distance Education 8(2): 30-42.

Jarvis, P. (2004). Adult education and lifelong learning. London, RoutledgeFalmer.

Jenkins, H. (2009). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century, Mit Pr.

Laurillard, D. (2002). Rethinking university teaching, Routledge %@ 0415256798, 9780415256797.

Littlejohn, A. (2003). Reusing online resources: a sustainable approach to e-learning, RoutledgeFalmer.

Moore, M. (1989). "Three types of interaction." American Journal of Distance Education 3(2): 1-6.

O'Reilly, T. (2004). The architecture of particaption.

O'Reilly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0 - Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software.

Salomon, G., Ed. (1993). Distributed cognitions - pyschological and educational considerations. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Siemens, G. (2005). "Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age." International journal of instructional technology and distance learning 2(1): 3–10.

Weller, M. (2011). The digital scholar - how technology is changing academic practice. London, Bloomsbury Academic.

20

21