It took some time for all this to change, publishers started to realise in most areas paid content was not the way to go, as there were enough ways for Internet users to get the same information for free, so step by step, content was available free of charge. Obviously, quality content is hard to find on the Internet, but it is out there and at the moment we do not have to pay for it. But how long will this last?

Considering how much we take all this for granted by now, it comes as a shock that Rupert Murdoch wants to turn back the clock now. Obviously, billionaires are amongst the most greedy people there are, but seeing as he doesn’t know the least bit about the Internet, I think he is being rather presumptuous in proposing newspaper content should be turned into paid content again. As yet, this only seems to work for special interest papers, and although I absolutely agree with critics who say a lot of content on the internet is just crap, I do not believe a general switch back to paid content is a solution to these problems. For me, it is rather a question of the right attitude towards the content, and I doubt that will change by simply putting a price tag on each and every article.

So why is this related to education and thus worth a post on this blog? Well, I think all English teachers – maybe all teachers – should read his books, especially the latter ones, in which he describes his career as a teacher. Rarely have I read more enthusiastic, more dedicated, yet still convincing accounts of the job: It’s hard, it’s a struggle, it’s a job you probably would like to quit every other week, but if you stick to it, it’s still rewarding. Know what you sign up for, and you’ll manage.

Thanks, Teacher Man. Say Hi to DNA for me.

Communities of Practice

During my research for this task I mostly stuck with different constructivist theories, and decided to chose Wenger’s and Lave’s “Communities of Practice” for my usecase. This theory was first developed during the 1990s, though Wenger states that “the phenomenon it refers to is age-old”¹. Communities of Practice (CoP) are groups of people with a common interest, who interact with each other to share their learnings and thus learn from each other’s experience as well as their own practice.

Wenger continues with defining three characteristics as crucial for a group of people to be defined as CoP²:

1. the shared domain, which is basically the topic the whole thing is about. A group of friends who are meeting weekly to catch up with each other is not, in itself, a CoP.
2. the community, which stresses the need of interaction – a single web page that was once created and remains static may have once originated from a CoP, but does not continue to be one automatically; the CoP ceases to exist without discussions, feedback, and/or other types of interaction. This, however, does not mean the members of the CoP frequently work together – it may well be they usually work on their own and just discuss their results on a regular basis.
3. the practice, as it is also part of the name, is the third pivotal element for a CoP: it does not suffice for a group of people to share a common interest – it is also essential that the people are practitioners. For example, a group of friends who go to football games and discuss these games afterwards in a pub are not necessarily a CoP, but if they all play football themselves, they are – and the discussions are higly likely to differ from the ones of the non-player group.

Usecase

The first thing that came to mind for me was using a CoP for A-level courses in arts. At that age, the students usually get projects to work on on their own, and depending on what these projects are, they sometimes cannot bring them to class meetings, so discussion of their work in progress is rather hard. If, for example, the task is to design furniture, many students are likely to create pieces of furniture that are too big or too heavy to carry around every other day.

If in this case the students create blogs, they can document their progress on them and also add pictures, and others can comment on the results. That way, they can also discuss difficulties and help each other solve problems that might arise for several of them. In addition, with this thorough documentation of the process, the teacher is able to grade a project, even if at the end a minor problem causes the whole thing to fail – or literally fall to pieces -, as in arts classes, the concept is almost as important as the product, and just because a student had difficulties with doing the actual building does not mean they necessarily have to fail the whole project.

For example, if a student designs a bed, but miscalculates the necessary strength of the material to actually hold a person, causing the whole thing to fall to pieces the first time it is being sat on, it can obviously not be an outstanding work, but also should not be a fail grade if the idea is great and the only problem was that the student could not build it correctly. In addition, when the whole process is being documented and discussed by the whole class, chances are others realise such errors and point them out to the student before the project has to be handed in.

¹ http://www.ewenger.com/theory/

² ibid.

• How can adults be “taught” to use the internet not like classical media?

First of all, the only way to teach anybody to use the Internet properly is to have them get to know it thoroughly and discover the opportunities at hand. Nobody can be expected to embrace the usage of a technique they have not even understood yet. This goes not only for adults, there are still a lot of students who also prefer their classical media. Even if they are digital natives, they still have spent a lot more time using books and paper than computers. Nicole Melander¹ recently wrote a blog post on her experience with offering online exams, reporting that still more than 50% preferred doing it on paper.

• How do educational blogs have to be changed to increase active participation – and I talk only about comments and discussions?

Assuming that people are able to use the Internet properly, increasinf active participation can only be achieved through posting relevant content. Skimming through educational blogs at the moment, this can be observed pretty well: Bloggers who only put links on their pages and tell their readers “Oooh, look at this neat little thing” without asking questions hardly get any responses, or if the do these merely include the odd “Thanks, that was awesome”. On the other hand, if a blogger discusses relevant topics on their blog, readers tend to participate in it. Looking at a blog like Jose Picardo’s Box of Tricks², you can see many of his posts are being discussed.

Admittedly, as yet I have mostly seen this with blogs aimed at fellow teachers, hardly with ones aimed at students. Nevertheless, I think relevance is the key to getting active participation from the audience.

• What are the fears of adults to write a blog? How can they be reduced?

I would say adults mostly fear data theft and related issues, which again could be solved by teaching them how to do it properly.

• How does a virtual learning environment look like which motivates adults to write their own blog or even participate at all? What does adults motivate to share their thoughts and learning experiences?

Again: Relevance! Only those who expect to gain something by using VLEs and PLNs are going to use them.

¹ http://digitalmindsblogger.blogspot.com/2009/04/is-online-exam-harder.html

² e.g. http://www.boxoftricks.net/?p=973

Nevertheless, there were some blogs I found which seemed to be somewhat successful approaches to using technology in non-IT subjects:

• Grundkurs Deutsch (http://gk-deutsch.blogspot.com/).

The owner of Grundkurs Deutsch is Peter Ringeisen, teacher in Bavaria, who has set up this blog in 2004 and has been using it with several courses. The layout is quite plain, and it is a mixture of student-generated content and recommendations posted by the teacher (aka rip). The student-generated content is often just written homework, so not really very Web 2.0-y, but sometimes they create videos or share recommendations about books etc. The teacher posts new tasks or interesting projects from other schools. He’s doing the same for his Leistungskurs Englisch (http://djd-elks.blogspot.com/), and the students there seem to get even more into the community aspect of using a blog for their course.

All in all, these blogs certainly aren’t perfect, but students make frequent use of them, so it obviously works and is at least a step in the direction of using EdTech in school.

In addition, I thought these were quite interesting:

• Universities will be ‘irrelevant’ by 2020: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705298649/Universities-will-be-irrelevant.html?pg=1

Not exactly about our topic, but nevertheless on the changes in education that come with new technologies in general. A professor predicts that universities will become obsolete for learning as such, but will keep their status as an important institution for those who wish to get a degree. So basically, we wil be able to learn anything we want for free in the near future, as long as it’s just for our personal gain. We will only have to pay fees in order to sit exams which will give proof we actually learned and which we will still need for job applications.

• The Edublogs Magazine: http://magazine.edublogs.org/

At first glance, this does not seem to be very interesting for our purpose, as the first and quite lengthy post is on PowerPoint, and frankly makes you wonder whether the author is really skilled to write about EdTech, seeing as he can’t even seem to find the “More” button to hide this long and ugly post from eyes that aren’t interested. Several of the other posts make you wonder similar things, such as “Can someone who says Twitter is a chat tool actually be trusted to talk about it any further?”, but it is nevertheless a decent source for interesting blogs. The following two recommendations are taken from it.

• The Networked Teacher: http://magazine.edublogs.org/2008/02/02/visualizing-the-networked-teacher/

This image illustrates today’s teacher, or at least how today’s teachers could be networked, if they actually used all this. It’s taken from the doctoral dissertation of A. Couros (http://www.scribd.com/doc/3363/DissertationCourosFINAL06WebVersion), whom I recommend following on Twitter (courosa).

• Is there a doctor on board? Twitter as part of your PLN: http://tbarrett.edublogs.org/2007/12/21/is-there-a-doctor-on-board-twitter-as-part-of-your-personal-learning-network/

I first found tombarrett through courosa on Twitter, but just like the latter, he keeps popping up when you search for information on Web 2.0 tools that can be used in school. He mainly uses Twitter for his own PLN, not in class, and explains in this post, how and why microblogging can be useful for teachers.

Not surprisingly, most of these articles lay – even if sometimes just inadvertently – stress on the community needed for decent results of VLNs. After all, a network is only a network if there are several participants in it.

If it’s a three-digit-number, one should probably not even bother checking those people out. But if it’s just a chosen few, chances are, these few are interesting enough to give following them a shot. And of course, this goes for the second, third or fourth degree of separation as well.

If they are following too large a number of people, one can still downsize the number of pages worth checking out by looking at their tweets: Who are they @replying to, or who are they referring to when tweeting links?

This way, thanks to ralfa’s tweet I found mrslwalker and three more people I am now following. I am really looking forward to finding more useful information out there.

To start with, a blog is a special kind of website, which can be edited very easily, and which is often used as a kind of online journal in private context or as a way of listing news in professional/semi-professional context. Usually, the entries (i.e. blog posts) are listed bottom to top, so the first one users see when visiting a blog is the most recent one. Most bloggers make use of the possibility to use comments on their blogs, thus making it an interactive platform on which all readers can communicate with each other.

For some people, when it was new, being a part of the blogosphere seemed to equal being part of online life in general; people felt it necessary to have a blog to show their communities what was going on in their lives ( – hence the title). Interestingly enough, as the whole concept of Web 2.0 spreads, especially to professional usage, which seems to be completely against the general idea of it, some of the pioneers turn their backs on it, and are now closing down their blogs, which I think is a shame …