Carsten Ullrich from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. This is a slightly adapted version of a talk he gave at the recent WWW2008 in China.<\/p>\n
Carsten’s slides are available at http:\/\/www.slideshare.net\/ullrich<\/a><\/p>\n Carsten is based in the e-learning lab – looking at how learning can be made easier and more interactive using technology. Recently they have been looking at Web 2.0 technologies\/approaches in learning. What they found is that these approaches were transformational – you have to change the way you teach to use these approaches.<\/p>\n Carsten is going to cover:<\/p>\n Starting with an outline of ‘Learning Management Systems’ – these support teacher centered ‘administered learning’ – if a lesson is ‘mastered’ then the student is allowed to continue – very typical ‘knowledge transfer’ paradigm, where teacher imparts wisdom to student.<\/p>\n An alternative approach is ‘Cognitive Tutors’ – built to support cognitive learning theories. These are very expensive to build – getting and encoding the principals of the theories into software is difficult.<\/p>\n What about Web 2.0? Often associated with constructivism – learner centred, emphasises collaboration and in-context learning, teachers provide assistance, advice etc.<\/p>\n When the e-learning lab looked at this they could not find an analysis of the technological foundations of Web 2.0 from an educational perspective. So first question ‘what is Web 2.0’ – looking at comments from Tim Berners-Lee and Tim O’Reilly – they adapted the characterisation of Tim O’Reilly.<\/p>\n Web 2.0 stimulates individual creativity – enabling and facilitating active participation. The value of a web 2.0 service increases the more people are using it.<\/p>\n From an education perspective there is a large potential peer network.<\/p>\n The web provides diverse data on an ‘epic scale’ – huge variety of data, via browser and APIs, often annotated, and increasingly semantic and\/or linked. From education – lots of information sources, access to data from real contexts which can be integrated into learning.<\/p>\n Web 2.0 supports the ‘architecture of assembly’. You can get students to combine data sources, but more importantly researchers\/tutors can build rapid prototypes to try out.<\/p>\n Carsten illustrating what an iGoogle based ‘PLE’ (Personal Learning Environment) for language learning could look like – emphasising ease of ‘drag and drop’ approach iGoogle supports.<\/p>\n Web 2.0 takes a ‘perpetual beta’ approach – continual improvements\/refinements to software. For education this can be confusing and distracting.<\/p>\n Some additional principles of web 2.0:<\/p>\n Moving on, what can Web 2.0 do for research?<\/p>\n Lots of available services available (often free), which can easily be combined to deliver new functionality. Again, prototypes can be built very quickly.<\/p>\n Two examples:<\/p>\n Authoring learning resources is time consuming and difficult task. Need to:<\/p>\n So, they designed a method for lecturers to use delicious to bookmark resources, using predefined tags which represented:<\/p>\n Used prefixes to allow effective filtering: “sjtu:”<\/p>\n Within the LMS for each page about concept c, look up resources in del.icio.us and add them on the page. Very simple – almost no effort to develop prototype.<\/p>\n The lecturer feedback was good. However, they found that students don’t look up external resources if the textbook is good enough – so need to concentrate on courses where the textbook doesn’t give enough coverage.<\/p>\n The e-learning lab implemented a twitter-update downloader to store all twitter updates in database, plus automatic grading based on number of updates. This was based on the Twitter API – but there were limitations (could only extract the last 20 messages), so they had to do work screen scraping the web interface as well.<\/p>\n They got 98 students out of 110 participating; 5574 updates during 7 weeks. about 50% students sent 1-19 updates, and 50% sent 20-99 updates, but a few ‘power users’ who sent 100+<\/p>\n Only 5% of students felt it didn’t achieve the aims (sense of community etc.). 50% stated they communicated with native speakers – although Carsten thinks that only 5% were actually having real ‘dialogue’ in this context (based on log analysis).<\/p>\n The main criticism was that there wasn’t enough ‘correction’ of mistakes (interesting, because this seems to suggest students would have liked some more ‘knowledge transfer’ elements?<\/p>\n Web 2.0 services can stimulate active participation – Twitter usage continued after lecture. But saw users drifting ‘off topic’ – e.g. posts in other languages, pejorative messages<\/p>\n They found that students didn’t make use of the ‘architecture of assembly’ – e.g. didn’t reuse to show on blog.<\/p>\n\n
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Social Bookmarking for Learning Object Annotation<\/h3>\n
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Micro-blogging for Language Learning<\/h3>\n
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Lessons learned<\/h3>\n
Totuba Toolkit<\/h3>\n