Periodic Fable

I’m the convenor of the ELKS community of practice – that’s E-Learning and Knowledge Sharing- and it’s a community of expertise in e-learning in HE, which is run for the UN’s GAID (Global Alliance for ICT in Development) initiative by BDRA out of the University of Leicester. It has several other institutional founders around the world (4 continents in fact!), and with an Australian Omnium web interface. So there were several people and sessions at ALT which were of interest to me wearing this hat, particularly as one of the strands was e-learning and internationalism.

In a session yesterday afternoon Alannah Fitzgerald spoke about social computing and the sustainable support of learning communities. The community she spoke about met the needs of a very specific niche group – volunteers and workers in micro-credit and micro-lending organisations based on Professor Mohammed Yunus’ Grameen Bank model. I guess an international version of the credit unions we have in the UK.

They’ve created a network of resources etc. aggregating information about successful projects for others to learn, including real and fictional case studies, guiding questions and reflective practice. Really helping to empower individuals and their communities and I’d love to have her talk about to the ELKS community.

I hadn’t heard of the software she mentioned to aggregate metatags from the social network – SUPRGLU, must check it out. A feed aggregator for blogs relevant to ELKS would be a great idea for our community.

Karen Robinson discussed her study about how cultural and linguistic backgrounds of students affected their use of e-learning and whether technology could support them better. Her story of the student pasting other people’s contributions and his own into a translator before he could post on the forum alerted me to that possible issue in ELKS discussions being entirely in English (though I am thinking of adding Spanish to the mix in some way).

Also, the use of discussion boards requires a higher level of English than listening to lectures and writing essays: and there can be cultural differences in how a forum (for example) actually looks (colour of the background!), let alone the culture of behaving in the online space.

Tore Hoel also had a message for me – “Syndication and aggregation work better that overarching frameworks or platforms.” In other words, people don’t necessarily want an all-singing all-dancing community that is a new, separate and time-consuming place they have to go and visit – even unique content isn’t necessarily appropriate – it may be better to provide an aggregate of information that is appropriate to our project in the ways that members already like to interact.

This morning I heard Marc Dupuis talking about a European virtual campus – lots to learn here about working together, and if within Europe is difficult – going global is even harder! “European collaboration is difficult,” he stated – and I have to admit from my experience of EU projects I concur. Copyright and intellectual property are of particular importance across institutions and nations – must get that issue clear for ELKS. Linguistic differences cannot be underestimated. I wonder if lessons from a European project like this can be extrapolated to global collaborative projects?

Chris Douce of the Open University talked about the plethora of standards across Europe for e-learning – so what will the situation be like when you add in the rest of the world? How difficult might it be for us to provide universal simple learning such as online tutoring skills courses or learning objects?

Paul Bacsich reminded us that teaching may be in English but “secret learning” may well be in the students’ native language(s) – Arabic in the case of the Arab Open University. He also gave us compelling reasons not to have more than 9 chapters in a report – sage advice!

As next year’s ALT theme is about the digital divide, I think it’s probably a cue to offer a short paper about ELKS, if we’re still going at that point!