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Vollständiges Transkript und die Folien
meines Vortrag auf der EADL Conference 2012
EADL Conference 2012 "The relevance of social media for distance learning" by Dörte Giebel from Dörte Giebel
Dear collegues from all over Europe,
I am very pleased to
take part at my second EADL Conference – my first one was the one in
Paris, 2006. I am very thankfull for this invitation and for having the
chance to discuss my ideas and my questions about social media and
distance learning with you.
So first of all: Why me? In the run-up of this event I tried to list up my references fort his topic:
I am a 40plus digital immigrant – like most of you are. But I am quite social media addicted and a heavy user of social media and social networks. As I have been working in the field of public relations for over ten years I have explored over this time the growing relevance of social media for corporate communication – and I decided two years ago to combine and merge this knowlege and to mobilize my virtual network for a special project: the development of a distance learning course with the degree „Social Media Manager“ at the ILS in Hamburg. By the way: This distance learning school – ILS – has payed my salery fort he last ten months as I am the new customer relationship and community manager at this distance learning school. Beyond that I am an active part of an international so called edupunk network and deeply influenced by the ideas of Georg Siemens and Stephen Downes – the two innovators of massive open online courses (so called MOOCs). I will come back to these ideas later on...
Let me start with a provocation:
For sure I am not the
first one talking at an eadl conference about social media concerning
distance learning – and doubtlessly you all have an idea of using social
software to enhance your distance learning courses. On the other hand
we all know that most of the pioneering work still has to be done – and
we should be honest: Most of the pioneer work is currently done
by schools and universities with an original portfolio of in-class
courses, courses with compulsory attendence.
Why that?
Because they are used to
the idea of peer-to-peer interaction and collaboration in learning
communities – so they simply bring these concepts into virtual or online
environments. For a paper-driven distance learning provider
with a portfolio of self-learning materials and the idea of one-to-one
lessons it is not that easy to change a successfull business modell
during ongoing operations.
But:
We all know that new generations of distance learners expect from us
that we include digital learning technologies – and when I am saying
„learning technologies“ I do not think of computer or web based
self-learning programms without any human contact but of collaboration
tools like wikis, blogs, newsgroups, lifestreaming or virtual
classrooms. We should have left behind the academic discussions about
eLearning – we are amidst a changing mode of digital communication worldwide.
Two trends make this change obvious: the growing number of Facebook members and the growing number of users of mobile devices.
For sure the brand Facebook is only an episode... But we must admit that Facebook finally has changed the understandig of beeing connected via internet – generation-spanning: Nearly
900 million Facebook users over the world, every other in the USA has
got a facebook account, one of four in Europe (remember: even babies are
counted here!). The everage age of Facebook users is 29 and a half.
The other point: Smartphones and tablets. They have changed the understanding of being availible.
They have opend new options for ad hoc informing and interacting. Just
remember: The iPhone is just five years old, the iPad just two years.
But most of us and of our target groups already get used to be online
where ever they go. And they expect others – they expect us – to be online when they are...
1. Definitions: Social Software – Social Media – Social Networks
Let’s do just one intermediate step and have a look at some definitions:
What is social media in dissociation from social software?
Social Software enables
people to build up communities and networks and to publish user
generated content and share this with others. It enables people to work
together at the same documents (and even in real-time) in a very
democratic or non-hierarchical way.
Social Media just means social software that is publicly available via internet and enables everyone to publish one‘s own created content to the public.
Or the other way round: Social Software ist Social Media used in a closed area without any public access.
To go a step further: Is there a difference between Social Media and Social Networks?
Some experts want to reserve the term Social Media
to the idea of publishing and sharing of content in terms of pieces of
work (literature, pictures videos and so on), with a focus on the user
generated content and the distribution of this content. Best examples
are YouTube for videos and Flickr for pictures.
Whereas Social Networks
represent the idea of connecting and interacting, with a focus on the
person (profil) and the relationships (social graph). Well known
examples are Facebook or LinkedIn.
So you might want to
differenciate between social media and social network to clearify your
goals for the usage. If you like it that differenciated than you should –
in my opinion – distinguish a third group: collaboration platforms or tools. They
are made for working together at the same documents with the purpose of
getting one piece of work out of it. Examples are Google Docs or
Piratepad.net ... I love PiratePads as they are really easy to use. You
should have a look at that: piratepad.net
Anyway, I will go on talking about social media as an umbrella term...
The are some key words connected with social media all of you might know:
- The idea of a Platform providing of space and technique
- The idea of user generated content as nonprofessionally produced content
- The idea of friends simply to translate as a reciprocal suscription of the content anybody publishes...
- The idea of sharing, rating and through this curating the content published by others
- The idea of a status update as a public notification of what somebody is doing at the moment – including automatically generated notifications which document somebody downloaded or which wheter somebody received a new grade
- And of course corresponding to that the idea of a timeline as a stream of suscribed content
- The idea of a community and of a Social Graph mapping of how you are related to others at social media
- The idea of open source as open access at no charge and with the permission to use and edit content without any copy rights
These key words lead us to the main mind-set behind social media – if we talk about social media not as a technique but as a culture (expressed in the Cluetrain Manifesto, 1999). The mind-set behind social media is the idea of non-hierarchical publishing and communication with open access to all sources.
2. Relevance for whom....?
Back to distance learning we have to clarify the question for whom in the distance learning process social media might be relevant:
- for the students?
- for the course developers and authors, teachers, tutors and lecturers?
- for the marketing chief or the customer relationship manager?
Off course for all of them!
1. Social
Media enlarge the scope of peer-to-peer communication and of building
learning communities – a very important aspect for students who dont’t
need to feel lonesome anymore and who have nowaday the chance to be
connected with the other course participants and to learn and work
together.
In a way this development is not only a chance, but even a challange or a provocation... I give you an example:
A few weeks ago I was
told about a distance learning university with an empty online campus.
What happend? The answer is simple: The students started to meet at
Facebook. They could-shoulder the learning platform of the university
and founded a facebook group. One evening at a regulars table a tutor of
this distance learning university saw students looking magnetized at
their smartphones – shouting out every minute the increasing number of
group members – in the meantime, inbetween some weeks, the newsgroups
and boards at the online campus have degenerated into a desert... What
would you suggest to this university?
The first lesson to learn is: Distance learning students nowadays get used to smart public software socutions for networking and collaboration. So they need very good reasons to use another platform,
the platform offered by you if they feel more comfortable with Facebook
or whatever. So if you are interested in their commitment you should
offer them options at your platform which they wouldn’t want to miss and
which they can’t find at at their favored social network.
The second lesson to learn is: Think open!
Is there really a need to control the spaces where your students
network and work together? Why should a distance learning school any
longer try to bond their students at a closed platform? The development
of social media gives us the chance to think about concepts which allow
students to bring along their own digital learning equipment, their
personal learning environment (PLE).
But of course it is still your
business – the business of the distance learning school or highschool –
to bring the content, the exercises and the people together, to guide
and to empower the students to communicate and to collaborate
efficiently via internet.
That leads me
to the answer of the second question: Are social media relevant for the
course developers and authors, teachers, tutors and lecturers?
Again: YES! Why or better: how?
Social Media change the way of preparing, presenting and publishing the learning content.
Three main chances and challanges for developers and tutors come along with social media:
First of all:
the revival of the learning community accompanied with the need to
implement classroom-based methods of knowledge transfer. This
can simply be the duty to fill a wiki and to discuss in a newsgroup or
board. That’s what we did with the distance learning course „Social
Media Manager“. The first version of the Wiki was simply the glossary
written by the authors of the textbooks. From then on the students had
to complete the artikels... And as we all know the WikiPedia, this is a
never ending story...
More sophisticated are
formats like WebQuests – a type of excercie which guides students to
organize their new knowledge by their own research. The students have to
work out the solutions rather than just acquiring information by
memorizing fact-laden instructional materials or watching ex-cathedra
teaching videos (Frontalunterricht).
The second challenge is the idea of openess. The social media age is also the age of open source. To say it in the words of David Wiley, Associate Professor of Instructional Psychology & Technology at Brigham Young University and founder of the Open High School of Utah: „With
the growth of open source software and other related trends a culture
of openess is advancing from the edges of society to the core of
academic culture.“
I guess you all have
heard of the Khan Academy with its slogan „Watch. Practice. Learn almost
everything for free.“ Some universities already pioneer the field of
open content by offering their lecture scripts and videostreams of
lectures for free. This business modell is driven by the idea of
teaching as a service not as a product – and this ist he way we should
think about distance learning. Don’t worry: As the content is for free
the people are still willing to pay: for feedback, support, community
management, fort he exams, the certificate... For sure this provoces a
totally different business modell – and this is what the new internet
age forces us to think about.
But instead of
discussing business modells for open content I want to put another idea
across: Have you ever thought of opening your courses to the people outside
of your courses? Social media is a great chance to bring your students
into contact to external experts and to a larger peer-group to broaden
the horizonts of your students and to expand discussions and
collaborative work.
The University
Tübingen in Germany (NOT a distance learning university!) made this
experiment last year: One course about workplace learning of the degree
programm „Psychology“ was opend to the masses at the internet. With the
help of a blog, a hashtag at twitter to tag all tweets concerning the
course and a group at a bookmarking platform the two worlds – the
students and the web people – were hold together.
Well, please keep in
mind my third point – that social media are the better learning tools –
and have a look at the third group for whom social media are – or should
be – relevant: the marketing people.
Social Media implicate new requirements for referral marketing and customer relationship management.
Why?
Social media provide publicity. That’s it.
To empower your students to use social media during their studies means
to provoke them to notify publicly that they study at your school, that
they like your course, that your content and your service is excellent.
Hopefully it is...
Just a little charming
example: We ad the first graduate at the social-media-course last month
and the first she did was tweeting about her success. Of course I
congratulated her – and as one of our followers saw that we were asked
where you can pass this course – the answer: At the ILS!
From Twitter to blogs and just some words about blogging! What I discovered is that a blog is a great opportunity to focus and hold together a group of learners.
That’s for example what I do by blogging about social media issues
around the distance learning course „Social Media Manager“ and by
offering the adress of this blog to all my students from the very
beginning. ... It works. They get linked.
I know that there are
some other experts in other sectors who work as distance learning tutors
and who are blogging as well. As more and more people get used to this
medium and accept blogs as a serious way of publishing high-value
content, I think it could be the right time to widen this option to make
the know-how of our authors and tutors more visible and to link with
the students – the current and the potencial ones – via blogging.
What you see here is a
blog post about the development of one of the textbooks of the social
media course... I arranged it as an open process with samples of the
text so my readers could discuss it with me. I was inspired to do this
by a collegue from another distance learning school. Anne Oppermann,
maybe some of you know her, from the Fernstudienakademie in Münster,
Germany, has been blogging about the process of developing a new
distance learning course for more than a year now. This provokes a lot
of publicity besides all the feedback of her community and the fantastic
search engine optimizing...
Ok, now a backword roll to the aspect of social media as the better learning tools:
Course developers should be aware of the fact that the best learning platforms already excist
– for free – so there is no need to blow money into a indiviudal
solution that at the end is much weaker... but only if you are willing
to think open and if you are without fear to loose the control over what
your students do while they are using the internet to learn.
Lets have a look at the annual survey of Jane Heart: „Top 100 Tools for Learning 2011“ based on the contributions of learning professionals worldwide.
- Twitter - micro-sharing site
- YouTube - video-sharing tool
- Google Docs – collaboration suite
- Skype - instant messaging/VoIP tool
- WordPress - blogging tool
- Dropbox - file synching software
- Prezi - presentation software
- Moodle - course management system
- Slideshare - presentation sharing site
- (Edu)Glogster - interactive poster tool
- Wikipedia - collaborative encyclopaedia
- Blogger/Blogspot - blogging tool
- diigo - social annotation tool
- Facebook - social network
- Google Search - search engine
- Google Reader - RSS reader
- Evernote - note-taking tool
- Jing - screen capture tool
- PowerPoint - presentation software
- Gmail - web-based email service
- LinkedIn - prof social network
- Edmodo - edu social networking site
- Wikispaces - wiki tool
- Delicious - social bookmarking tool
- Voicethread - collaborative slideshows
- Google+ - social network
- Animoto - videos from images
- Camtasia- screencasting tool
- Audacity - sound editor/recorder
- TED Talks - inspirational videos
Above the first 30
tools the tools at the places 2, 3, 12, 15, 16, 20 and 26 belong to
Google. Combining these tools Google offers a complex personal learning
environment including a collaboration suite and a virtual classroom that
is able to replace Adobe Connect. So basically all you have to do is to
instruct your students how to use google efficiently...
3. Add on or core element?
But of course you all
have already produced your own individual social software as you all
offer a form of learning platform or online campus. But before we all go
a step further on we should be honest about the pivotal question: Do we
adopt social software as an add on? Or as a core element of our
distance learning courses?
The typical way to include social software – or even social media – is the use as an add on, simply wrapping the social media elements arround the established methods and processes:
o Staging
a password protected learning platform with newsgroups and boards
without any content management or community management and for the
optional use only.
o Or
setting up a Facebook page (or Twitter, or YouTube ...), but with the
usual one way marketing communication and without any further strategies
for community building or market research.
Regarding social
software or social media as an add on has the following typical effects:
Ignoration, misuse and damage of image.
Ignoration means:
Students don‘t develop and capitalise the opportunities – and that
means: Only few of them interact with each other or with the school. Lack
of time is an important issue for distance learners. So if they do not
realize the advantage of using the offered social software (or if the
software is too complicated and the instructions manual too
incomprehensible) the ambitious ones go on learning on their own, only
the uncertain ones (ort he lazy ones) cry for help – and the kindhearted
ones help them... Is this the effect you want to provoke by offering social software?
The other typical effect I mentioned is: Misuse
Misuse means:
Students feel like talking off the records so they use the offered
platform to moan and to complain or even for the try to deal with
solutions of the tests... This moaning and complaining of course
irritates the new students. This has nothing to do with a constructional
peer-to-peer learning process. And if you let such complaining
uncommented you risk a
... damage to your image!
Another special effect of your offered social software as an add on is emptiness.
Newsgroups or boards without any content intensify feelings of
lonlyness and lack of interest on the part of the school or the tutors.
Do you remember the
story of the fast growing facebook group and the empty learning platform
on the other hand? The main question is: Why should students build up
their network at a learning platform when they can do better at
Facebook? Is there any benefit of the network platform you offer? Have
you any further features or tools Facebook hasn’t which help studying
the way you want them to study? Any excercises or challanges they need
to fullfill by using your platform? No? So you won’t see them again...
Does that matter? Yes, because they pay for the course and therefore
have some expactations... Maybe you do – but your students don’t think
of distance learning as a product, fort hem it’s a service! They want to
experience the value in excess of the lecture notes. And as they become
more and more used to smart social media solutions these expectations
should be thought-provoking for you...
To be honest: If you
haven’t done your homework to integrate social software as a core
element of your distance learning methods I would strongly advise
against taking a step forward! Using social media just as an add on has
got the same negativ effects – but now these effects are public at once!
And some more wagging fingers for you...
If you are willing and disposed to integrate social media in the distance learning process, be aware of the following aspects:
- First of all: You need a community! à Be sure that there are enough students to revive your concepts.
- Than, of course, be aware of too much scheduling in form of live-online-events. à Don‘t loose your core benefit – the flexibility!
- And be prepared for new questions about privacy and security!
- Above that you need course developers and tutors with corrresponding skills.
4. Some visonary thoughts
Let me end up my lecture with some visionary thoughts:
To argue with a quotation of Georg Siemens: „Connections are the central point from which we need to cast an educational system.“
And these are my words: Distance learning is no longer a product it is a
service. And social software and social media are the tools to give a
better service than ever before...
Social Software has the power to change the distance learning world as it brings back the idea of learning together and from one another. We all are social beeings and so our learning processes are.
Rethink your
didactical concepts of your learning media mix and of the communications
and colaboration you make possible! The other way round:
If
you go on offering text books full of excercises the students have to
do for their own and if you go on offering a one-to-one contact to the
tutor as the only
connection that is really necessary to get a degree at the end – than
you stick to a modell that servces the institution well but not the
learners.
Social media and the rising culture of digital communication have the power to enhance the concepts of distance learning:
- With social media you can guide your students to what they really need in the future: the ability to build networks and to learn with and from people widespread all over the world.
- With social media you can train the ability of using modern technologies for a lifelong – formal or informal – learning process.
- With social media you can encourage your students to build up a personal learning environment that can be extended even after the finish of a formal training or study.
In a nutshell: Don’t
miss the chance to make your students fit for a knowledge-based economy
where digital communication, virtual teamwork and knowledge management
via internet is taken for granted!
We distance learning
experts have been so often so proud of the skills our students develop
as side effects: excellent time management, high intrinsic motivation,
purposefulness... Using social media our distance learning courses will
breed more skills, new skills needed in a new era of economy and working
world.
So at the end it is
clear now, that discussing the relevance of social media affects all
three main areas this conference wants to focus on:
· Learning media· Service and tutoring
· Business model
Thank you!
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