Interview with SeOPPI magazine
There is a interview with me in SeOPPI magazine from Oili Salminen in Finnish. Here is an english version of the interview:
State of the union: eLearning
Q1: The use of eLearning is growing much at least in the countries where ICT has become a part of every day life. Why does it happen?
KDW: As soon as people have access to ICT on a daily basis it becomes very natural to use these resources for learning. E-Learning is much broader defined than just a few years ago, when eLearning was mostly about taking some kind of web-based course. Today informal learning at the workplace using the Internet is probably the most important way of eLearning. Knowledge intensive jobs are demanding up-to-date and often very specialised information. Without access to internet-based learning resources and the sharing of knowledge in online communities it becomes nearly impossible to cope with the tasks at hand. Also the technology has become a non-issue and media-rich content is just happening. The most important reason is probably that it has become much easier to create, provide and find content. Now with a critical mass reached more and more people understand that sharing is creating returns.
Q2: What are the most important skills (competence) to be able to learn and to study with the help of eLearning methods and environments?
KDW: While there are some basic computer skills needed, the mainstream of web-based technology provides a very easy to use array of tools. A bigger problem is how to combine some of these tools to support one’s own learning. So the most important skill is the self-learning competence of a user. This means identifying needs of learning, setting goals, devising strategies to reach these (learning) goals and implementing them with the help of (eLearning) tools. Additionally, media literacy skills become more important, such as adhering to a Netiquette in an online community, knowing when it is appropriate to share what information, to be able to assess the quality of an internet resource and the like. With all the resources available, the biggest problem is to filter and select the relevant information. Some people just drown in the sea of information, get lost in the details or get lured into some kind of infoholic way of checking news sites, RSS feeds or their mails every few minutes.
eLearning design and Web 2.0
Q3: eLearning environments are challenging and complex. Could you describe some general design guidelines for a good eLearning application?
KDW: In a recent article together with my colleague Helge Städtler I tried to come up with some basic rules of novice user – computer – interaction. Here they are:
(i) The more time-consuming an action is, and the less the user feels savvy in doing it, the less will he try it again, if it fails the first time.
(ii) If some action cannot be done immediately and easily, it is neither done now nor later.
(iii) The more important an action is, the easier it has to be to accomplish.
(iv) To get people engaged, a system has to be as easy and non-frustrating to use as possible.
These rules have been shaped by my work for the school of education at the virtual university of bavaria in Germany and also in my day-to-day teaching practice at the university of Bremen. The users we are working with don’t have very specialised computer skills. They do basic word processing, check their emails and surf the Web. That’s it. And that’s ok, because the technology should serve the user. To be more specific about eLearning, I would like to add that eLearning applications should empower the user to create and share content and get into some meaningful discussions. I like to think of five Cs of eLearning: let the users create their own content, communicate with each other, construct meaning by setting up some structure, cooperate by asking and answering questions and ultimately collaborate with each other to create public entities and common understanding. But this is just the learner’s side being active. The teacher’s side is all about giving meaningful feedbacks and supporting the learning processes (see question 2) and help to improve the self-learning ability.
But maybe this is a very constructivistic point of view. There are a lot of other learning models available. For example screencasts are a new way to share the knowledge how to use computer software or how to program. While this is just some kind of “look over my shoulder” didactics, in the context of the web it becomes a powerful tool because you can easily choose what shoulder to look over and what for.
Q4: Web 2.0 concepts are presented and discussed in public very often nowadays in the context of social media, information sharing communities and so on. Is there in Web 2.0 something new and important issues for innovative practices and user generated content on education?
From a pedagogical point of view the whole constructivist discussion in educational technology has been talking about these ideas for about twenty years. Just have a look at the work of people such as Seymour Papert, David Jonassen or Carl Bereiter. You will find it there and in a lot of other places. Nevertheless, it has been long in the coming, but now it really is there – mass user generated content. So what is new or important? Short term consequences are, that there is much more content, super-special interest channels and a much shorter time of information circulation. Long term consequences are in my opinion ever more important. We need to think about how we can put all the learning time students at all level of education to improve our own educational system. If all the content generated by people learning can be shared – how can we organize that to get high quality learning material for the next generations of learners? Will we be able to accelerate their learning? Will we be able to build some kind of open access learning repository just by giving learners Web 2.0 tools and harvest their output? Probably we need to go beyond Wikipedia to solve this problem, but the potential is clearly there.
Q5: Do you see some “killer applications” in the near future in the eLearning domain/sector?
Actually I do have some ideas, but I want to implement them by myself 🙂
But here are some directions:
- If you have a look at the eLearning sector, we will see a lot of integration to avoid using patchwork-environments. Google and Yahoo! is trying to bundle sets of services to make this happen. Just think of a combination of blogs, wikis, newsgroups, social bookmarking, personalized search and networking tools – the support and enablement of online learning communities will be a very important business. There are also some open source projects such as Elgg trying to go into this direction. It is not about the money to be made by offering the tools, but by getting access to the members and their knowledge.
- One killer application will be to pool the right resources into some kind of learning stream, both digested and fed by learning communities. Getting the right filters and support meaningful learning will be the key to success.
- Mobile learning combined with social software and geographical information systems will become even bigger than using computers – but it will take a few more years. Ask me next year about this again 😉 (see also my book chapter in the Dijkstra/Jonassen/Sembill book about ubiquitous learning environments)
Your research and study
Q6: You have studied gender differences in computer usage and interest, ease of use, usage, motivation and interest, and in learning outcomes. Could you shortly desribe the most important differences? And can they be generalized to concern different countries?
KDW: There are not so many. Please refer to the summary:
“While there is good progress in didactical design and usability requirements for gender-inclusive online courses, much research has to be done regarding the gender aspects of the tutors’, students’, and peers’ interactions. The high amount of written or recorded interaction makes e-learning an ideal field for further study of these effects. Both the positive and negative roles of gender awareness are not fully understood yet. Is it for example possible and desirable to learn collaboratively in a gender-neutral environment?
From an implementation point of view, the online course presented in section 9 proved to work both for women and men. Didactics seems to be of prime importance for successful gender mainstreaming of e-learning courses. Technology has to be reliable, very simple to use and should, above all, support the didactical design, empowering the students to create, communicate, and collaborate. The positive results from the study support the claim for concentrating on gender inclusiveness in didactics, not so much on dramatizing the differences [3]. This is especially important because the differences in technological skills and attitudes relevant for e-learning are (at least for teacher students) non-existent. This means, that a further discussion of gender mainstreaming of e-learning in the form of worrying about women not being able or willing to participate is itself a form of gender stereotyping. The biggest problem for e-learning right now is that it is still perceived as technology-driven.
Starting to worry about boys and young men because of their lower level of reading abilities so important for e-learning, and their love of time-consuming and non-educational types of games, would be another form of doing gender stereotypes. One should not forget that especially with the rather small differences reported in the short review of important meta-analyses, the variations within a gender are much more significant than between genders. Blowing up little differences into stereotypical roles is counterproductive. Creating rich learning environments open for diversity, student participation and individual expression should be the goal.”
Q7: CV
Q8: Have you visited Finland before? How do you see the eLearning development here in Finland?
Yes, I’ve been to the Eden conference in Helsinki in 2005 and to the workshop on Human Centered Technology in Pori in 2006. I also have a research cooperation with Prof. Eero Pantzar from University of Tampere (Informal learning across the lifespan) and also with Antti Syvänen from the Web-Seal team (Mobile educational blogging). We are visiting and skyping each other regularly and I participate in a summer school at University of Tampere this year. So there is quite a lot of cooperation going on.
I am always amazed by the level of competence and commitment of my Finnish colleagues in the eLearning field. I am looking forward to work with them this year. Especially in the field of mobile learning I think that I can learn a lot from their exciting research. This time I will also visit Jarmo Viteli and the Hypermedia Laboratory at University of Tampere to discuss some ideas.
Am 16. May 2007 um 15:38 Uhr
[…] Dead Tree Media: Ein Interview in der finnischen Forschungszeitung SeOPPI zu aktuellen Thema des E-Learnings findet sich ebenfalls im Didactalab. […]